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Record 1,  Textual support,  English

Record number: 1, Textual support number: 1 OBS

When Catholic Missionaries first arrived in Canada, they had a lot of trouble trying to figure out how to give the Bible to the aborigines. Not only were the phonettes of many First Nations languages quite beyond the scope of the alphabet, these people had no written system of their own. The missionaries therefore developed a general syllabary for use among the aborigines. Although it might seem strange to use a syllabary instead of an alphabet, in actual fact most writing traditions develop as syllabaries instead of alphabets. The missionaries probably chose to use a syllabary because it is conceptually simpler, and therefore a better introduction to the principle of writing for peoples who had no previous exposure to such a practice. The Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics system consists of a variety of geometric shapes. Each shape is associated with a consenant, and its spatial orientation is associated with a vowel. Today, the Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics are used as the primary means of codifying many First Nations languages. A Unicode chart helps maintain the use of these languages into the 21st Century, and supports computer use and a web presence for these nations. The characters in this code block are a unification of various local syllabaries of Canada into a single repertoire based on character appearance. The syllabics were originally invented in the late 1830s by James Evans for Algonquian languages, and then adopted and altered by various communities and linguistic groups. The primary used community for this script consists of several aboriginal groups throughout Canada, including Algonquian, inuktitut and Athapascan language families. The script is also used by government agencies and in business, education and media. The repertoire is organized primarily on structural principles found in the 1994 report of the Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics Encoding Committee, and is essentially a glyphic encoding.  3, record 1, English, - Canadian%20Aboriginal%20Syllabics%20Encoding%20Committee

Record 1,  Textual support,  French

Record 1,  Textual support,  Spanish