I've had the thought of creating a map of a divided North America, where the Deseret and Cherokee scripts are not only state languages but a lot more widespread and used in multiple countries. I'm thinking the Deseret script would be used primarily in the OTL Southwest interior and maybe California, while the Cherokee script would be extant in the southern Great Plains and Lower Mississippi (a Cherokee nation is created in Arkansas perhaps?). How could this come about, and are there any other ideas on where non-Latin scripts could make their way into common use in North America? Maybe a Russian-speaking Alaska as well?
AHC/WI: More widespread Deseret and Cherokee Script
- Thread starter wilcoxchar
- Start date
In the case of the Deseret script, there were attempts by LDS missionaries to adapt it to Native languages (in one of the Utah archives lies a Hopi dictionary, entirely written in the Deseret script). So it is possible to have the Deseret script survive mainly to write First Nations languages long after it stopped being used for English. In that sense, it could be seen as the US counterpart to Syllabics in Canada (which, depending on who you believe, are entirely an original creation by James Evans or are an adaptation of Devanagari with help from Pitman Shorthand - which does not explain the variations used for Dené languages, which are anything but).
There have been a few AH threads on Alaska remaining a Russian territory into the 20th Century. That gets you Cyrrlic in N America.
Ooh, tell me more!Pre-1918 Cyrillic, though, which has some joys of its own.
Ooh, tell me more!
I as a letter in addition to (the backwards N vowel)
Fita (shaped like Theta, and used where Greek would use a theta, but pronounced 'f' - it's the letter in Feodor, for instance).
There's a couple of others, IIRC.
Speaking of syllabics, get Aboriginal syllabics to be in much more common use to the point where most American Indian languages are written using some variation of it, maybe have it end up a symbol of native identity across both the US and Canada. It's a very cool-looking and functional alphabet, and it's disappointing instead that Indian languages have extremely difficult and strange orthographies.
If Cyrillic from Alaska is mentioned, then Chinese or Japanese colonisation of the West Coast (extremely unplausible, admittedly, but both are doable with a POD far enough back) will get you their scripts.
If Cyrillic from Alaska is mentioned, then Chinese or Japanese colonisation of the West Coast (extremely unplausible, admittedly, but both are doable with a POD far enough back) will get you their scripts.
Ooh, tell me more!
Daði got some of the basics, but basically the orthography is more based on etymological grounds. These include some interesting stuff, like some older verb conjugations and pronominal declensions, and these four letters and one orthographic convention:
*<І/і>, known in Russian as <і десятеричное> "decimal I". Since it and <И/и> covered the same phoneme (though descended from two different Greek letters), this mechanical system developed:
> <І/і> was used before vowels and the semivowel <й> - except at the end of a morpheme in a compound word
> <И/и> was used before consonants and when word-final, including the end of a morpheme in a compound word
> In some cases, like the <миръ>/<міръ> distinction, homophonous words disregarded all rules and used the two spellings for disambiguation
Note that both letters exist in Ukrainian, but for very different reasons: <И/и> in Ukrainian is equivalent to Russian <Ы/ы>, while <І/і> is equivalent to Russian <И/и>.
*<Ѳ/ѳ>, known in Russian as <ѳита> (pre-1918)/<фита> (post-1918). This letter is descended from Greek thita; however, as Slavic languages do not have this phoneme natively, often times it gets shifted to /t/ under the influence of other European languages. In Russian, on the other hand, originally it was shifted to either /f/ (itself a non-native Slavic phoneme, at least at first) or /v/ (in the case of <Матве́й> "Matthew"), so fita was used for this etymological pronunciation of Greek loanwords. When Russian started borrowing words from other European languages, these included Greek loanwords with the /t/ pronunciation, creating orthographic doublets (cf. <ѳеатръ>/<театръ>) and some confusion as to pronunciation due to the natural tendency towards /f/.
*<Ѣ/ѣ>, known in Russian as <ѣть> (pre-1918)/<ять> (post-1918). This is when it gets fun, as it goes straight into the heart of the history of the Russian language.
> Jat' is a continuation (for those who believe in the traditional reconstructions) of Indo-European and later Proto-Baltic-Slavic *ē, and has some reflex or another in all Slavic languages (in fact, a graphic remnant of it exists in Czech, where it exists as <ě> and has continued in this function in Slavic scientific transcription). Generally, it had an interesting history - as far as the historic record can indicate, originally jat' was different only in terms of length, then became a low front vowel, not too different from English /æ/, and then eventually a diphthong */jæ/. With some exceptions, this diphthong was then raised to */je/, where it simplified further and broke up, often merging with another vowel - in Shtokavian, for example, there are three options for this vowel, which are /je/ (known as Ijekavian), /e/ (known as Ekavian), and /i/ (known as Ikavian).
> In Russian, history was more complex. In Old East Slavic, *<ě> was a distinct phoneme from *<e>, not only graphically but also phonetically. While other East Slavic dialects merged *<ě> with another vowel (/e/ in the case of Belarusian, /i/ in the case of Ukrainian), in Northern and Central Russian the two were more or less kept distinct (and is still the rule in Northern Russian dialects, where *<ě> is reflected as /e/ (or a variation thereabouts, notated as <ê> in Russian dialectology) and *<e> is reflected as /ɛ/). Eventually, in the standard dialect as well as in Southern Russian and most of Central Russian, the two phonemes merged, though as of yet we still have no idea when the merger took place. First, *<e> shifted to <ʲo> (currently pronounced as [ʲɵ], acoustically similar to German <ö>/French <eu> or European French schwa) when stressed. As it did not affect *<ě>, it continued to be pronounced in the usual way. Once the soft/hard consonant distinction became more systemic, *<ě> eventually merged with <e> (combined with borrowings from Church Slavonic which did not exhibit the shift). This leads to the modern phonetic distinction in Russian between a "hard" [ɛ] when word-initial and after vowels (as well as in European loanwords after consonants) and "soft" [ʲe] otherwise.
> Russian orthography, however, couldn't keep up with the changes, though the Petrine 18th-century reform of the script kept <Ѣ/ѣ> as a distinct letter. Originally, Russian orthography inherited from Old Church Slavonic a phonetic distinction between <Є/є> (representing *<e>) and <Ѣ/ѣ> (representing *<ě>). Only much later did an alternate distinction emerge, between (officially) "hard" <Є/є> and "soft" <Ѣ/ѣ>. With the Petrine reform, <Є/є> became <Е/е>, and admitted that the newly modernized letter had become soft, thus bringing to the fore a long-standing "backwards" variant of <Є/є>, <Э/э>. Thus was there a single "hard" vowel letter, <Э/э>, but two "soft" vowel letters representing etymology, <Е/е> and <Ѣ/ѣ> (though the inclusion of both might have reflected an actual existing distinction, at least in Petrine speech). Eventually there were calls to abolish <Ѣ/ѣ>, which was achieved with the 1918 spelling reform, leaving us with modern "hard" <Э/э> and "soft" <Е/е>.
> As an aside, you may note that I don't mention what happened with <ʲo>. Since its occurrence was basically predictable, many Russians (even today) felt no need to distinguish it. As such, the letter used for this purpose, <Ё/ё>, was never really used except among pedants, as well as in loanwords from European languages. The only cases where <Ё/ё> are regular? In Belarusian (whose Cyrillic orthography was largely created during the Soviet period, and is thus more phonemic than Russian) and in Dungan, a language spoken by the Dungan people (strongly related to the Hui, or Chinese Muslims) of Central Asia and is historically derived from the Central Plains dialect of Mandarin.
*<Ъ/ъ>, historically known in Russian as <еръ> or more precisely as a back yer, and currently known as <твёрдый знак>, or the "hard sign". Like jat', it too dates back to the history of the Russian language. In Proto-Slavic, this had a distinct sound akin to the English "u" in "hood". In Old East Slavic, this changed into an /o/ when stressed and a schwa when unstressed (the latter pronunciation preserved in Bulgarian, a South Slavic language, where it also occurs in a stressed form as is common among many Balkan languages with this sound). Gradually, the schwa was lost but its graphic representation remained - most notably in word-final position, since under the old orthography generally words could not end in a consonant if it historically ended in a schwa - so the rule for writing the back yer in Russian was based largely on etymology. The elimination of this letter during the 1918 spelling reform forced publishing houses to use an apostrophe for those cases where the yer was useful (as is the case currently with Belarusian and Ukrainian). Gradually, the yer returned, but as the "hard sign", and is now of the rarest letters in Russian. To give an example, from Wiki:
--- Pre-reform: съѣздъ (sŭězdŭ)
--- Transitional: с’езд (s'ezd)
--- Current: съезд (s"ezed, s'jezd, sjezd)
which means "descent, exit, convention, congress".
*<Ѵ/ѵ>, known in Russian as <ижица>. This letter derived from the Greek ypsilon and thus largely reflected its pronunciation in Byzantine and Modern Greek, which is basically simple - its default pronunciation is /i/, except in <αυ, ευ, ηυ> where it is pronounced /av, ev, iv/ (except before a voiceless consonant, where it is instead pronounced [af, ef, if]) and in <ου> where it is pronounced /u/ (the ultimate origin of <У/у> in the Cyrillic script). By the time of the 1918 reform, however, it was only used in <мѵро> "chrism, myrrh" and its derivatives (it still, however, remains in consistent use in Church Slavonic), and thus was quickly replaced with modern <миро>.
Therefore, to give an example of pre-1918 Cyrillic in Alaska, one can only look at Aleut (the pronunciations are a guess based on the actual phonology and Latin orthography, as well as a revised version from the Soviet period):
А, а /a/
Б, б /b~p/
В, в /v/
Г, г /ɣ/ (/g/; /ɣ/ in Church Slavonic loanwords)
Ѓ, ѓ /ʁ/ (actually an inverted breve; this is a temporary solution)
Д, д /ð/ (/d/)
Е, е /i/ (/e, je, jo~ë/)
Ж, ж /j/ (/ʐ/)
З, з /z/
И, и /i/
І, і /i/, /j/
Й, й /j/
К, к /k/
Ҟ, ҟ /q/
Л, л /l/
М, м /m/
Н, н /n/
Ҥ, ҥ /ŋ/
О, о /u/ (/o/)
П, п /p/
Р, р /r/
С, с /s/
Т, т /t/
У, у /u/
Ў, ў /w/
Ф, ф /f~h/
Х, х /x/, /h/
Ӂ, ӂ /χ/ (actually <Х/х> with an inverted breve; this is a temporary solution)
Ц, ц /(t)s/
Ч, ч /ʧ/
Ш, ш /s/ (/ʂ/)
Щ, щ /s/ (/ɕt͡ɕ~ɕɕ/)
Ъ, ъ --
Ы, ы /i/ ([ɨ])
Ь, ь -- (/ʲ/)
Ѣ, ѣ /i/ (/e, je/)
Э, э /i/ (/e/)
Ю, ю /ju/
Я, я /ja/
Ѳ, ѳ /f~h/, /t/
Ѵ, ѵ /i/, /v/
This does not take into account Aleut's distinct vowel length (giving us three short vowels /a/, /i/, /u/ and three long long vowels, /aː/, /iː/, and /uː/, with vowel allophony typical of Eskimo-Aleut languages) and its voiceless sonorants; one can only guess how Russian Orthodox missionaries transcribed them.
Does that make sense?