A Transitional Orthography For Northern Canadian Native Languages

Abstract

A phonemic orthography poses serious problems for students from oral cultures, in part due to the very structure of such orthographies and in part due to negative transference from English spelling habits. A syllabic orthography minimizes the structural problems at the level of decoding, but is an obstacle to morpheme recognition and hence grammatical analysis. Early exposure to syllabics, followed by a gradual shift to a phonemic Roman alphabet, may be the most advantageous approach to Native literacy where grammatical analysis is one of its aims.