Great Lakes Algonquian syllabics
[3] It was originally used near the Great Lakes: Fox (also known as Meskwaki or Mesquakie), Sac (the latter also spelled Sauk), and Kickapoo (these three constituting closely related but politically distinct dialects of a single language for which there is no common term), in addition to Potawatomi.
[4] Use of the Great Lakes script has also been attributed to speakers of the Ottawa dialect of the Ojibwe language, but supporting evidence is weak.
[1] Consonant and vowel letters that comprise a syllable are grouped into units that are separated by spaces.
Because glottal stops have frequently been overlooked when transcribing Native American languages with the Latin script, whereas /h/ seldom is, this anomaly suggests that the script was originally developed for Potawatomi, and subsequently transmitted to speakers of Fox, Sac, and Kickapoo.
In most Great Lakes syllabics alphabets, the letter for the vowel /i/ has been reduced to its dot, which has become a diacritic on the consonant of the syllable.
[22] Several variants of the script existed among Fox speakers, in which various symbols were substituted for combinations of consonant and vowel letters.
On a subsequent visit to Fox territory in Iowa in 1884, a Winnebago speaker learned to write in the script.
[26] Anthropologist Paul Radin worked with Ho-Chunk speaker Sam Blowsnake to produce Crashing Thunder: The Autobiography of an American Indian.
[28] Use of syllabics declined over time; when Radin visited Winnebago communities in 1912, he reported that it was known only to a small number of people.
Blackbird’s Ottawa writings use a mixture of French and English-based characteristics, but not those of Great Lakes script.
A photograph of Michelson and prolific Fox writer Albert Kiyana appears in Kinkade and Mattina (1996).
A newly edited and transcribed version of "Owl Sacred Pack," one of the culturally most significant of the stories written by Kiyana, has recently been published.
[33] Because Great Lakes Aboriginal syllabics is not part of the Unicode standards, glyphs for this table have been approximated with cursive Latin script.
