The Chipewyan Syllabarium Transliterated

Virtually every example of the Dene Syllabarium I have seen, the chart from the 1904 version of Prières, cantiques et catéchisme en langue montagnaise ou chipeweyan (ᑌᓀ ᔭᕱᐁ ᑎᐠᕃᓭ) is given.

This chart, being over a century old, does not contain the current Roman orthography equivalents of the syllabics. For people learning syllabics today who are already familiar with the Roman orthography, this chart is of no real help. Furthermore, linguists have constantly been confused by the phonetic values of the syllabics, and provided pronuncations which do not exists in the Dëne language, such as */ty/.

More difficulties have arisen from the list of “finals” which appear along the right-hand side of the chart. These finals are not in the same order as the syllabic characters, causing much misunderstanding over the years. Most notably: Unicode—the catalogue of characters (for use by computers) used by the world’s writing systems—mistakingly gave the asterisk * the value of /tth/ because it is in the same row as the /tth/ syllabics. The asterisk * is actually a punctuation marker for proper names (much like a latin capital letter), and has no phonetic value whatsoever.

Finally, this chart does not mention many of the digraphs (one sound–two characters) used in Dëne syllabics. Many have assumed that ᗴ would be /cha/ in Roman orthography, however, this is actually /sha/: keeping in mind that the chart was developed by French speakers where <ch> is pronounced <sh> in English. The sound /cha/ is written with the digraph ᐟᗴ, which is not included in the chart.

A final character in bold indicates that the preceding character should be placed mid-line, not top-line. It is not yet possible to indicate mid-line finals using computing standards. For more information, please see the ᑌᓀᓱᒼᕄᓀ/Dënesųłiné syllabary page on this site.

General Notes:

• Tone is not written here as it is always ignored by syllabics.
• Spelling in syllabics has by no means been standardised, and spelling can be quite irregular. Many syllabic characters have several sound associations, and there are many overlaps. For example, /ga/ is ᑲ, /ka/ is ᑲ~ᒼᑲ, /k’a/ is ᑲ~ᒼᑲ~ᑲᑊ; the sound /ła/ can be ᕍ~ᒼᕍ~ᐢᕍ. The Chipewyan syllabics page describes the syllabics with a more consistent spelling,
• The following sounds of Chipewyan are not indicated on the chart

1. I am using the small-caps ʀ to represent the French r-sound. Loan words from French like ᓭᓱᐢᐠᖋ “sesuskʀi” although transcribed with <r> in Roman orthography, may be pronounced more like Chipewyan /gh/; thus the use of the gh-series of syllabics for the French-r.

2. The ᒐ ᒉ ᒋ ᒍ syllabic series was labelled /th/ and the ᐟᒐ ᐟᒉ ᐟᒋ ᐟᒍ was labelled /dh/ in the 1857 and 1865 editions of the Dëne syllabium. In the 1904 edition, the sounds were reversed. According to LeGoff’s version of 1890, ᒐ ᒉ ᒋ ᒍ was both /th/ and /dh/, while ᐟᒐ ᐟᒉ ᐟᒋ ᐟᒍ is /ddh/. LeGoff’s analysis is preferred because it is consistent with Dëne syllabics logic, and his description of the language is far superior to the other missionaries at the time.

3. When /w/ stands alone at the end of a word, the mid-ring final ᐤ is used, but when following /k/ or /gh/, the mid-dot symbol ᐧ is correct.