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Combining mark
- In some languages, a small sized mark indicates that an
extra consonant sound comes in between the initial consonant sound and the
vowel. These marks appear either before or after the syllabic, depending on
the language or writing tradition. An example from Plains Cree is the
"w-dot". ᑫ (kē) becomes ᑵ (kwē).
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Final
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A symbol used to show that the consonant sound has no vowel after it. The
final can be a reduced size version of a larger syllabic (as in Inuktitut ᒃ
or ᒻ for "k" and "m"), or an abstract mark (as in Blackfoot ᐨ or ᔈ for "t"
and "s"). Some sounds do not have full syllabics of their own, like
Cree/Ojibway ᐦ (h), so "ha" is written ᐦᐊ.
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Syllabic
- A syllabic is any single character/glyph/letter that includes a
consonant sound followed by a vowel sound. A syllabic series is three to six
symbols that begin with the same consonant sound but have different vowel
sounds. Dunne-za (Beaver) examples are ᗴ, ᗯ, ᗰ, ᗱ (cha, che, chi, cho).
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Vowel
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I am using the term vowel to represent a syllabic character that does not
have any consonant before it. In most syllabic languages, the vowels are
shown as triangles, as in Dene (Carrier) ᐊ ᐅ ᐈ ᐉ ᐃ ᐁ (a, u, e, i, o, oo).
However Blackfoot has the distinctive vowel syllabics ᖳ ᖰ ᖱ ᖲ (a, e, i ,o).
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