1671: Lack of Universality for Cree Syllabics Jul 12, 2019

The Cree Syllabary is a writing system developed to efficiently write North American languages without the Latin alphabet. Not only was this system more suitable, making words much shorter because the symbols represent whole syllables and not each sound, but for many Cree it was emotionally preferable because it did not relate to the languages of colonizing peoples. However, this did not catch on everywhere in the rest of the region; notably, Inuktitut of Northern Canada uses a variant of this system, but the very similar Kalaallisut of Greenland does not. Part of this has to do with geography, but also because the syllabaries required whole new machines for typing but little real demand, it proved easier for some to use the Latin writing system.