Mason's Pali Grammar, New for 2015

If a whole mess of historical anecdotes, grammatical tables, and etymological theories (about a dead language!) sounds like your idea of fun… then, well… this is the Pali textbook for you!

https://books.google.ca/books?id=mdnvBQAAQBAJ


Mason's Pali Grammar was book that faced technical challenges at every stage, and ended up having several fonts created especially for it (at my demand!).  It is finally available for download from Google Books, about ten years after I completed my work on it… and almost 150 years after its first author began work on it, I suppose.

Admittedly, it's not for everyone…

Ashoka's Edicts, Dead Languages and the Culture of Learning

(1) I recently had a conversation with a professor of Anthropology who contradicted me when I remarked that the variations between Northern "Tai" writing systems were quite easy to cope with reading.  He contradicted this simply by complaining that, from his perspective, the differences between these scripts were extremely difficult, and he named some examples he had encountered, in moving from one contemporary dialect to another.  My perspective on these writing systems starts with the edicts of Aśoka (Ashoka), and continues through Pallava, Mon, Old Khmer ("Cambodian"), various Burmese variants (including Lanna) and and so on; I tend to be aware both of how these writing systems were applied to Pali and to the corresponding vernacular languages; and then, of course, I have some experience with modern Lao (I lived in Laos for two-and-a-half years, and bartered for my groceries in the language during those days).  Given my own peculiar mix of prior research (into both the ancient and the modern) the written language is the easiest aspect for me to cope with, in all of these contexts; however, I do understand why it is that the written aspect is the most difficult for so many others.  Not many people start with Pali; not many people end with Pali; and even amongst those who can read Pali, few to zero start with the most ancient writing to then "work forward" and learn the more contemporary systems.

The question is: why not?

The pedagogical value of learning to read the inscriptions of Aśoka for yourself (in their original scratchy lines) should be obvious to everyone working in a wide array of languages (living and dead), at least spanning from from India to Cambodia, with Sri Lanka, Burma and Thailand in-between.

(2) In addition to the enduring "propaganda value" of the Aśokan inscriptions themselves, there are rarely-mentioned Mauryan dynasty inscriptions scattered all over Sri Lanka.  The script is most typically seen on the "drip ledges" of caves (surrounding many of the ancient sites that are now modern tourist attractions on the island); these were natural caves that underwent "renovation" for monks to inhabit; the stone of the cave floor, for instance, has sometimes been flattened to make a better "bed", and the purpose of cutting along the drip-ledge was to direct rainfall away from the entrance and, thus, prevent flooding.  I've managed to put together an illustration of this at the top of the article (and, for the record, I was standing next to Ken when he took the photograph, pointing at the inscription with some excitement).  The segment of the text that is "zoomed in" (in black-and-white) is neither the start nor the end of the extant text at this particular cave; the excerpt starts and stops where it does simply because this shows a relatively flat stretch of the stone.  Naturally, the surface is neither straight nor flat, but follows the curvature of the exterior of the cave.  The proper method of transcribing these inscriptions normally requires "taking a rubbing" letter by letter (i.e., recording an impression by laying paper directly on the surface and then rubbing a crayon over the paper).  However, with minimal effort, you're here able to identify most of the letters at a glance.

For anyone who can recognize the ancient method of writing, these inscriptions make a powerful impression when wandering the island; they make the very remote past seem tangible in Sri Lanka, perhaps moreso than the monuments of greater scale.  However, the inscriptions of this era (in Sri Lanka) rarely say anything more than the name of the donor (who paid for the renovation of the cave, presumably); sometimes the donor's profession and village-of-origin are added, and sometimes the reader may be unable to guess if they are looking at the name of a person, profession or village, but can see that it is a name in any case (and not a philosophical statement).  There have been some archaeological surveys trying to collect together this evidence; every one that I've read myself opens and concludes with bitter complaints about how little progress (of this kind) has been made in the last century in Sri Lanka.  Although this stuff seems self-evidently inspiring, very few people get inspired by it.

(3) While every possible publication (including the newspapers of India and Thailand) continues to broadcast propaganda claims built on (dubious) claims about what the ancient inscriptions of this era say, it seems that almost nobody alive has any interest in reading them for themselves (and I've learned this the hard way, over the last ten years).

One of the few historical figures who did take a positive interest in this ancient script as pedagogy was the Christian missionary Francis Mason (who was primarily famous for his work in Burma, and whom I already mentioned with some castigation in a prior blog on Cree syllabics).

The Aśokan-era script is remarkably easy to write (by hand) but, as you can see in the illustrations here, Mason was one of remarkably few people to attempt typesetting and publishing it.  Given the intellectual accomplishments of Christian missionaries of this kind, it's a bit embarrassing how few Western Buddhists ever bothered to learn modern Burmese-script Pali, let alone the various precursors in the history of South and South-East Asia.  As you can see here, Mason set out both the Aśokan script and the Burmese in (imperfect) parallel, almost as a diversion in the course of his textbook on Pali language and grammar.

Why is the parallel imperfect?  Well, one of the simple facts that should leap out at you from these illustrations is that the language of the edicts of Aśoka is neither Pali nor Sanskrit (although much of the propaganda dogmatically insists the contrary, and you may meet people who verbally insist on one or the other, on the basis of secondary sources); thus, we do get a few character combinations that neither literary Sinhalese nor Burmese-Pali are accustomed to expressing orthographically in these (multi-directional) transcriptions.

(4) The most ancient script shown here (that has endured so well on rough stone surfaces) has proven more difficult to adapt to typesetting --and almost impossible to express through computerized word-processing.  Something similar could be said about the peculiar difficulty of getting literary Sinhalese and Burmese onto a computer screen (just a few readers looking at these illustrations will know enough to gasp at the difficulty of this: all these illustrations were typeset in Unicode… unlike Mason's hand-made press).

This brings me to the peculiar case of Ka'ōnohi Kai, without whom none of these fonts would exist, and without whose work all of these illustrations would be impossible.

I corresponded with Ka'ōnohi over a period of many years: there were several periods during which I wrote to him daily, sending in detailed error-reports, and suggestions for improvement, when the fonts were under development.  My correspondence with Ka'ōnohi often dealt with minute questions of how exactly two glyphs should combine, or how a certain curl-of-the-pen in a character wasn't quite the right shape.  I described all of this verbally as I actually had no access to a scanner in those years.  I was sometimes sending in these reports from monasteries in Sri Lanka, and, at other times, from a garret in Vientiane, and so on.  Through a thousand tiny revisions, I became involved with the making of these typefaces; but all of the hard work was done by Ka'ōnohi himself, in Hawaii.  We never met in person, and I knew that it would be impossible for us to ever do so after he renounced his American citizenship in support of Hawaii's native sovereignty.  I now haven't heard from him in several years, and I haven't found any recent updates from him posted on the internet; my thanks now goes out to him without expecting to hear anything back.  I was hoping to hear more from him after I switched from Southeast Asian languages to working on a language indigenous to "the new world" (scil. the Algonquian language Cree) but he seems to have disappeared.

At some point in this long correspondence, Ka'ōnohi must have lost his objectivity because I convinced him, against his best interests, of the philological and pedagogical value of creating a font that could properly display the Aśokan-era inscriptions.  With the full awareness that this product would have a total market of roughly ten scholars, Ka'ōnohi undertook the long hours of labor to make this possible, simply as a favor to me (or, perhaps, to reward whatever efforts he thought I had made in obsessing over revisions to so many other fonts, from modern Lao to medieval Khom).

The results remained imperfect for a rather sad reason, beyond anyone's control: the technical support from Mac was wildly inconsistent from one version of the operating system to the next.  During those years, Ka'ōnohi would scramble to "fix" all of his fonts every time Mac updated their software --although there had been nothing broken about them before.

This was exasperating to people all over the world: around the year 2001, Mac had an enormous advantage over Windows in rendering the languages of the poor (just ask anyone who was typing in Tibetan in the 1990s; the difference was even more dramatic for languages that had zero commercial incentive for software developers in that era, like Khmer and Shan); however, in the space of just a few years of corporate indifference, this advantage was eroded, along with the patience of many people who had come to rely on Mac.  Despite the uniformity that the Unicode standard was supposed to create, many people found that they had to re-type documents on their hard drives that had become incoherent (in updating from one version of O.S. 10 to the next) through no fault of their own.  As the operating system became more sophisticated, its ability to deal with "marginal" languages actually decreased, and Aśokan script specifically went from difficult to impossible to deal with.

I'm not digressing to explain what the technical difficulties are because (based on my experience) the vast majority of people who aren't already professionally engaged with these problems will be unwilling to read through an explanation of that kind.  The general statement of disbelief I receive (when this comes up in conversation) is that a computer that can display Chinese should be able to display anything, i.e., because the brush-strokes of Chinese characters are so complicated (for the human hand and the human eye to deal with); however, the computer does not "see" language in the same way as a person does, nor does it "write" language in the manner of a human hand.  It is much more technically complex for software to render a script with combining elements that need to be "drawn" in a slightly different way given the context of other letters surrounding a given glyph (and this is the case for Burmese, literary Sinhalese, etc.); the number of brushstrokes is irrelevant.

(5) Although a few may end up reading this article as their first exposure to the subject, it is more likely that anyone who could end up looking at this page would be asking themselves (instead) how it could possibly be that anything new could be said about the edicts of Aśoka, and (thus) wondering why I would be encouraging anyone to study anew something that has (seemingly) already been studied so many times over.  The subject has been exploited from every possible propaganda angle, and it may seem that there's nothing new to be known.  My axiom here is that doubt is productive, whereas faith is inductive: the vast majority of those who have published opinions about these stone inscriptions never read them in their original language, and of the few who did, even fewer took the time to read them in their original orthography (i.e., to read the letters as set out on stone, and to become familiar with the ambiguities and distinctions peculiar to the script).  There's room for doubt, and, in time, that doubt will prove to be productive.

The other sense in which the ancient is ever new is simply that the people studying it are new: it may be that someone, somewhere, has already studied the edicts of Aśoka, but that really doesn't entail that it would be pointless for you (now) to learn to read them for yourself.  The point here is not that your reading is better or worse than some other scholar who lived a hundred years ago: the point is that your reading is your own.  It is only by the act of such reading that you can develop the ability to do such reading (and this is especially true of a dead language: you can't practice by striking up conversation at the dépanneur).

I've never heard anyone say that learning Chinese is pointless because a billion people have done it before, and (perhaps strangely) I've never heard anyone working in English literature say that it's pointless to read Shakespeare, because it has been done so many times before; conversely, I have heard the excuse many (many!) times that there is (supposedly) no point in undertaking original research on ancient Buddhist texts because "someone" supposedly has done this all before.  This is a poor excuse, and, even worse, it results in the current generation depriving itself of an education: doing things for yourself is not an embellishment to learning, but is the process of learning as such.

If you don't have the patience to sit with a text and copy it out longhand (from manuscript to manuscript) then you don't have the patience to learn the language.  I say this while quite aware that the conceit of contemporary education is the very opposite, and that students now are supposed to know things without any process of memorization or application: the substitute for learning is a matter of repeating the opinions of others, and the mannerisms of making learned quotations are the only skills passed on through the medium of the university lecture.  What is really necessary for learning has not changed so much since the bronze age.  Unfortunately, in the current generation, I have never heard of a student sitting and copying out a manuscript in this manner (neither with a professor nor without one, neither in a PhD program nor in a monastery).

The significance of reading the primary source doesn't diminish because "someone" else has done it before, and, of course, there's the separate problem (discussed in many of my more formal publications) of who this "someone" is that people suppose have done all the hard work before, and whose judgements can now be relied upon; to be a scholar of any particular language means relying on nobody's judgement other than your own, and nobody's reading other than your own.  There very few rewards to taking this path, however, once you've done the work yourself on the primary sources, you can then look at the secondary sources with new eyes, and perceived (or even "appreciate") the many forms of fakery that dominate the field.

Certainly, the propaganda that has been attached to the edicts of Aśoka (by many different nations) becomes absurd as soon as anyone studies the primary source for themselves; and, indeed, many of the grand theories and generalizations made by linguists and historians are also revealed as fakery, from the direct study of the edicts (and they are not the only such instance, but merely the instance of this short article).

(6) It deserves to be said, both in conclusion and as a warning, that learning of this kind is neither appreciated nor encouraged in the 21st century: in looking at the illustrations attached to this article (or found in any of my published work) it may be worthwhile to ask yourself when was the last time that you saw any such thing in an academic journal.

The lack of interest in comparative reading of primary sources (and demonstrating that they were consulted and transcribed accurately, etc.) is a "false first step" into a hall of mirrors; however, the lack of interest itself is very real.  Almost nobody alive has reading comprehension of Pali, and the small number who can muddle through primarily rely on reading it in Romanized phonetics.  Nearly nobody can make comparative reading of manuscripts from different parts of Asia, and even closer to zero learn to read the dead language in scripts that are likewise dead.  As my simple point was for this article, there remains a question of "why not?"

The Cree Written Language, Thomas More's Utopia, and Genocide

(1) This article clears up a few facts about the connection between (i) the invention of the "syllabic" writing system (now used for many indigenous languages in Canada) and (ii) the classical writing systems of India, that I would show, briefly, to be more significant than the often-mentioned connection to (iii) European systems of short-hand in general, and (iv) Thomas More's Utopia in particular; noted here also is (v) the subsequent influence of the Canadian syllabics system on at least one writing system in Asia, with a few reflections on the over-arching issue of (vi) Christian Missionaries of the the British Empire.

The article as a whole (diverse as these subjects may be) is a knot of anecdotes resulting from the rise and collapse of an empire; it is a peculiar knot, linking several radically unrelated cultures, peoples, languages and themes.  While these are merely linguistic anecdotes, tying them together provides us with a peculiar vantage on the legacy of both attempted and actual genocide in that empire.

(2) In some quarters, the invention of what we now call "Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics" remains controversial as an "invention", but I would propose here that (in most cases) this controversy is the result of sincere confusion.  (i) The tenet that Cree as a spoken language is an ancient, sacred patrimony of the Cree people is uncontroversial (and so on for Ojibwe to the speakers of Ojibwe, etc. etc.), and many words to this effect are found in the opening pages of the wâskahikaniwiyiniw-âcimowina, 1987; (ii) the further tenet that the Cree and adjacent indigenous peoples had a writing system of some kind prior to European contact is also uncontroversial (more on that in a moment).  However, what is controversial (and, indeed, impossible to believe) is the blending of these two tenets, such that people start to assume that the syllabic characters now in use are themselves part of that ancient cultural patrimony (pre-dating European contact).

The same Christian missionaries who introduced new systems of writing to transcribe these languages provide us with the evidence that there was writing of some kind before it (at least in limited, local use).  In another essay, I've compared this aspect of colonialism to a layer of volcanic lava, that arbitrarily preserves fragments of the very same thing that it destroys; in looking through the autobiographies of the destroyers, we find some evidence of what was destroyed.  Thus, amongst the James Bay Cree, a missionary who was trying to introduce a new alphabet himself observed that the locals already had their own system of "…hiroglyphics [sic] being marked with the finger nail on a piece of birch bark".*¹

Although it is hypothetically possible that this was some other European writing system that had reached them already (and that was not recognized as such by the missionary observing, in 1842) it is more likely that this was another example of a native system along the same (general) lines of what we have documented among the Mi'kmaq (formerly writ Micmac).  Why do I say this is likely?  The same missionary that we're quoting himself witnessed the arrival of the syllabic system (locally) within the same year as this observation, and then proceeded to teach the new system himself; it would be wildly improbable, given his whole career, if he could not see the difference between a European system of spelling (of some kind) and native "hieroglyphics".  This same word (hieroglyphics) is still used to describe the Mi'kmaq system of logograms; unfortunately, the missionaries who documented it were primarily interested in adapting it to record prayers and biblical meanings (thus, polluting the evidence).

It isn't surprising that a culture that manufactured so many items out of birch bark would devise writing of some kind (the bark easily retains marks, made with any implement or none at all); and as we do have some documentation of the (pre-contact) symbols used by the Mi'kmaq it is reasonable to suppose that the symbols used by the Cree would (likewise) have no resemblance to any European alphabet (i.e., there is no evidence of a phonetic script prior to European contact, but merely hints at pictograms and logograms, in local use here and there).

Why is the example of Mi'kmaq better documented than this example from amongst the James Bay Cree?  Simply because the particular Christian missionary observing one system took a greater interest in it than the other (i.e., in both cases, we are dependent upon a missionary witness).  I assume that a few more articles on this subject will yet be written (collecting together other anecdotes about such pre-contact symbols in Canada), as both missionary archives and the records of the Hudson Bay Company become digitized, and more readily available.  Arbitrarily, as I say, some fragments of evidence are preserved by the same forces that were set upon the subversion, conversion, and destruction of the colonized culture.

(3) What exactly is the link between the writing system now used for Cree and Thomas More's Utopia?  The link both to Utopia and to European shorthand (that pre-dates the invention of Cree/Ojibwe syllabics) is much more tenuous than most other authors seem to think.

The illustration at the top of this article gives the reader their first hint: the similarity is rather less than it seems.

Looking at the Cree in the left-hand column, we can see the systematic relationship between the sounds ᒧ (mo), ᒪ (ma), ᒥ (mi), and ᒣ (mê).  The same shapes do appear in the middle column, as they appear as letters in Thomas More's Utopia; however, there is no such systematic relationship between them at all.  You can see that Utopian does not even create a logical separation between consonants and vowels, but simply transcribes the English alphabet on a one-to-one basis, in this same order: ᒧ, ᒪ, ᒥ, ᒣ = n, o, p, q!

Other websites (and even peer-reviewed articles) have vaguely suggested that the common link between these alphabets is the principle of rotation.  This is extremely misleading: "rotation" seems to imply that they have in common the logical relationship between ᑭ=ki, ᑫ᐀kê, and so on.  Both with More's Utopian alphabet and the early shorthand scripts, there is no such significance to "rotation" whatsoever.  Indeed, 18th century shorthands generally removed the significance of "rotation", so that the same character could be written with more than one alignment to speed up the pace of penmanship: notice that the chart lists two different forms for the sound "h" in Byrom shorthand (right-hand column).  In this shorthand, both ᑫ=h and ᑯ=h; they are two different ways of writing the same character.  This is, as I say, the diametric opposite of Cree, where the distinction of ᑫ-vs.-ᑯ is crucially important (ᑫ=kê and ᑯ=ko).

The shorthand systems were certainly influenced by More's Utopia, and while the small chart for this article doesn't show the patterns in full, the reader will notice that the bottom row shows that Byrom shorthand has ᑎ=m and ᑌ=n.  This is no more sophisticated than Utopia before it: the sequence of the symbols in the alphabet is just made a bit easier to remember by this pattern, but there is no logical principle of "rotation" that explains one sound by contrast to another.  Of course, in Cree ᑎ᐀ti, and ᑌ᐀tê.

(4) I think that some sources simply reach out for Utopian as the earliest possible example of the type of "rotation" that is found in many of the shorthand systems; however, all of these precedents lack the directional logic of vowel sounds found in Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics.  Obviously but fundamentally, Utopia's alphabet is not a syllabary, but simply a futuristic-looking alphabet (showing, strangely, that our notion of what is aesthetically futuristic hasn't changed much since 1516!).

The so-called principle of rotation is in fact one of the aspects of the syllabic system derived from India.  The connection to India's writing systems is always admitted (if fleetingly and without details) in articles on this subject: James Evans himself knew Devanāgari to some extent, and I've seen various sources try to demonstrate that particular Cree letter-forms were derived from Devanāgari.  This seems to me to miss a more useful point (that I've foreshadowed in this article's second illustration).

India's writing systems are indeed syllabic (albeit imperfectly so), and what we call "rotation" in Canada is really derived from a pattern of the ancient Indian writing systems indicating vowels by "direction" (a few of my readers will roll their eyes at my simplicity of expression here, but I'm assuming that my audience has not already studied the inscriptions of Ashoka, etc.).

I should confess here that I am digressing to provide some answers to "F.A.Q." on the relationship between written Cree and the written languages of India here: there seems to be real confusion about this among the specialists (both students and professors) whom I've spoken to, perhaps resulting from the same type of vagueness I've seen in other articles myself.

(5) The most ancient era of India's history that we have (extant) written evidence from is called the Mauryan dynasty (and the most famous tracts of writing from this period are the edicts of the Emperor Aśoka, whose name you will also find anglicized as Ashoka).  If you're going (to Google) to look for further illustrations of this writing system, you'll need to know that a number of different (ancient) systems of writing are now referred to as "Brahmi" (the term is more confusing than you might expect, but I won't digress into discussing it here).

What you can see in these ancient systems (more clearly than in some of the modern languages of India, that are directly derived from the same source) is a consistent system of expressing the vowel by adding an extra line "pointing" in a direction that indicates the vowel-sound.  The syllable "lu" is expressed by the consonant symbol for "l" plus one line below it (pointing downward), whereas the symbol for "le" is the same consonant shape with a line added pointing to the left instead.  All of this should be clear enough in the illustrations.

In the classical Indic writing systems, the number and shape of the lines added (to the core consonant symbol) isn't as significant as the "direction" that the vowel is pointing toward; thus, because of the shape of the "k" character, it takes two lines to add a mark above the character to form "ki" (and scribes had some liberty to use their imaginations to make these markings look stylish, giving rise to a great variety of glyph-forms over the centuries).

The reliance on the pattern of directions (rather than the graphic form of the vowel) makes the script easier to learn (and easier to read) because stylistic variations don't break the pattern: in reading the language, you soon learn that anything pointing "up" adds an "-i" to the syllable, whereas "down" adds a "-u" sound, and so on.  The resemblance to the way we now write Cree is limited, but it is real.

At the most basic level, both systems are designed to display one syllable as one symbol as often as possible (but there are exceptions and imperfections in both systems).  This is fundamentally different from More's utopia, and also differs from all of the shorthand systems antedating the Cree syllabary.

This broad pattern of expressing vowels by "decorating" a consonant symbol has remained the principle of all Indic writing systems, through an amazing array of variations and historical examples over more than 2000 years (including the writing systems for unrelated languages in Southeast Asia, such as Cambodian and Burmese).  Although the style of the lines that "point" off in the various directions has changed there has been a remarkable consistency in the basic association of the sounds with the directions.  In modern Thai, you don't add a single line above the consonant for an "i" vowel, but instead add a sort of loop; however, the "i" sound is still a decoration added above the character, whereas a "u" vowel is a different sort of loop added below the character, and so on.

(6) It deserves to be said that this directional principle is extremely well-suited to a language with only four vowels (and Cree has exactly four) whereas it would be poorly suited to a language relying on contrasts between a large number of complex vowels (e.g., Cambodian, Thai and Lao).  However, the same basic writing system has been foisted onto radically unrelated languages, either by the indifference of history, or else by the designs of missionaries.

In the Buddhist countries of Southeast Asia (Burma, Cambodia, etc.) the writing systems that have resulted from India's influence can express the ancient language of their religious scriptures very efficiently (i.e., Pali), but can just barely express the spoken vernacular of the modern languages (with many "bootstrapping measures" to denote all of the vowel sounds necessary, and still with many leaps of imagination left up to the reader).

Interestingly, however, the effect for Cree and Ojibwe has been the opposite: anyone looking at the first generation of Bible translations (from English into Cree) will find it remarkable that they are looking at a writing system that can express the indigenous vernacular well enough, but it breaks down into a mess every time a Hebrew name or biblical concept must appear (and this happens on every page of these religious tracts, with a borrowed vocabulary from Abraham to Zachariah that defies transcription into Cree).

(7) So what exactly was the inspiration that the Christian Missionaries took from Thomas More's Utopia?  When you look at the illustrations of the original plan for the writing system produced by James Evans (of the Wesleyan Methodist Church) there is one major difference between Cree as he wrote it and Cree as it is written today: Evans tried to express the difference between the long vowels and the short vowels by bifurcating the syllable (i.e., cutting the glyph in half, leaving a gap in the lines forming the character).

This seems wildly original, and the only thing it looks like (to my knowledge) is the Utopian alphabet (where we have gaps in the middle of circles, and squares divided in half, etc.) --although it is a resemblance only.  I don't think there's any mystery as to why More did this, nor as to why the first designers of the Cree script copied the same geometric aesthetic: simply, in type-written script, it looks neat.

In hand-writing, however, it is difficult, time-consuming, and it generally ends up looking like a mess.  You can go ahead and try writing a triangle in two halves that don't join up, if you're having trouble imagining this; the more letters of this kind are on the same line, the more work there is for the reader's eye to do in joining up the halves to make sense out of the sentence (and half of one letter can look like half of another, etc. etc.).

In no time at all, a much simpler long-vowel-marking came to replace the Utopian convention: a single dot was added above the character to mark long vowels (ᐃ vs. ᐄ, instead of writing the whole syllable in two halves).  Apparently the only place that the original plan (of bifurcated characters) is demonstrated is in the proposal documents produced by James Evans (before the script became popular with the Cree and Ojibwe themselves).

The simple dot is also somewhat messy and imperfect; as anyone with direct experience will tell you, the vast majority of fluent Cree speakers (over age 50, shall we say?) do not use the dot in their own hand-writing, but leave these vowel distinctions unmarked on paper (much to the frustration of some linguists), along with omitting the marker for h (ᐦ).

(8) These were not the only influences on the development of the syllabic writing system: the precedent of Cerokee syllabics was significant, and pretty well every published source on this history will mention the systems of shorthand writing that were then in use in Europe, in one way or another, as a model for emulation.

However, it may be that the most important influence of shorthand was simply the cultural impetus of questioning what the best way to write a language might be, and encouraging innovation in general.

It is remarkable (prima facie) that a self-selected group of people who had devoted themselves to a Hebrew-and-Aramaic religion did not have any interest in devising their new writing system on the basis of what they considered to be their own sacred language.  Certainly, it is easy to imagine that some other missionary might have instead found inspiration in the writing systems of what were then called the "Hamito-Semitic" languages; but, instead, they invented something new, and presented it as new, i.e., neither boasting of any roots in ancient India, nor of any in ancient Israel.

(9) The story of this particular writing system begins in Canada, but it doesn't end in Canada: other missionaries did follow the precedent set by the Cree syllabary, in working with radically different languages, in radically different cultural contexts.

As I am one of very few people with combined experience in researching languages in both Yunnan and Canada, I was quite relieved when I discovered that someone else had already published an article on the next chapter of this history (because it means that I don't have to write the article myself!).  Here is the citation:
Alison Lewis and Louis-Jacques Dorais.  2003.  "Two Related Indigenous Writing Systems: Canada's Syllabic and China's A-hmao Scripts."  The Canadian Journal of Native Studies.  Vol. 23, No. 2, 2003, p. 277–304.  Brandon: Manitoba.  http://www2.brandonu.ca/library/cjns/23.2/default.htm

(10) While I understand why various sources try to put a positive spin on this story, it deserves to be said bluntly that the invention of this system of writing was expressly part of a project to conquer, Christianize, and subjugate the native peoples of Canada in one instance, and to (similarly) conquer, Christianize and subjugate other native peoples in Yunnan (S.W. China) in the other case.  The comparison illustrates broader patterns of British imperialism found around the world.  In the source just cited, above, the positive spin is to emphasize that, regardless of whatever the intentions of the missionaries may have been, "As soon as it became available as a writing system, it was, so to speak, appropriated by its users, who made it totally their own" (id., p. 287).

The problem with appending this kind of happy ending onto the story is that it mis-represents cultural destruction as cultural preservation: I favor the blunt honesty of the (aforementioned) wâskahikaniwiyiniw-âcimowina that sums up the history as one of white society "robbing [the Cree] of everything, even our language and also our culture" (p. 2).  As chilling as this honesty may be for some, it is preferable to presenting a reassuring pseudo-history of native appropriation of the missionary's tools.  I don't think that this kind of reassurance is useful to anyone: the vast majority of published works that are extant in these written languages (that were invented to impose the Bible on the indigenous people of Canada in the first place) are still Bible-translations and church sermons.  The effectiveness of the tool has to be evaluated relative to the purpose it was designed to serve; and, of course, the earlier phase of translating the Bible into native languages was rapidly followed by outright forced assimilation (pursued by both church and state), banning the use of the native languages, and forcing the recitation of prayers and reading of Bibles in European languages only.  Even in this bleak context of cultural genocide, it may be complained that the British Empire didn't take much interest in forcing its conquered peoples to learn Aramaic, Ethiopic or even Hebrew (i.e., if anyone sincerely believed that their god "said" any of this stuff, why would they be forcing the conquered peoples to learn English?); in a sense, linguistic homogenization was a higher priority than Christianization.

(11) So, as it is has been foreshadowed that I don't want to pin a happy ending onto the tale, what is the unhappy ending that I propose instead?

One issue that is illustrated by the dotted lines traced out in this article (from Europe to India and China, with the Cree somewhere in-between) is the peculiar cosmopolitanism of the authorities of the British Empire --both the temporal and ecclesiastical authorities alike.

At the top of the heap, there were figures like Lord Lamington, who were expected to be experts (or at least imperators) from one end of the world to the other, serving the empire in the most diverse (and mutually-alien) linguistic and cultural contexts imaginable; and (in general) these men served with deplorable brutality, ignorance, and indifference to human suffering, everywhere they were sent.  At the bottom of the heap there were Christian missionaries (many of whom at least lived up to their promises to live in poverty, in contrast to the lairds at the top) who, likewise, often had experience at unrelated extremities of the earth, and in radically alien languages.  In the careers of particular individuals, we see decisions being made (with long-term ramifications) by people who had served in some capacity in Africa, who then were re-assigned to India, or who were equally arbitrarily re-assigned from Asia to "the New World", and so on.  This is indeed part of the intellectual background to the invention of the Cree syllabary, the A-hmao syllabary, and many other linguistic oddities of the empire.

However, within this strange patchwork of the British Empire, I cannot say that all conquered peoples were treated genocidally: while the same missionary organizations were often involved in translating the Bible into both Chinese and Cree, they did not equally expect that the Chinese and the Cree would one day cease to exist.  The conquest of Canada, like the conquest of Australia, falls into a category much different from the British conquest of Burma: as brutal as the annexation of Burma may have been, the British never dreamed that Burma would one day be completely uninhabited by the Burmese, whereas they not only dreamed of an equivalent genocide for Canada but very much came to assume that it was a sort of automatic outcome of British dominion there.

Were the missionaries themselves aware of this purpose?  Did they regard the future of the continent in this way?  The answer is, very often, written out plainly enough in the autobiographies of the missionaries themselves, as I have alluded to before.

I would here present one example of an important missionary who worked both in "the new world" and in Burma, and whose work on languages was of tremendous importance (at least for Southeast Asia); this was the Reverend Francis Mason, who wrote his autobiography in 1870.*²  The man travelled the world during one of the bloodiest eras of imperialist history, and he seems to have approved of the slaughter going on around him in each and every theatre of the war called civilization.  Mason was a witness to this history in the most literal sense: "Official councils were frequently held with the Indian chiefs [in St. Louis] at the house of General Clark, and I was often present. [...] They had much to say about dying away before the white man, like withered leaves ..." (pg. 148).

The following excerpt takes on more weight when we consider that the reverend doctor had both witnessed some of the extinction of the bison (that he is endorsing) and the persecution of the native population (that he is excusing), as both proceeded at a rapid pace during the years that he lived in America:

"The Indian may be excused if he complains of his lands being taken from him, but shall we have no Pacific railroad because the land belongs to the Indian, and he will not sell it?  I see no absolute wrong in the government taking it under such circumstances. [...] The world cannot be civilized without their lands, and the civilization of the world is a necessity as great as the turning of the earth on its axis.  If they will submit to be civilized, land enough will be left them for a civilized people to dwell on, but if they are determined to remain wild, like the bison on their plains, then like their bison, they must move on before the wave of civilization, or be swept away by it." (p. 149-150)

In this case, as was typical of the British empire, we have one and the same man acting as a missionary in what seem like the most diverse (and mutually-unrelated) civilizations imaginable.  Perhaps he had an equally limited appreciation of each of those civilizations.  However, my point here is that the remotest tribal minorities of Burma were indeed linked to the indigenous peoples at the opposite end of the world, because they were both conquered by the same empire, and had to contend with the same characters (like Mason) ruling over them, preaching to them, while both documenting and redefining their languages.

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Endnotes.
¹ John S. Long.  1986.  "The Revend George Barnley and the James Bay Cree."  The Canadian Journal of Native Studies.  Vol. VI, No. 2.  p. 318.  Brandon: Manitoba.
² Francis Mason.  1870.  The Story of a Working Man's Life: with Sketches of Travel in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America.  Oakley, Mason & Co.  New York: U.S.A.