Abstract
This document points to resources for the layout and presentation of text in languages that use the Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics (UCAS) script. The target audience includes developers of Web standards and technologies, such as HTML, CSS, Mobile Web, Digital Publications, and Unicode, as well as implementers of web browsers, ebook readers, and other applications that need to render Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics text.
Status of This Document
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document at the time of its publication. A list of current W3C
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This document points to resources for Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics (UCAS) script layout and text support on the Web and in eBooks. These requirements provide information for Web technologies such as CSS, HTML and digital publications about how to support languages written using the Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics script. The information here is developed in conjunction with a document that summarises gaps where the Web fails to adequately support the Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics script.
The editor's draft of this document is being developed in the GitHub repository Americas Language Enablement (amlreq), with contributors from the W3C Internationalization Interest Group. It is published by the Internationalization Working Group. The end target for this document is a Working Group Note.
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Some links on this page point to repositories or pages to which information will be added over time. Initially, the link may produce no results, but as issues, tests, etc. are created they will show up.
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This document points to resources for Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics (UCAS) script layout and text support on the Web and in eBooks. These resources provide information for developers of Web technologies such as CSS, HTML and digital publications, and for application developers, about how to support languages written using the Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics script. They include requirements, tests, GitHub discussions, type samples, and more,
The document focuses on typographic layout issues. For a deeper understanding of the Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics script and how it works see Eastern Canadian Inuktitut Orthography Notes, which includes topics such as:
Phonology,
Vowels,
Syllables, and
Numbers.
The document Language enablement index points to this document and others, and provides a central location for developers and implementers to find information related to various scripts.
The W3C also has a repository with discussion threads related to the Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics script, including requests from developers to the user community for information about how scripts/languages work, and a notification system that tracks issues in W3C working groups related to the Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics script. See a list of unresolved questions for Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics experts. Each section below points to related discussions. See also the repository home page.
The Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics script is an featural syllabary, where the majority of symbols represent both a consonant and a vowel, but vowel components are indicated by standardised rotations of the glyph shape.
The Inuit languages can be written using the syllabic script, or using a Latin transcription. The former is widely used in eastern dialects, whereas the latter is more common in the west.
Plains Cree is only one dialect (albeit with the largest number of speakers) in a continnuum running east and west, where each dialect has small differences in pronunciation and also small differences in orthography. In particular, eastern dialects tend to put the labialisation dot on the left, rather than on the right of the base character, and the small superscript coda symbols tend to resemble the larger syllables, whereas in Plains Cree the shape is very different.
The UCAS script runs left to right in horizontal lines. Words are separated by spaces. There is no case distinction.
In the UCAS featural syllabary a majority of symbols in the syllabary represesent a CV pairing, but the symbol is rotated to indicate what the vowel is.
Standalone vowels are represented by syllablic letters.
Syllable-final consonants (ie. not followed by a vowel), are typically represented by a set of superscript symbols, however Cree also uses a small number of non-syllabic characters for particular sounds.
A small dot above a symbol indicates a lengthened vowel, but there are precomposed code points for all combinations of base plus diacritics. These are all atomic characters. Inuktitut uses no combining marks.
Numbers are written using ASCII digits.