To Point or Not to Point

In a recent comment Mark brought up the issue of tone marks in Pinyin,

"I tend to think that the best system for native speakers would be the least complicated, thus omitting most diacritics. ... I'd like to learn more about the use of pointed/unpointed text with the Hebrew and Arabic scripts. I wonder if you or any of your readers know of studies on the efficiency (for reading, but also for writing, if available) of using or omitting diacritics with these scripts. Or perhaps the partial omission of diacritics."

I can't say much about Arabic, since it is a bit too complicated to compare to tone marks. For Hebrew, most of the text that I have seen on the internet is unpointed except for some religious sites.

However, the topic of pointing or not pointing in Cree Syllabics is one that I have thought about for many years. Too many.

The original Cree Syllabary was designed by a missionary to mark vowel length and preaspiration of consonants with marks. If all of these features are marked all the time then the text is called 'fully pointed.' If they are omitted, then 'unpointed'. Sometimes the text is pointed occasionally to disambiguate, for certain words, for stylistic issues, etc. Then it has been called strategic pointing.

While I have a some old copies of the Wawatay News in a filebox somewhere, I have also found a copy of an article from this Oji-Cree newspaper on the internet. Although the online version of the paper is in English only, the newspaper that I saw was always in English and Syllabics. This is an aboriginal publication and as such represents one very common way to write in Oji-Cree.

The image posted above represents the same text in unpointed and pointed syllabics.

As a retrospective on this for Cree, originally it was intended by the missionary to be pointed. The Cree used it as unpointed text, except for one or two families who had a tradition of pointing. This corresponded to their reputation as priests and elders in the Anglican tradition.

Most missionary publications have only been partially pointed. Now on the internet we can see variations by community. The Cree School Board has a policy of using pointed text. The Naskapi unpointed. Most Cree and Oji-Cree text written by the Cree elsewere is unpointed or occasionally partially pointed.

Is it necessary to point text? Evidently some communities thought not. So why are others using pointed text? Hmm.

Thanks to Chris Harvey for great resources.

Mark invites readers to respond to this issue of whether to use fully marked text or not, whatever the language.