Western syllabics use only those characters needed to write the phonemes of the western dialects. In this article, Cree words and sounds will transcribed using the Standard Roman Orthography used to teach Plains Cree. There are four basic vowels in Plains and Swampy Cree: a, i, e and o. The a, i and o sounds also have long versions: â, î and ô. The vowel e is always long and is written as ê. In Woods Cree, ê has merged with î, so only three basic vowels are used in that dialect. Woods Cree also has the phoneme th /ð/. For more on Cree dialects see the article on the Cree language. Standard Roman Orthography consonants sound for the most part like their English equivalents, except that they are never aspirated. The letter c sounds like the "ts" in "bits". Long vowels can be written either with a macron or a circumflex.
Inventory
Cree syllabics uses different glyphs to indicate consonants, and changes the orientation of these glyphs to indicate the vowel that follows it. The basic principles of Canadian syllabic writing are outlined in the article for Canadian Aboriginal syllabics. Notes: Note that the th-series closely resembles the y-series characters. The th phoneme in Woods Cree appears where a y is found in Plains or an n in Swampy Cree. Recognising the relationship between the th and y sounds, Cree writers use a modification of the y-series. In addition to these characters, western Cree syllabics indicates the w phoneme by placing a dot after the syllable. Thus, the syllable wa is indicated with ᐘ, pwi by ᐽ and so on. The dot used to mark the w can be combined with the dot marking length. The syllable wâ is marked as ᐚ and pwî as ᐿ. The dot used to indicate w is placed before the syllable in Eastern Cree syllabics. This and the way finals are written are the two principal differences between eastern and western Cree syllabics. The dot placed above syllables with long vowels is often dropped in real texts unless necessary to disambiguate the word. Long and short vowels may be written identically and require context to disambiguate. Also, western Cree writers may use the character ᙮ to indicate the end of sentence, instead of the Roman alphabet period so that it is not confused with the diacritic indicating the w sound. An example of Plains Cree written in western syllabics: In Standard Roman Orthography: English translation:
