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I know some peoples in more southern parts of the Americas had forms of written language, however, I was unsure as to whether this is something that had also developed among groups living in modern America-Canada prior to Columbus.

T.E.D.
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arara
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  • I think this is a duplicate, but can't find it. Can anyone else track it down; or am I mistaken? – Pieter Geerkens Oct 11 '20 at 16:25
  • @PieterGeerkens - I don't remember getting one quite like this before, but my memory isn't exactly renowned for its reliability. – T.E.D. Oct 11 '20 at 19:19
  • Edited the question a tad, because I'm pretty sure the OQ wanted this restricted to the geographic areas of modern Canada and the continental United States, and thus probably isn't interested in eg: Mayan codexes. – T.E.D. Oct 11 '20 at 19:22
  • Does the hide calendars count? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_count) – Greg Oct 11 '20 at 20:27

1 Answers1

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There is/was the Micmac writing system:

Schmidt and Marshall argued in 1995 that the missionary system of the 17th century was able to serve as a fully functional writing system. This would mean that Miꞌkmaq is the oldest writing system for a native language north of Mexico.

(and)

Pierre Maillard, Roman Catholic priest, during the winter of 1737–38 created a system of hieroglyphics to transcribe Miꞌkmaq words.

However, as Barry Fell points out, the Micmac hieroglyphics are very similar, in both form and meaning, to the Egyptian ones (America BC, pp. 255, 256).

enter image description here

And then a little mystery (p. 257):

Maillard died in 1762, 61 years before Champollion published his first decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Tomas By
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    I'm upvoting this because its possible this is pre-contact, and I was previously unaware of it. However, it would be nice if this answer went into some detail about why this may qualify as an answer to the question, and also why it may not. There appear to be arguments either way. – T.E.D. Oct 11 '20 at 19:17
  • I cannot imagine how the hieroglyph for "ram, sheep" could have been in use in Canada before European contact, given that the animal itself wasn't present on the American continent. – Evargalo Oct 12 '20 at 07:39
  • @Evargalo I'm not very familiar with hieroglyphics, but that is clearly not the way it works with normal words. e.g. the Ram is a Zodiac sign. – Tomas By Oct 12 '20 at 10:00
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    @TomasBy I am note sure I understand your comment. I just wanted to point out that if Mikmaks already used glyphs in the 15th century then the "Ram sheep" was certainly not one of them. Anyway, Barry Fell's work is received with a lot of skepticism by scholars - It would be nice to check if other sources found the alleged similarity between Mikmak and Egyptian hieroglyphs. – Evargalo Oct 12 '20 at 12:16
  • @Evargalo I believe you are wrong. They could have used that glyph as a name, or metaphorically. I agree it would be good to check Fell's tables. He does actually cite somebody else IIRC. – Tomas By Oct 12 '20 at 13:00
  • Is not is clear from the answer that this system was invented by the Europeans, many years after the contact? So how it addresses the question? As a proof that there was no writing before the contact? – Alex Oct 13 '20 at 01:19
  • Well, it seems doubtful to me that Maillard invented those hieroglyphics, he probably just wrote them down, but in either case the wiki quote at the top clearly suggests there were no other "US/Canadian" pre-contact writing systems. – Tomas By Oct 13 '20 at 01:28
  • `Wrote down' as in compiled a dictionary or whatever it was. – Tomas By Oct 13 '20 at 01:37
  • @Evargalo Rightly so. Anyone who has had a cursory introduction to Egyptian would have laughed this off. For all his credentials in marine biology, he's hilariously inept as a linguist and an historian, and anyone who takes this at face value might as well believe that aliens built the pyramids. – cmw Jan 27 '23 at 21:45
  • @cmw point out the problems. Point out one problem. – Tomas By Jan 27 '23 at 21:49
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    Evargalo already did. I'll do another one. The "glyph" for "I my me" is A1 in Gardiner and looks nothing like this. Same with the 2nd person singular pronoun. So many of these don't even resemble hieroglyphs at all. It's all 100% bullshit. If you've never taken Egyptian, then you don't know what you're talking about, and you shouldn't peddle the ramblings of someone the academy has regularly and routinely labeled a crackpot for decades. – cmw Jan 27 '23 at 21:58
  • Moreover, when would they be coming? Why would they choose the monumental script, and not hieratic or demotic? None of this makes remote sense. – cmw Jan 27 '23 at 22:02
  • I don't find Evergalos objection convincing, as I say above. You could be right, I don't know. Maybe there are several ways to express the same meaning. As to your questions in the 2nd comment, clearly what the Micmacs had, after some millenia, was a random, distorted, partial system. – Tomas By Jan 27 '23 at 22:10
  • And interesting quote here: (I mean I am not obsessed with this or anything) "We need to ask not only what Fell has done wrong in his epigraphy, but also where we have gone wrong as archaeologists in not recognizing such an extensive European presence in the New World." – Tomas By Jan 27 '23 at 22:31