Mikmaq hieroglyphic writing
| Mi'kmaq hieroglyphs komqwejwi'kasikl |
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|---|---|
.jpg) |
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| Type |
logographic
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| Languages | Mi'kmaq |
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Time period
|
17th–19th century (logographic); date of precursors unknown |
Mi'kmaq hieroglyphic writing was a writing system and memory aid used by the Mi'kmaq, a First Nations people of the east coast of Canada.
The missionary-era glyphs were logograms, with phonetic elements used alongside (Schmidt & Marshall 1995), which included logographic, alphabetic, and ideographic information. They were derived from a pictograph and petroglyph tradition. In Mi'kmaq the glyphs are called komqwejwi'kasikl, or "sucker-fish writings", which refers to the tracks the sucker fish leaves on the muddy river bottom.
Scholars have debated whether the earliest known Mi'kmaq "hieroglyphs" from the 17th century qualified fully as a writing system, rather than as a pictographic mnemonic device. In the 17th century, French missionary Chrétien Le Clercq adapted the Míkmaq characters as a logographic system for pedagogical purposes.
In 1978, Ives Goddard and William Fitzhugh of the Department of Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution, contended that the pre-missionary system was purely mnemonic, as it could not be used to write new compositions. 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 Mi'kmaq is the oldest writing system for a native language north of Mexico.
Father Le Clercq, a Roman Catholic missionary on the Gaspé Peninsula in New France from 1675, claimed that he had seen some Míkmaq children 'writing' symbols on birchbark as a memory aid. This was sometimes done by pressing porcupine quills directly into the bark in the shape of symbols. Le Clercq adapted those symbols to writing prayers, developing new symbols as necessary.
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