Also, though the requirements in terms of current Americanist practice are
fairly simple, in the past a lot of different expedients, especially over
and under dotting of consonants, or acute accents above consonants, have
been used. Recent popular systems have sometimes used some of the older
expedients, and sometimes tried to substitute diagraphs and trigraphs, with
varying success. The popular Crow orthography, for example, has a few
anomalies, but basically works very well with standard Roman characters for
English plus acute-accented vowels. But, for a Siouan language Crow has a
very simple sound system. Simple sound systems are typical of Caddoan,
Plains Algonquian, and Missouri River Siouan.
I'm using simple in a rather special way here - I mean that relatively few
orthographic symbols are needed, provided that aspirates, preaspirates,
geminates, ejectives, etc., are written as digraphs. I don't mean that the
sounds and sound combinations are easily pronounced in all cases by, e.g.,
English speakers, and I'm not taking account of current phonology's
preference for treating aspirates, etc., as units, not clusters.
John Koontz (koontz@bldr.nist.gov)