Paul Davis
1 min readJun 17, 2020

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I was surprised at the assertion that Cyrillic script is used by Inuit and Eskimo people yet today. Is there documentation to support this?

When I arrived in Alaska in the ’70s, two competing writing systems had been developed for Yup’ik, the language spoken in southwestern Alaska — which previously had had no written language at all. I don’t remember what the systems were called, but by the time I became aware of it, one, developed by the University of Alaska, had gathered enough momentum to be considered the new standard and was used in a course I took.

I saw some evidence of Cyrillic writing in connection with old Russian Orthodox Church documents dating back to when Alaska was owned by Russia, but these were in Russian, not native languages, and I saw no evidence of and heard nothing about any writing system in native languages predating the contemporary ones I encountered then.

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Paul Davis
Paul Davis

Written by Paul Davis

Nomadic writer, realist, voluntaryist, nudist, singer, drummer, harmonica and recorder player, composer, gadfly, runner, troublemaker, survivor so far.

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