James Evans (linguist)

James Evans ( born January 18, 1801 in Kingston -upon -Hull in the UK, † November 23, 1846 in Keelby, United Kingdom) was a Methodist missionary and pastor in Canada and amateur linguist.

Evans was born in Kingston -upon -Hull in the UK, and emigrated in 1820 to Canada. He proselytized on Hudson Bay and invented the language of the Ojibwe tribe in 1840 its own font. Evans experimented briefly with the Latin alphabet, then he gave it in favor of a syllabary, in which he was probably inspired by the Pitman shorthand. This document consisted of nine characters, which could be represented by the rotation in four directions, the various vowels. Later he modified the script slightly to apply it also to the language of the Cree tribe can. Both documents were quickly adopted by the Indians (see Cree font).