Pushing the boundaries of Chinook Writing: How to write (more) Chinese
The inventor of a different Chinese shorthand
(Image credit: ChinaDaily.com.cn)
Regular readers of my site probably recall a remarkable old Chinuk Wawa article showing how to count in southern Chinese. (See “Shaina Man Mamuk Kansih Kakwa“.)
That article was written in the “shorthand” Chinook Writing, i.e. the Chinuk Pipa alphabet of British Columbia. It was neat to get a glimpse of how that shorthand-based writing system, which many in the 19th century said was “universal”, could be applied to several one-syllable words in a very different language from Chinook Jargon.
Today we see it stretched further. Kamloops Wawa #198 (September 1901) carries a many-page article reporting on the Boxer Rebellion in China, and there we find plenty of multi-syllable Chinese proper names. It turns out there are some new twists.
Take a look.
Right away it’s clear that the multiple syllables in a Chinese name are connected by a symbol that you otherwise rarely see in Chinuk Pipa, a plus sign (* my asterisk indicates an unclear reading):
Page 76:
- lisivik kopa Si+Chuin ‘the bishop in Szechuan/Sichuan’
- Kun.g+Ton.g* ilihi ‘the Kwangtung/Guangdong/Canton region’
That style of punctuation has to be influenced by European style; for example, in various places, the Jargon text has section titles in English where we see the typical hyphenated Chinese names, for example “Tien-Tsin”.
Another noticeable feature is that, even though Chinuk Pipa has a symbol to represent the “ng” sound that’s so frequent in Chinese varieties, Father Le Jeune hardly uses it here. the “ng” symbol is the Chinuk Pipa “n” symbol plus a dot, and it’s often hard to distinguish the two. That may be why we see “n” plus “g” used instead (represented here as “n.g”):
Page 77:
- kopa U+Chan.g+Ku ‘at U Chang Ku*’
- Mõsinor Favrii*, lisivik kopa Pi+King, Shaina taii tawn ‘Monsignor Favrier, bishop at Peking, China’s capital’
- Ukuk Twan, iaka drit ilo tiki kanawi tkop man ‘This Tuan really hated all Whites’
- Kopa iht tawn iaka nim Kaw+Ló* ‘At a town called Kaw Lo…’
- Ukuk man iaka nim Tu+Duk*, iaka taii ankati kopa Ton.g+King ilihi… ‘This man named Tu Duk used to be the leader in the Tongking region…’
That “Kaw+Ló” shows you another way that Chinuk Pipa can be extended and used to represent sounds more precisely; you absolutely can place accent marks on the vowels of Chinook Writing. This was hardly ever done for writing the Jargon (as was true of writing Jargon with Latin letters too). But for some languages it was common. Sechelt and Okanagan, a couple of Salish languages, were written with hundreds of accent marks in Chinuk Pipa.
One symbol that exists with some frequency in Chinuk Pipa writing of the Jargon, but that gets used much more for Chinese, is the letter I’m transcribing as “c”. As in modern “pinyin” writing of Mandarin Chinese, this stands for a “ts” sound…
Page 79:
- Tiin+Cin, Sip. <30>, <1900> ‘Tientsin/Tianjin, Sept. 30 1900’
- Shaina wach min kopa tkop man, klaska nim Cun.g+Li+Ia+Min*… ‘the Chinese guards over the White people are called Tsung Li Ya Min…’
In the following bunch of examples, we find not just proper names but also some spoken Beijing Chinese written down:
Page 82:
- Naika klatwa nanich prins Cing ‘I visited Prince Tseng*’
- iht tlus styuil haws iaka paia kopa tanas saia ilihi, Tun.g-An.g* ‘a nice church burned down in a nearby place, Tung-Ang’
- kopa Nan-An.g* ‘at Nan-Ang’
- Boksirs wik saia nsaika haws, ayu wawa: Sha, sha, mamuk mimlus; Shaw, chaw, mamuk paia. ‘The Boxers were near our house, saying “Sha, sha (kill!); Shao, shao (burn!)” ‘
- <26> Shaina pan.g* haws paia ’26 Chinese “pang houses”* burned down’
- Liplit kopa Si+Tan.g* iaka mimlus ‘the priest at Si-Tang has died’
- Shaina taii wawa pus kanawi tkop man mash Pi<X>King tumoro ‘the Chinese leaders told all the Whites to leave Peking’
That last example above shows a rare alternative to the plus-sign punctuation, an “X” shape.
Here is one last bit of shorthand Chinese:
Page 89:
- ayu fait kopa iht aias laport iaka nim Si+Hwa ‘there was heavy fighting at a gate named Si-Hwa’
Maybe some of my readers will have enough acquaintance with Chinese varieties to tell more about how well the Chinuk Pipa captures the language!
This is dearly interesting! The online ECO library of the KW ends at December of 1900 at this moment. Would you please include some pictures of the relevant pages from 1901? Who is reporting this from China? Is the reverend translating from particular wire or newspaper reports for the Boxer rebellion?
I’m none too educated about the 庚子國變 (Boxer rebellion), but a couple of things did strike me in how Lejeune has articulated Chinese this way. In random order:
First, yes, as well as some southern language variants, this also includes more northern Chinese, Mandarin. Tu+Duk obviously southern, for instance. But the C use as /ts/ or such… this is news indeed, works for Mandarin certainly, and I’d love to see more examples.
Although the pronunciation of Beijing as Piking was already archaic at the time, if certainly not in foreign naming practice. The /g/ to /zh/ shift in the standard was one of dialect as the capital flipped between Nanjing and Beijing, but aside from elite practice was already quite widespread if memory serves.
The Wade Giles or “post office Chinese” latinization he must be reading from did use dashes to separate syllables or characters in phrases, but inconsistently in practice. My first impression was he might have gotten the idea from early transcription of foreign names INTO Chinese with a medial black dot. Either way, it is interesting he would pay attention to the phonetics with such care here. Were there Chinese readers of his paper he was keen to attend to?
The Cung+Li+Ya+Min is definitely to read as 總理衙門, Zong3 li3 ya2 men in pinyin. This was the foreign affairs bureau who fecklessly tried to interface with the west until just after the rebellion.
The Si+Hwa gate sounds like it might be the 西華門, the Xi1 hua2 men, the gate in the west side of the imperial palace of Beijing. Was that the context? I didn’t know the eight allies got in that far to the palace…
This last brings up an odd point I notice in this orothography. In Mandarin, xi and si are pronounced quite differently. And yet here si is meant to stand in for both, in Xi+Hwa and Si+chuin respectively. He must be translating from English or French…
“Sha, sha” and “shaw, shaw” are amazingly spot on Mandarin. I’d like to know who was reporting. It truly brings back what it must have been like at the time.
Pan.g is mysterious. Do they mean fang2 as in 房屋 or 房子, the common word meaning house? I suppose they mean 26 courtyard houses burnt?
Kaw+Ló: Sounds somewhere in the southeast? The diacritic is very interesting. One of the many deficits of alphabets in transcribing Chinese languages is the usual lack of tone indicators. Is that what was going on here? If there are other indications of tone in Chinukpipa snippets of Chinese, this would be a huge find.
Please consider a follow up to this report.
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