1894: A bilingual CJ-French shorthand text
A nice Rosetta Stone for deciphering Chinuk Pipa and shorthand French…
…a bilingual Genesis 1.
Many languages appear in shorthand in the newspaper Kamloops Wawa (launched 1891).
Ironically the hardest for me to read, because it’s in the most unique version of the Duployan alphabet, is the material in French.
That irony comes from the fact that this shorthand alphabet was originally invented in order to write French.
Me, I’m far better at reading Chinuk Wawa, 8 Salish languages, English, and Latin in the shorthand. All of those are in simpler versions of Duployan, using for example far smaller selections of vowel symbols.
So, as I’ve gone through every findable issue of Kamloops Wawa (around 250 of them so far!), transcribing them so they can go into a searchable database as well as help me create the biggest CW dictionary ever…
…it helps a lot whenever editor JMR Le Jeune happens to present a shorthand French text along with some kind of “key”, whether it’s French written in normal Roman letters (which I can handle), or the sort of bilingual text we see below.
Quite nicely, this Rosetta Stone arrangement also gives us a fair idea of how a native French speaker thought about the meanings of Jargon words and phrases.
Have a look at a sample of what I”m talking about.
Here as usual, I bold the Jargon material.
The shorthand French is in what I take as the average Kamloops Wawa reader’s view of it, if they were to take the time to figure out the special nasal vowel symbols and such that Le Jeune sometimes printed charts of.
Let’s be clear, a native speaker of French, educated in Duployan shorthand — which was tremendously popular at the time — would have no difficulties reading this stuff. (Although I think we catch Le Jeune in a couple of minor slips, as you may notice below.)
These squiggles are murder on a foreign, mediocre French student like me, and I bet they’d be tough for many a present-day French person as well.
You should see how my brow furrows when I run into pages & pages of Le Jeune’s, and other BC priests’, shorthand French without any clues provided as to what it says!!
Maybe by posting this, I’ll wind up recruiting some fluent francophones to figure out the funny figures filling a fair fraction of Kamloops Wawa!
[first column:]
Ankati (Otrfwa) Autrefois
ST (Diyu) Dieu
mamuk (fi) fit
sahali (li o) les eaux
ilihi (la tir) la terre
pi (i pyui) et puis
ukuk (sit) cette
ilihi. (tir). terre.
Kopa (O) Au
ilip, (prmii,) premier,
kopit (riĩ k) rien que
chok (d lo) de l’eau
pi (i pyui) et puis
pulakli (la nyui) la nuit
mitlait (iti) était
kopa (syur) sur
ukuk (sit) cette…[second column:]
< Traduction. > Otrfwa Diyu fi l siil i
Autrefois Dieu fit le ciel et
la tir. Tu dabor, il ni avi syur sit
la terre. Tout d’abord, il n’y avait sur cettetir k d lo i li tinibr, e Diyu di:
terre que de l’eau et les ténèbres, et Dieu dit:K la lyumiir swa fet. A lĩstã [SIC?] la lyumiir fyu
Que la lumière soit faite. A l’instant la lumière futfet syur la tir. Diyu fi sla l prmii
faite sur la terre. Dieu fit cela le premiershur. L skõ shur, Diyu fi s firmamã k
jour. Le second jour, Dieu fit ce firmament quenu vwaiõ ã o. L trwasiim shur, il rasãbla
nous voyons en haut. Le troisième jour, il rassemblali o okil il don [SIC?] l nõ d o sali,
les eaux auxquels il donne [?] le nom d’eau salé,mer. Apri sla il di pur k la tir s
mer. Après cela il dit pour que la terre sedisicha [SIC]. Syur sit tir sesh il fi
dessécha [?]. Sur cette terre sèche il fitpusi tut ispis dirb, darbr e d
pousser [?] toute espèce d’herbe, d’arbre et defyutr [SIC? for fryui?]. L katriim shur Diyu fi l solii
fruit [?]. Le quatrième jour Dieu fit le soleil(,)lalyun e li itwal dã l firmamã.
la lune et les étoiles dans le firmament.(A rough translation: ‘Once God made the sky and
Earth. First of all, there was on this
earth only water and darkness, and God said:
Let there be light. At that moment the light was
made on earth. God did this first
day. On the second day, God made that firmament that
we see above. On the third day he gathered
the waters by which he calls [?] the name salt water,
sea. After that he said for the earth to get dry [?]. On this dry land he made
grow [?] every kind of grass, tree and
fruit [?]. On the fourth day God made the sun(,)
the moon and the stars in the firmament.’)—
<Notes.> ST: < S.T. > abrishi d
ST: < S.T. > abrégé de
‘ST: abbreviated from’sahali taii, dã o l shef, l shef
sahali taii, dans haut le chef, le chef
‘sahali taii, [literally] “up above(,) the chief”, the chief’
dã o, Diyu.
d’en haut, Dieu.
‘of up above, God.’
— from Kamloops Wawa #121, October 1894, page 170
What makes this French text doubly interesting to me is that it looks like (mostly) Standard French, but with a number of (possible) concessions to local Metis French/French of the Mountains usage in order to increase intelligibility.
Thus, at the seventh and last lines, we’ve /li o/ and /li itwal/, respectively. Both lack the expected (obligatory!) liaison consonant, /z/. Interestingly, lack of liaison is very common in L2 forms of French.
Also, things like “Que la lumière soit faite” instead of expected “Que la lumière soit” definitely feel like a concession to spoken French: the former is roughly analogous to “Let light be made”/”Have light made”, with the latter being more akin to “Let there be light”. That is to say, it is more liable to be understood by an L2 speaker of French unexposed to more standard registers.
Some definitions (ce firmament que nous voyons en haut/il donne le nom d’eau salée, mer- Incidentally, “eau” in French is feminine, hence “eau salée” and not “eau salé)” seem designed to allow speakers who might not know “firmament” (A bookish word) or “mer” to follow what is being said.
Oh, and it is definitely “d’en haut”, “from above”, and not *”dans haut”.
More later, I hope. This is a VERY intriguing text, I must say.
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Merci beaucoup for your comments, Etienne. Just responding to your note about the lack of “liaison” — this appears to be a consistent trait in all of the shorthand French that I’ve encountered in the Kamloops orbit. So, despite its self-proclaimed nature as a “phonographie”, the sténographie duployenne appears to prioritize an adherence to standard French citation forms over phonological detail!
A further detail that I’m guessing will interest more linguists than just me is that Duployan shorthand winds up encoding the vowel system much as Devanagari does that of Hindi or Sanskrit, i.e. the schwa of French isn’t reflected by any symbol whatsoever. (Thus “de” is spelled < d >, “le” is < l >, and “ce” is < s >.) All other vowels, though, have their own distinct symbols. Quite the neat little efficiency!
Dave
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Also, I’d be highly interested in seeing whether you find the “concession to L2 French” hypothesis borne out on examination of more such materials. So I’ll make a point of publishing more of this stuff here soon.
I appreciate your corrective notes, by the way — ‘water’ for example is of such variable gender in Spanish (which I’m more familiar with) that I benefit from your proofreading here 🙂
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Dave: I had a look (again) at your July 20 and 21 2016 entries, where you gave other examples of French in shorthand. Okay, it seems that liaison was indeed typically not represented in writing. But otherwise I definitely sense that there too that Lejeune deliberately used local/spoken French forms to maximize intelligibility.
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Really a fascinating thought! Let’s be sure to pursue this further.
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