Kamloops Wawa pictures, part 14: Sténographie Duployé
I reckon this one counts as a picture, in a way…
Kamloops Wawa #125 (February 1895), page 32 shows us a chart of the “Sténographie Duployé”. That’s the original French alphabet that Chinuk Pipa was derived from.
If you know some French, you can make more out of this than just a pretty image.
For instance, the letter < g > (“GUE”) is described as “grande oblique, de droite à gauche” (‘a big diagonal, from right to left’). That’s true, but to me, it’s more important to specify that this is one of the few letters that’s written against the flow of writing, which is left to right.
Another detail of interest, for those who try reading French in this shorthand, is that the consonant letters are routinely represented in the chart as “BE”, “FE”, “CHE”, etc. That is, they’re shown to us, not by their French letter-names bé, ef, gé etc., but instead as consonant + schwa.
This helps me illustrate a point I sometimes make about the history of Chinuk Pipa: the original French shorthand had no symbol for schwa. When it came time to devise an alphabet for Chinook Jargon, which has a much more important schwa sound than French has, folks had to improvise, using various of the existing vowel symbols, “A”, “O”, “U”, etc.
Also, in a micro-scale replication of spoken Jargon’s history, the French nasal sounds (well, symbols) “AN, ON, IN, UN” dropped out when French words were used in Chinuk Wawa.
