The usefulness of studying French shorthand

An important fact about the “Duployé” shorthand from France that inspired Chinuk Pipa writing — 

Everybody tended to personalize whatever shorthand they’d learned, back in the day.

I’ve been studying Denis-Romulus Perrault’s 1903 book “Cours élémentaire de sténographie: en quatre leçons, d’après la méthode Duployé, à l’usage des professeurs et des personnes qui désirent aprendre seules la sténographie : adopté par la plupart des écoles et des collèges commerciaux de la province de Québec”.

There’s a ton of useful information here for the “Chinook Writing” student — information on how not to write Chinook!

You might gather as much from this sample of some notes I was taking…

Image credit: My study notes

I have a number of trifling frustrations with this French-language shorthand 🙂 They show up in red ink above.

But they make me stronger. I’m seeing numerous ways in which Father JMR Le Jeune personalized the previously existing Duployan shorthand, many of which can be called “simplifications”, in the service of writing Chinuk Wawa.

I’ll leave it at that for today. But some of our seriously devoted Chinookers may want to click over there & get a load of how very different French shorthand is!

ikta mayka chaku-kəmtəks?
What have you learned?