Another example of how clunky Chinuk Pipa’s own number symbols were
Right now I’m not re-finding the document, but in one edition of “Sténographie Duployé”, a textbook of the French-language ancestor of Chinuk Pipa, I found this: 
Any idea what it says?
(This is my re-creation of the symbol, using an awful clunky drawing program.)
It’s supposed to be “1900”!
How, you ask?
- The vertical line is meant to signal “1” in the Duployan number system, plus it’s identical to the letter “p” of the Duployan alphabet.
- The U-like curve that it’s attached to is “9”, and also confusingly, identical to the letter “s” or “i”. (Long story.)
- The big U-curve underneath is, even more confusingly, meant as the letter “s”!
- It’s connected to a tiny, partial curve with a tick-mark like an acute accent above it, which together show the French nasalized vowel sound “an”.
Got that?
No?!
I’ll give it away, then: what you’re looking at is “19 cent” in French, i.e. “nineteen hundred”.
Even more confusing than writing in Duployan numerals is, writing partly in them and partly in French words!
(I doubt the above was meant to represent the date 1900. To my understanding, nobody speaking French says “19 cent”, unlike us Anglos with our “19 hundred”.)
I can only imagine the countless garden-path, rabbit-hole, wild-goose-chase experiences people endured when numbers were written this way in French shorthand.
And I’m delighted that the British Columbians who wrote Chinuk Pipa virtually never did this.
Chinook writers preferred the simplicity of the numerals they saw all around them as written in standard English: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and so on.
(See “5 Shorthand Symbols No One Ever Used“) 😁
