Discussion list: Chinook in the UCS

• Main Author: Source Van Anderson
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Historical Overview of the Duployan and adaptations; Pacific; First Nations; Alaska
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.174.2821; http://www.dkuug.dk/JTC1/SC2/WG2/docs/n3895.pdf

The Duployan shorthands and Chinook script are used as a secondary shorthand for writing French, English, German, Spanish, Romanian, and as an alternate primary script for several first nations ' languages of interior British Columbia, including the Chinook Jargon, Okanagan, Lilooet, Shushwap, and North Thompson. The original Duployan shorthand was invented by Emile Duployé, published in 1860, as a stenographic shorthand for French. It was one of the two most commonly used French shorthands, being more popular in the south of France, and adjacent French speaking areas of other countries. Adapted Duployan shorthands were also developed for English, German, Spanish, and Romanian. The basic inventory of consonant and vowel signs- all in the first two columns of the allocation- have been augmented over the years to provide more efficient shorthands for these languages and to adapt it to the phonologies of these languages and the languages using Chinook writing. There currently exists no encoding- PUA or otherwise- for the representation of the Duployan or Chinook. Indeed, the submission of the Duployan Shorthands and Chinook script to the Unicode Consortium has necessitated the creation, from scratch, of the first Duployan/Chinook font, and the allocation is based solely on the internal logic of the script and affinity of usage among characters. The Chinook script was an adaptation and augmentation of the Duployan shorthand by fr. Jean Marie Raphael LeJeune, used for writing the Chinook Jargon and other languages of 19th c. interior British Columbia. Its original use and greatest surviving attestation is from the run of the Kamloops Wawa, a (mostly) Chinook Jargon newsletter of the Catholic diocese of Kamloops, British Columbia, published 1891-1923. At the time, the Chinook Jargon pidgin was widely spoken from SE Alaska to northern California, from the Pacific to the Rockies, and sporadically outside this area. Although the Chinook Jargon was the lingua franca in many communities of the Pacific Northwest, it was ...