Historical Overview of the Duployéan and adaptations

• Main Author: Source Van Anderson
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Pacific; First Nations; Alaska
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.433.1931; http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2010/10159-duployan.pdf

The Duployéan shorthands and Chinook script are used as a secondary shorthand for writing French, English, German, Spanish, Rumanian, 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 Duployéan shorthand was invented by Emile Duployé, published in 1860, as a stenographic shorthand for French. It was one of the two most commonly used shorthand systems in France, being more popular in southern France and adjacent French speaking areas of other countries. Adaptations of Duployéan were developed for the representation of English, German, Spanish, and Rumanian. 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 formal encoding, in any context, 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 Duployéan/Chinook font, and the allocation is based solely on the internal logic and historical usage of the script. The Chinook script was an adaptation and augmentation of the Duployéan 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