Duployan Shorthand

[Lee Falconer]

Dave wrote:

>How did you manage to write Duployan shorthand
>by computer?

Mike wrote:

>I note that Lee includes modern borrow-words
>("link", "list" eg) in shorthand form, and seems
>to have established a graphic style for the
>word-glyphs that looks more like type a la Cree/Inuktitut
>than handscript.

---

It's interesting Mike should mention the Cree/Inuktitut
writing systems, because it was after viewing some sites
out of Nunavut that I made a final decision on how I wanted
my site to look. Their sites have a modern crisp look
and most often employ an Arial font when writing English
or French.

I originally lifted Le Jeune's Duployan shorthand symbols
directly from pdf files of his books at Canadiana Online.
I cleaned them up a bit and threw in a Garamond font for
a home page that resembled a title page out of a 19 century
book. But I felt like I was just ripping off what others
have already done on their sites.

So I went back to the drawing board (Paint utility, actually)
and worked out a standard way of drawing each shape within a
glyph (large circle, small circle, semi-circle, etc.) pixel
by pixel. So when I drew a new word, all I had to do was put
these shapes together and center them vertically in a 30 pixel
high space. This was actually a lot less time consuming
than cleaning up the original hand-drawn Le Jeune glyphs.

As for the modern borrowed words, I'm following Le Jeunes's
advice of sticking to a core CJ vocabulary of a few hundred
words and adding simple English words when absolutely needed.
The only reason I did this is because I'm not quite confident
enough yet to come up with new Chinook Jargon compounds. Though
one I've thought of using is "tlap-machine" for search engine.

Anyways, I think that's a long enough explanation! Pi naika tel
kopa wawa kopa Kinjorj la lang. Ayas mahsi poos konawe msaika
patlach kopa naika tloos feedback!

Klahowya pi mahsi,
Lee