Mike's right: Cree syllabics and "Kamloops Wawa" shorthand

[Dave Robertson]

LhaXayEm!

This gets kind of linguistic.  :-)

Mike's memory was right.  I have found something that looks like evidence of
influence from the Cree syllabaries on the Chinook Jargon shorthand used in
the newspaper "Kamloops Wawa".  Here's how it works:

In the article "Native Writing Systems" by Willard B. Walker in volume 17,
"Languages", of the Smithsonian Handbook of North American Indians (on page
177), there is an illustration of the "CHIPEWYAN SYLLABARIUM".

This was a syllabic writing system (i.e. like Japanese; a way of writing not
with symbols for each *sound* but for each *syllable*) invented by the
Anglican missionary William West Kirkby,

     "who, early in his career, had adapted John Horden's Moose Cree
hymnbook for use by the speakers of Western Swampy Cree at York
Factory, [and] published a Chipewyan 'syllabarium' in 1881...This
orthography was evidently derived in part from the Cree syllabics used
by the Oblates and differed in several respects from the Anglican
syllabics [for Cree]."  (page 176)

So, the influence of the Oblate Catholic missionaries is the first potential
link with the "Kamloops Wawa" writing system, which was evidently invented
by an Oblate a bit later.  Let's read on to see the second link.  Walker
notes,

     "Adapting the Cree-Ojibwa syllabary to Athapaskan languages [for
    example Chipewyan, as well as Slavey and Carrier] is no easy
task...Athapaskan languages...have many more consonants and consonant
clusters than Cree."  (page 177)

One consequence of this different sound-structure in Chipewyan was that Rev.
Kirkby added a series of symbols for "Finals", that is, sounds which can't
be written as syllables--generally because they are lone consonants at the
end of a word.  Now, the Cree-derived syllable symbols each stand for a
combination of CONSONANT + VOWEL, for example /wa/, /we/, /wi/, /wo/; /ba/,
/be/, /bi/, /bo/, and so on.  The problem Kirkby faced was how to write
syllables that end, not in a vowel, but in a consonant (like /wan/, /wed/,
/big/).

The Finals symbols that Kirkby invented to show syllable-final consonants
are what caught my eye.  There appear to be eleven of these, and four of
them (/d/, /l/, /m/, /n/) have shapes that are identical to the
corresponding sounds in "Kamloops Wawa" writing.

A further three (/k/, /g/, /s/) have forms nearly identical to the
corresponding sounds in "Kamloops Wawa's" shorthand.

This looks like much too close a resemblance to be coincidental.

I'm hoping to be able to investigate the earlier Oblate sources mentioned,
for insight into the formation of the shorthand used in writing the Jargon
in "K.W.".

Incidentally, the Chipewyan syllabary has a consonant sound "kl", which I
take to be the voiceless lateral that we also have in Chinook Jargon--and in
the Jargon, it was also often represented in writing as <kl>.

Dave