French-Chinook list

[David D. Robertson]

Re Mike's message, two bits:

On Fri, 17 May 2002 11:43:31 -0700, Mike Cleven <ironmtn at BIGFOOT.COM> wrote:

>http://www.legrandordinaire.com/Mediatheque/textes/ecrits/divers/CHINOOK.ht
m
>
>Interesting; contains a few things we haven't seen/sourced before, or in
>variations so far unseen (except maybe in KW transcription): nb ab-ba =>
>"eh bien"; [etc.]

Gibbs (1863) is the earliest source I can think of that gives this &
several of the other surprising etymologies from French.

>My Kamloops Wawa page has been fixed up so that the text is readable
>now; I'd changed the background colour on all my pages without changing
>the purple text on some which made them unreadable, including this one:
>
>http://www.hiyu.net/kamloops.html

I can't view the shorthand glyphs, Mike.  Are they uploaded yet?


>And for the record, the use of the anglicization "kamlups wawa" used by
>another poster is unseemly; LeJeune didn't see fit to transcribe it that
>way and it's also an unnecessary change for the name of one of BC's
>major cities.  Unlesss Spoakann, Iakuma or Syatel makes sense down your
way.

Leaving sarcasm aside, I can see your point, in that a Roman-alphabet
spelling <kamlups> hasn't been used in the historical record.  Yet in my
research, when I transcribe CJ scribbles into Latin letters, I find it
useful to try to render the shorthand letter-for-letter.  Thus, I use <u>
for the big circle with a line cutting into it, in preference over the <oo>
that LeJeune favored for pedagogical reasons (viz., most of his non-Indian
audience being literate in English) because I want to maximally avoid
confusion with a completely different shorthand letter <o> (which is shaped
O).  I reckon "Spoakann, Iakuma or Syatel" are perfectly intelligible in
context, as is <kamlups>.  In this case, the relevant points of the context
are that (A) everyone knows what city we're talking about and (B) this
shorthand is intended to reflect how words are pronounced rather than their
conventional spellings in English, French, or other alphabets.