2 Algonquian languages in shorthand

[David Robertson]

Maika komtaks.  You understand.  (Now beware, because this is a long email
on a topic I'm interested in.)  :-)

Similarly, Le Jeune sometimes included sheet music for hymns in his
publications, and whether the lyrics were in Chinook, a Salish language,
English, Latin, Greek, or French, he wrote 'em in shorthand so his readers
could have an idea how to pronounce them.

I was reminded today that William J. Poser, a really talented linguist,
discusses a similar situation in his paper "Dulkw'ahke: the first Carrier
writing system", available online at

http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~wjposer/cgi-bin/load.cgi?
http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~wjposer/.downloads/dulkwah.pdf.

(Sorry for the weird long URL.)  There he discusses how the Carrier
(Athapaskan, central interior BC) syllabics were used also to write
English and some unknown language that's "not interpretable as Nuxalk
(Bella Coola [Salish])".

To continue a separate thread of our discussion, I note that Poser talks
about the audience that read the Carrier syllabics.  (For example, the
missionary newspaper put out by Father Morice.)  There were Babines to the
north who subscribed, although their language is pretty different from
Carrier.  And there were plenty of Sekanis who read & wrote Carrier in
syllabics--but apparently never wrote their own language in syllabics.

This last group is interesting.  Reminds me of the Native people who
referred to Father Le Jeune's shorthand as "Chinook writing", identifying
it with the language it was mostly used for.  (Le Jeune's own usual term
in Chinook Jargon is "mamuk Chinuk pipa" also.)  To this day, I'm told
that the people in aboriginal communities that know about the shorthand
call it the "Wawa writing" in English.

Along the same lines, I suspect that when people began learning the Roman
alphabet, it was in order to read & write English, the language most
closely associated with that alphabet (in southern interior BC circa
1900).  What we often see is that aboriginal people started looking for
ways to write their Native languages using English letters a couple of
generations after a widespread shift to English for many purposes of daily
life.

Prior to widespread & frequent use of English, use of the shorthand was
very widely accepted in the same communities.  Thousands of indigenous BC
people were using shorthand around 1900 to write Chinook and Salish
languages.  Now, Father Le Jeune tried to teach them some English via
shorthand in various issues of Kamloops Wawa, based on his perception that
ever-more-dominant English* would be more useful to Indians than Chinook
Jargon.  But once the indigenous people actually were using English a lot,
to communicate with outsiders, it must have been clear that only the
English alphabet would help that purpose.  Le Jeune's stated goal(see
articles written in non-shorthand English in various 1893 issues) of using
Chinook & shorthand as a way of helping those Indians who wanted to learn
English saw success, measured in the eventual obsolescence of his
shorthand.  By 1905, Kamloops Wawa was dead.

*Note that Le Jeune made no attempt to teach Indians French, Latin,
Esperanto, or any other outsider language in his publications.  His
purposes seem to have been completely practical.  He did create hundreds
of pages of shorthand materials in Salish languages, which had real use in
the people's lives since they were being preached to in their own
languages.

--Dave R.

On Fri, 9 Jul 2004 21:17:11 -0700, Leanne Riding <riding at TIMETEMPLE.COM>
wrote:

>That's pretty neat,
>so what I'm understanding is that Le Jeune used the KW to share
>information with Salish-and-CJ-speaking peoples, about other native
>people such as the Cree and the Algonquian Montagnais. He therefore
>printed the information in the shorthand script that they could read,
>instead of roman characters or the Cree scripts etc. that were
>unfamiliar, wikna? :)

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