Duployan

Shorthand is writing with the brief inverted. Every other system here is optimised to be read; a shorthand is optimised to be written, at the speed of speech, by someone who will read it back within the hour. Legibility to strangers is not a requirement, and permanence is not the point.

Émile Duployé, a French priest, published his system in 1860. It is geometric rather than cursive-derived: consonants are straight strokes and arcs at fixed angles, vowels are small circles and hooks, and the whole is joined into a continuous flowing line. Nothing in it is descended from a letterform.

Then it did something no shorthand is supposed to do: people started using it as their ordinary writing.

From the 1890s, missionaries in British Columbia adapted Duployan for Chinuk Wawa — the Chinook Jargon trade language of the Pacific Northwest — and for neighbouring languages including Halkomelem and Okanagan. It was taught, printed in a periodical, and used for letters, prayers and records by communities who took it up as a script rather than as a note-taking aid.

The reason is the one this building keeps finding, most sharply in the Cree syllabics chapter: what spreads is what can be learned quickly without a school. A geometric shorthand has a small inventory of simple strokes and a regular way of joining them, which is very close to the property that made syllabics travel across the subarctic fifty years earlier.

It also had the advantage every borrowed alphabet lacked. Latin orthography fitted Chinuk Wawa badly and arrived bundled with English; Duployan arrived as a neutral technique with no national language attached to it.

What it never acquired was a corpus of any size, and by the mid-twentieth century use had largely lapsed with the decline of Chinuk Wawa itself. The script's condition now follows the language's.