Duployan Letter J N S

It names one sign in Duployan’s combined-consonant set.

J, N and S name its shorthand elements, not three Latin letters to read aloud. The name alone does not give a universal sound: each adaptation maps Duployan signs to the language being written.

Émile Duployé published his Duployan shorthand in 1860 to record French speech quickly. In 1890, Catholic missionary Jean-Marie Le Jeune adapted it for Chinook Jargon, a Pacific Northwest trade language, and local Salishan languages because a syllabary (a system built around whole syllables) was hard to adapt to their many consonants. Le Jeune recounts that people wrote unfamiliar songs down in 1891 to study together. The Kamloops Wawa newspaper used the adaptation from 1891 through 1923. A 1892 report says Secwépemc (called “Shuswap” in the account) learners named the writing “Chinook pepa.”