Plains Cree: A Grammatical Study - Computer Science Club

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VOL. 63, PT. 5, 1973] INTRODUCTION In Alberta, speakers of Cree are found as far west as Duffield and as far south as Hobbema and Rocky Mountain House-allowing, of course, for a scattering of Crees even beyond these limits; this is especially true for the foothills region north of the Edmonton- Jasper highway. In the northern part of the province, the Peace River may be considered the western and northern boundary. But even beyond this line, as in the urban centers of the south, Cree is often used as a lingua franca; as Lacombe put it (1847a: p. xi): "On peut dire que le cris est pour le Nord-Ouest ce que le frangais est pour les pays civilisEs." Throughout the Cree-speaking areas of Alberta it is the first, and dominant, language of all those who grow up in the more remote areas. In the immediate vicinity of urban centers, especially Edmonton, many children today learn to speak English first, and some never acquire a working command of Cree; the social pressures in favor of English are, of course, consider- able. In the more remote areas, monolingual speakers are not uncommon among the older generation. In addition to local differences, there is a relatively clear distinction, however slight, in Alberta between a "northern" and a "southern" variant (both y- dialects). The boundary runs somewhere between Edmonton and Lesser Slave Lake; that is, it coincides with the cultural and ecological boundary of plains and woodland. However, there can be no doubt about the full mutual intelligibility of these variants whatever the historical situation may be. We therefore tentatively extend the domain of the linguistic term "Plains Cree" beyond the limits of the cultural unit with which it is primarily associated. The isolated dialect differences which have been observed are noted in the relevant sections of this study (e.g. 5.33); there is also some lexical variation between the northern and southern areas. One observation of a more general range is that the speed of utterance seems to increase considerably as one moves north. 1.3. DATA AND INFORMANTS The present investigation is based primarily on data collected in central Alberta in 1967-1968.13 How- ever, examples from Bloomfield's published texts (1930, 1934) are also used liberally so that the in- terested reader may examine the wider context. Bloomfield's texts were recorded at Sweet Grass Reserve (near Battleford, Saskatchewan) in 1925; the agreement, sometimes down to minute details, between Bloomfield's texts and those recorded in 1967-1968 is indeed remarkable. Two informants provided the bulk of the non- 13 Concordances and indices of Cree texts, an inverse stem lexicon, and a variety of statistical information are among the preliminary results of a computational project which is described in Wolfart and Pardo, 1972. textual data. In addition to some direct elicitation, their help was employed mainly in the extensive grammatical analysis of texts, in paraphrasing, etc. JV who has since died was in his sixties. He was born and raised at Long Lake but later attended a boarding school in the south of the province. His wife is from Saddle Lake and since they lived in relative isolation, some Saddle Lake influence may be expected to show in his speech. JV's unfailing patience and the kindness which both he and his wife extended to me are memorable aspects of my field experience. MC is in her early twenties. She was born and raised on one of the Hobbema reserves; her slow speech proved particularly advantageous during the early stages of field work. A large body of texts was collected in 1967-1968 mainly from the "southern" area. A representative selection (comprising approximately seven hours) of these texts has been deposited in the Library of the American Philosophical Society at Philadelphia. The informants who appear in this selection are briefly introduced below. AM is said to have come from Saskatchewan as a child and ML was born at Riviere qui Barre, north- west of Edmonton; all others were born, and spent most of their lives, in the Hobbema area. AM is over ninety, the patriarch of an important family; his repertoire of texts is known to be extensive. PO who has since died was seventy-eight years old at the time, and was considered to be one of the few "pure-blooded" Cree still alive; the full meaning of this term could not be ascertained. He speaks very slowly and clearly but his repertoire, at least as displayed towards me, seems to be limited. WW appears to be in his eighties, he is rather weak and his enunciation is none too clear; he is apt to get confused in his story-telling. The other informants represented in the selection all appear to be in their sixties. PL's Cree differs from that normally heard at Hobbema by being much faster; his family seems ultimately to go back to Rocky Mountain House where some "Saulteaux" influence is said to exist. CL is his wife, and MY and JY are her brothers, all of them living close to each other. These last four informants are all very traditionally minded people, observing the old ways and openly longing for the day when the White Man will be gone and the world in its proper state again. The Cree themselves classify all texts into two categories, dtayohkewin and dcimowin. The first of these is translated as "sacred story," and while it may contain fairy-tale elements even of European or Oriental origin, and the like it more properly refers to stories about the earlier state of the world and the exploits of the culture hero, wtsahkecdhk. These sacred stories in the narrow sense are highly conven- tionalized, down to the linguistic structure of particu- 11
12 [TRANS. AMER. PHIL. SOC. lar stretches of the story. New stories may be made up on the existing pattern. Several of these sacred stories have been recorded in more than one version. "Wisahkecahk and the Shut-eye dancers," for example, was recorded in at least two versions by Bloomfield (1930: pp. 34-40 and 1934: pp. 282-284); twelve versions, of varying quality and length, were recorded in 1967-1968. The term acimowin is usually translated by informants as 'true story,' which may be taken to imply that texts of the sacred story type are not historical in the usual sense of that term. An dcimowin may concern any everyday event, it may be an anecdote, a funny story, or the like; but there is an important subclass of historical narratives, called kayds-acimowin 'old-time story.' These deal with military exploits of the horse-raiding days, or with other historical topics; they may be personal recollections, or "recollections by proxy," passed on down the generations. That they contain magical experi- ences does not disturb their status as true stories. A final, non-native, subclass has for the moment been labeled "exhortatives"; they usually contrast the golden age of the buffalo economy with today's misery and, especially, alcoholism. 1.4. ABBREVIATIONS AND CONVENTIONS 1.41. Grammatical Information The use of technical abbreviations has been kept to a minimum. The verb classes are occasionally referred to by the following symbols: TA transitive animate TI transitive inanimate AI animate intransitive II inanimate intransitive WOLFART: PLAINS CREE The abbreviations of the person-number-gender-obviation categories (indf, 1, lp, 21, 2, 2p, 3, 3p, 3', 0, Op, 0', O'p) are defined in table 1 of section 2.01; the choice of numbers should be largely selfexplanatory. In discussions of transitive animate (TA) verbs, a combination like 1-3 is to be interpreted as the first person acting on the third; an inverse action, with 3 acting on 1, would be indicated by 3-1. Transitive animate (TA) verb forms which involve third persons exclusively, show only one of the referents morphologically expressed (cJ. sections 5.622 ff.). Textual examples, however, will be more intelligible if the syntactic referents (rather than merely the significative and morphological status of the verb form) are indicated. That referent which is not expressed morphologically, is enclosed in parentheses, e.g. direct: -ew TA 3-(3') -eyiwa TA 3'- (3') inverse: -ik TA (3')-3 -ikoyiwa TA (3')-3' For transitive inanimate (TI) verbs, only the actor is indicated (e.g., TI 2p) since the number and obviation distinctions of the inanimate goal are not morphologically reflected in the verb (cf. 5.13). When cited in isolation, verbs are generally in- flected for a third person actor; nouns and pronouns are given in the proximate singular. In Cree forms, leading or trailing hyphens indicate that a segment is not a free form; when a form is cited in morphophonological representation, leading or trailing hyphens are usually omitted. In phonemic representation, a hyphen within a word marks it as compound (6.5). We use Bloomfield's orthography (cf. appendix A and Bloomfield, 1930: pp. 2-6) except for the purely mechanical substitution of o, e, and c for his u, d, and ts. Phonemic representation is indicated by italics. This mode of representation14 is used throughout, even when strings smaller than words are cited. Morpho- phonological notation, namely strings enclosed in slashes (and the additional characters /e/, /0/, /L/), is used only where it is immediately relevant to the discussion; cf. appendix A. 1.42. Text References Most of the illustrative material is quoted from the texts (see below). Examples which are not specifically identified are taken from my field notes. An identification included in parentheses, e.g. (T55p62), means that the form is not cited verbatim but regularized or in a citation form. Glosses are not necessarily uniform throughout. Although unpublished, the texts collected by myself are identified by a number preceded by T, e.g. T105. Since they are in varying states of editing, reference is sometimes made to paragraphs (by a hyphen) and sometimes to pages (by the letter p). Thus, 105plO refers to page 10 of text 105, and T91-6 refers to paragraph 6 of text 91. Bloomfield's published texts are identified by S for Sacred Stories of the Sweet Grass Cree (1930) and by P for Plains Cree Texts (1934). Citation is by page and line, e.g. S247-34. Passages from the texts are left exactly as originally printed except for obvious misprints and the mechanical replacement of certain symbols; see 1.41 above. Note especially the frequent writing of final h in Bloomfield's texts; cf. appendix A and Bloomfield 1930: pp. 2, 3. 2. GRAMMATICAL CATEGORIES The major grammatical categories of Cree are gender, number, person, and obviation. The cate- 14 Cf. appendix A, footnote 85.
Page 1 and 2: Plains Cree: A Grammatical Study Au
Page 3 and 4: This book has been published with t
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Page 8 and 9: VOL. 63, PT. 5, 1973] INTRODUCTION
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Page 14 and 15: VOL. 63, PT. 5, 1973] gories are pr
Page 16 and 17: VOL. 63, PT. 5, 1973] 2.1. PERSON D
Page 18 and 19: VOL. 63, PT. 5, 1973] . ., soon he
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VOL. 63, PT. 5, 1973] WORD FORMATIO
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WORD FORMATION VOL. 63, PT. 5, 1973
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A: MORPHOPHONOLOGY 0.1. Transcripti
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VOL. 63, PT. 5, 1973] APPENDIX: MOR
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VOL. 63, PT. 5, 1973] 'he walks alo
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VOL. 63, PT. 5, 1973] kd-itwe = t P
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REFERENCES CITED BLOOMFIELD, LEONAR
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