While we’re all in isolation, we’re going to try to post one video a day from Sol’s existing teaching library, and the teaching libraries of some of his friends. Like Sasquatch himself, Solomon Ratt has experience with self isolation. Who better to help out with online Cree lessons for remote learning?
Today we have a lesson from Dorothy Thunder who gently dips our collective toes into animacy. Linguists refer to this as “grammatical gender.” In the same way that every noun in French is either masculine or feminine, every noun in Cree is either animate or inanimate.
Dorothy begins her lesson with a selection of animate and inanimate nouns. Next, she moves on to their corresponding demonstratives (awa for animate, ôma for inanimate), then goes one step further, moving into the verb forms that must also change their shapes to match their animate or inanimate objects.
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(About Sol’s shirt: https://creeliteracy.org/2020/03/17/awas-go-away-most-dialects/)
