Mikisiw Hall – a member of Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation who lives in Winnipeg – did something really cool on FaceBook in the Nêhiyawêwin (Cree) Word/Phrase of the Day group: Knowing that colour words can take many forms depending on context, who is speaking, and where, he went through all the resources he could and built an overview of the variety. Then, he not only shared his work, he gave me permission to share it here as well.
I also liked the responses to Mikisiw’s collections offered by my friend Arok Wolvengrey (best known for his itwêwina online dictionary of Plains Cree) whose comments on the shapes of the words, and sometimes their etymology (word roots), added another layer of depth to the collection.
Colours work very differently in Cree than they do in English. For one thing, English is said to have eleven basic colour terms, where Cree has only four: black, white, red and yellow. (English probably has more “basic” colours than any other language; the others are green, blue, brown, orange, pink, purple, and gray.) Another important difference: Cree colour words are verbs (not adjectives), so they need to match the animacy of whatever they’re describing.
And since we were looking across a variety of dialects, I took the opportunity to add corresponding entries (where they exist) from the Old Cree dictionary of Dr Kevin Brousseau. By clicking through to his entries, you can see forms from additional Cree dialects that Brousseau referred to in creating this resource.
I know people are interested in colour terms: our blog post about colours has been viewed over 22,000 times since it was posted in July 2016. And I get really excited when I see language learners – and teachers – working collaboratively this way: thanks both to Mikisiw, and to Arok for setting such a great example, and thanks to Kevin Brousseau for creating such a great etymological resource. And if you scroll down – scroll waaay down – you’ll find an audio file for each set of colour terms from Solomon Ratt.
If your community has different/additional colour terms, I hope you’ll take a minute to add a comment. Let us know your colour term(s) and where they’re from. The variety is fascinating!
One Response
You mispelled grey. 😀