It’s an honour to announce yet another significant contribution to Cree language reclamation prepared by Dr Kevin Brousseau, this one reflecting 20 years’ research.
Those “lexical roots” referred to in the title are the smallest meaningful units of words (though in many cases, they reflect the entire word). In fact, without a proper reconstruction of these lexical roots, the reconstruction of complete words would be impossible. They are central to Cree’s polysynthetic structure, where a single word can function as a whole sentence.
They are also the subject of fascination among speakers recovering their language. By scrupulously tracing these roots in Cree dialects from across the entire language continuum, and making meticulous comparisons, this dictionary documents genuine ancestral word forms, relying on historical records and on interviews with contemporary Cree speakers. The picture that results is a fact-based recreation of elements of contemporary word forms that continue to evolve in modern dialects. Sometimes they even contradict popular, but misguided “folk etymologies”.
Lexical Roots of Old Cree: An Etymological Dictionary is part of Canada’s notable “Mercury Series” co-published by the Les Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa / University of Ottawa Press (PUO/UOP) and the Canadian Museum of History. The Mercury Series, established in 1972, consists exclusively of peer-reviewed academic research, and includes significant publications on Algonquian culture and linguistics, including Preston’s 1975 Cree Narrative, Piggot’s 1983 Ojibwa Lexicon and Hewson’s 1993 A computer-generated dictionary of proto-Algonquian. The series effectively took over the function of the Bulletins of the National Museum of Canada published under the banner of the Geological Survey of Canada from 1913 to 1970.
A significant online sampling of the dictionary can be viewed at https://oldcree.com/. Among the dialects it represents are:
- Plains Cree
- Woods Cree
- Western Swampy Cree
- Eastern Swampy Cree
- Moose Cree
- Atikamekw
- Southern East Cree
- Northern East Cree
- Western Innu
- Eastern Innu
- Naskapi
Ordering instructions:
- The book can be ordered directly from PUO/UOP,
- Through the National Museum of History Boutique in Gatineau
- And is already available on, and shipping from Amazon.ca.
