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Western Cree syllabics are a variant of Canadian Aboriginal syllabics used to write Plains Cree, Woods Cree and the western dialects of Swampy Cree. It is used for all Cree dialects west of approximately the Manitoba–Ontario border in Canada, as opposed to Eastern Cree syllabics. It is also occasionally used by a few Cree speakers in the ...
Sam wâpam- ew see- 3SG Susan- a Susan- 3OBV Sam wâpam- ew Susan- a Sam see-3SG Susan-3OBV "Sam sees Susan." The suffix -a marks Susan as the obviative, or 'fourth' person, the person furthest away from the discourse. The Cree language has grammatical gender in a system that classifies nouns as animate or inanimate. The distribution of nouns between animate or inanimate is not phonologically ...
Cree syllabics were developed for Ojibwe by James Evans, a missionary in what is now Manitoba in the 1830s. Evans had originally adapted the Latin script to Ojibwe (see Evans system), but after learning of the success of the Cherokee syllabary, [additional citation(s) needed] he experimented with invented scripts based on his familiarity with shorthand and Devanagari.
In more western dialects, the distinction between /s/ and /ʃ/ (š) has been lost, both merging to the former. "Cree is a not a typologically harmonic language. Cree has both prefixes and suffixes, both prepositions and postpositions, and both prenominal and postnominal modifiers (e.g. demonstratives can appear in both positions)." [22]
Today, together with the "n-Cree" dialect-speaking Woodland Cree, those who live in the Lowlands and Uplands who speak the "n-Cree" dialect are called "Swampy Cree", [6] but culturally Moose Cree (the Cree speaking the "l-dialect") [7] and other peoples of the Upland including the Oji-Cree occasionally self-identify as being "Swampy Cree". [8]
Plains Cree has some regular sound correspondences with other Cree-Montagnais dialects, and in some cases the differences between Plains Cree and other dialects exemplify these regular correspondences. Note that in terms of linguistic classification, the East Cree dialect which appears in these tables is a dialect of Montagnais.
The Woods Cree language belongs to the Algic family, within the Algonquian subfamily, and the central Cree–Montagnais–Naskapi language group. [6] [7] [8]Western Cree is a term used to refer to the non-palatized Cree dialects, consisting of Northern Plains Cree, Southern Plains Cree, Woods Cree, Rock Cree, Western Swampy Cree, Eastern Swampy Cree, Moose Cree, and Atikamekw.
When syllabics spread to Ojibwe and to those Cree dialects east of the Manitoba–Ontario border, a few changes occurred. For one, the diacritic used to mark non-final w moved from its position after the syllable to before it; thus western Cree ᒷ is equivalent to the eastern Cree ᒶ – both are pronounced mwa.