The Student's Dictionary of Literary Plains Cree

Ronald Henry is director of the School of Translators and Interpreters
at Laurentian University.

Although H.C. Wolfart states in his introduction that this book is a
Cree dictionary accompanied by an English index, it is actually a
two-part bilingual dictionary: one Cree to English, and the other
English to Cree. The language inventoried here is circumscribed by the
limited corpus of transcribed oral discourse, as well as by the topics
of the speeches by the elders that have been recorded. That said, the
book does convey the traditional culture of Plains Crees as expressed in
their own words.

The Cree entries are based on word stems with nouns and verbs ending in
long hyphens. This is a linguistically sound procedure, but beginners
with no prior knowledge of Cree verbs, grammar, and word formation will
find it challenging. Nevertheless, the book serves students of the
literature well by providing consistent spelling, indicating parts of
speech, and supplying summary annotations as well as equivalent English
words. It also gives the etymology for some place names, but provides no
information on loan words.

The English index deals with meaning, an important object of
lexicography. The headwords may be ambiguous by themselves, since it is
in the nature of words to carry different meanings. That is why several
English words may refer to a single Cree stem, and vice versa: doctor,
for example, leads to no fewer than seven Cree entries. The strength of
this book lies in the understanding and use of that knowledge.