Eye sea Y

You know, one of the challenges for many students, one I noted a while back, is the literacy part.

To learn how to write correctly (one should be somewhat careful in saying that for Cree, as not everyone agrees how best to 'transliterate' Cree sounds into ABCs) is to basically be learning another communication system on top of what you're trying to pick up orally/aurally.

In fact, some of us students note that we're really being asked to, in effect, learn four 'languages' this year:

> Cree, the spoken version

> Cree, the written version I
(Standard Roman Orthography, aka SRO, what you are reading right now)

> Cree, the written version II
(Syllabics writing system, to the left there)

> Cree grammar

All this at the same time. It can be a bit much. I mean, I have been told that at least with French and Spanish there is some degree of overlap or relatedness to help ease the pain, but not Cree.

Anyway, my point in bringing this up is to note again how hard it is to break the association we can have between letters we're used to seeing in English and the way we're now supposed to say them in Cree instead. You get a tad frustrated.

Example: how do you think you'd say, seeing it for the first time, the word acimosis? (It means 'puppy.') With a hard 'c' as in 'a-KEE-mo-sis?' Nope.

It's actually pronounced 'ah-TSI-moe-sis' where the 'ts' in -tsi- is said like the back end of the word 'cats.' See? Easy. Test tomorrow.

Well, after a while you're tempted to start thinking, man, Cree is just not made for an English writing system, so deal, dude. Then, one day, when you're not just automatically taking in all the written English everywhere around you, you notice: "Hey, why do they spell knife with that 'k' in front? Wouldn't that be pronounced 'kuh-NI-fay?' And why is 'I' (as in, 'me myself and...') spelled and said that way, but eye isn't pronounced 'ee-YAY ?'

Aye, boy, why is that? Ay caramba.

And then it dawns on you: you just got used to it, and the less you ask why, the more you'll accept that the reason we don't spell "why" as just 'Y' is because English is weird on paper, and so is Cree, and so is the fact you can read this sentence right here and make seamless, immediate sense of it, but when I type hbspvlfrmdskhazedqhqnj you'll scratch your head in great puzzlement.

ekos'anima (that's it exactly),
Rick