A Pangrammatic Autogram in Plains Cree

Abstract

A pangram is an expression which contains all letters of the alphabet in the expression’s language. An autogram is an expression which describes itself (correctly) by (for example) describing how many copies of each letter appear in the expression. The first pangrammatic autogram found in English was the result of an 18-month long project in the 1980’s resulting is the sentence, “Only the fool would take trouble to verify that his sentence was composed of ten a’s, three b’s, four c’s, four d’s, forty-six e’s, sixteen f’s, four g’s, thirteen h’s, fifteen i’s, two k’s, nine l’s, four m’s, twenty-five n’s, twenty-four o’s, five p’s, sixteen r’s, forty-one s’s, thirty-seven t’s, ten u’s, eight v’s, eight w’s, four x’s, eleven y’s, twenty-seven commas, twenty-three apostrophes, seven hyphens and, last but not least, a single !” In this presentation, Edward Doolittle, Associate Professor of Mathematics at First Nations University of Canada, will describe his effort to “translate” such sentences into the Plains Cree language. Joint work with Arok Wolvengrey, Professor of Linguistics at First Nations University.