Talk:Navajo language

noun class for "long, stiff object" is a joke?

That noun class for "long, stiff object" is a joke, isn't it?

While I understand how you might think that, this is no joke. As I understand it, this noun class refers to things like sticks, rifles and planks, whereas long and non-stiff (i.e. flexible) things, like ropes, fall under a different noun class. Navajo has a large number of noun classes, and these correspond to physically observable characteristics of the noun in question. The assignment into noun class is not so arbitrary as in Latin or Greek. Here are some examples of a verb which varies according to noun class:

ch'í-n-lhtí~ carry an animate entity out horizontally
ch'í-n-lá carry a slender flexible object out horizontally
ch'í-n-tá~ carry a slender stiff object out horizontally
ch'í-n-jaa' carry many objects out horizontally
ch'í-ni-'á~ carry a solid compact entity out horizontally
ch'í-n-lhjool carry non-compact matter out horizontally
ch'í-n-yí carry a burden or pack out horizontally
ch'í-n-lhtsooz carry a flat flexible object out horizontally
ch'í-n-ka~ carry something in a container out horizontally

thefamouseccles 10:08, 6 Sep 2004 (UTC)

That's right, this is no joke. Welcome to linguistics! I added a section about this. Check it out. - Ish ishwar 11:14, 2005 Jan 10 (UTC)

Polysynthetic??

For this reason, some call it a polysynthetic language.

I thought polysynthesis was the extreme use of affixes, not the contraction of affixes into one another: that's inflection.

Navajo uses up to 7 prefixes on its verb. I don't know what your definition of extreme is, but to me that's a lot. Also, the affixes don't just contract, sometimes their form changes depending on the segments around it (e.g. d-effect).

Of course this is all very subjective. I'll try to do some research into this and pull out some references from published papers, when I get some time. Until then I'll leave it out. - wulong 08:14, 8 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Some more thoughts.

1) Inflection is not contraction of affixes, but something quite different. I have put forth some effect to correct the inflection entry, but it still needs work. Check out the explanation there (or better yet consult an introductory linguistic textbook!). But at any rate, Navajo has quite a bit of inflectional processes going on.

2) Most Athabaskanists (i.e. linguists who work on Athabaskan languages like Navajo & Tlingit, etc.) consider Athabaskan languages to be polysynthetic.

But, if you check out what polysynthesis means you will see that what is being talked about here is the degree of synthesis or the word-to-morpheme ratio (i.e. how many morphemes are present in each word on average). So if we look at a bunch of langs we see that there is a continuum from langs that words with only 1 morphemes to ones that have 2-4 morphemes per word to langs that have quite a high number of morphemes per word.

Another thing to think about is "Do different word classes have different degrees of synthesis?". The answer is "yes". Take Japanese: the verbs generally have a greater degree of synthesis than nouns. Things are getting more & more complicated...

So where is Navajo? Well, it definitely has more morphemes in verbs than in nouns (the non-deverbal nouns) or other word classes. So maybe the verbs are polysynthetic but the nouns are just synthetic. But if we compare Navajo to some really polysynthetic languages like Chukchi or Central Siberian Yupik (a.k.a. Eskimo), we see that Navajo is not as extreme. So it depends on your definition of polysynthesis which is what Wulong stated above.

The other thing to mention is that these categories of isolating, synthetic, and polysynthetic are simplified notions of ideal languages. They are commonly used in introductory linguistic textbooks and the like. But, they do not necessarily accurately describe the situation. To be more rigorous about this you could establish a numerical value of the word-to-morpheme ratio and then make your comparisons.

3) What you are alluding to above when you say "contraction of affixes" is the degree of segmentability. Easily segmentable languages are called agglutinating, not so easily segmentable are called fusional. Young & Morgan (1987) say of Navajo verb: [it] "consists of a stem preceded by two or more prefixes, ... agglutinated together in a fixed relative sequential order...". It is easy to take issue with this. Some affixes (esp. suffixes & enclitics) are agglutinatively combined to other morphemes, but a lot of prefixes are rather fused together. It is quite complicated. Most of early Navajo linguistics was trying to figure all these "contractions" and permutations and other weird things (like changing tones).

Anyway, it's a interesting language. Maybe when Wulong has time s/he will give us some more things. Cheers! - Ish ishwar 20:50, 2005 Jan 5 (UTC)