N is for Navajo

[muckefuck]

A stem vocabulary of the Navajo language. Haile, Berard. (St. Michaels, Arizona : The Franciscan Fathers, 1950-1 ; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1975)

I'm hard-pressed to think of any other language that has kicked my ass as thoroughly as Navajo. This should come as no surprise to y'all, given its legendary difficulty, but with time I'd learned how overblown some of these reputations can be. Basque, for instance, has its challenges, but it's nowhere near as impossible as it's made out to be. So when I bought these volumes at a book fair (at Alumni Gymnasium on the Loyola Campus, IIRC), I was not expecting the pasting I got.

Ask me for a simple translation in a foreign language, and I can probably eke one out given some time and good resources. With Navajo, I didn't even know where to start. Every stem in Haile's dictionary comes in several extremely divergent forms whose uses I didn't understand even after reading through the entire attached grammar twice. In my excitement, I'd rashly offered to create some compounds for a game my brother was running, but I soon realised that I was nowhere near to being up to the challenge.

So when I saw Faltz' The Navajo verb in the basement of Powell's during that epic buying binge I told you about last week, I thought I'd found my godsend. I still think that, but it's hard to tell, since every time I read more than five pages of it at a sitting, I need to have a little lie-down, and then I somehow forget to pick the book up for another nine months.

The verbal system really is a marvel of complexity, where ablaut effects and metathesis rub up next to object classifiers and obviative pronominal prefixes. All told, there are ten slots to be filled in the Navajo verb template and the form of almost every element can vary depending on what comes before or after it. You really get the feeling that the mad genius who came up with it was simply having too much fun.

At leasts it's a comfort to know I'll never be bored in my old age.