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.

Comments

[wwidsith.livejournal.com]

Sounds interesting. I often hear that Finnish is one of the hardest living languages for an English speaker to learn – what d'you know about that one? (without wishing you to double back to F or anything)

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I think it's an unearned reputation that probably stems from the conjunction of a common misconception with a somewhat distorted fact. The misconception is that learning a language consists chiefly of learning its inflections; the corollary is that the more inflections a language has, the harder it much be to learn. Add this to the claim that Finnish has the largest number of cases of any language (15; I think decent arguments can be made for a few more), and it logically follows that Finnish is the hardest language to learn.

In reality, the Finnish cases are breathtaking in their regularity. You don't have to deal with a tonne of declensions, only with predictable variants based on vowel harmony and the occasional irregularity due to consonant gradation. That's because, in most cases, you're dealing with postpositions that only relatively recently got stuck onto the nouns preceding them. Is it really any harder to learn talolta and talossa than "from a house" and "in a house"? I wouldn't say so.

Nah, to get really hard, what you need is a shitpile of mandatory distinctions that simply don't exist in the languages of Europea. Boy does Navajo have that!

[pne.livejournal.com]

I think decent arguments can be made for a few more

That reminds me of a page I read a long time ago where Jukka Korpela talks about Finnish cases.

He mentions several other proposed cases but ends with Please notice that none of the suggested cases in the list above passes the following congruence test: in Finnish, an adjective attribute (almost always) complies in its form with the noun, e.g. isossa talossa, isoilla taloilla etc. That is, the case (and number) is expressed both in a noun and in an attached adjective attribute. And none of the proposed cases can take such an attribute, so they are more adequately regarded as classes of adverbs or as other constructs than cases.

[pne.livejournal.com]

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.

That doesn't bode well for youngster being enthusiastic about picking up the language.

I have this feeling that they'll either say things akin to "I runned" and "he haves" a lot, or they'll say, "You know what? Forget this, I'm speaking English."

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

That's why the key is not letting them know English exists until they've already learned Navajo.