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102-569: Begay is a surname, derived from the Navajo word biyeʼ [pìjèʔ] meaning "his/her son". Begay may also refer to: Navajo language The language has struggled to keep a healthy speaker base, although this problem has been alleviated to some extent by extensive education programs in the Navajo Nation. In World War II, speakers of the Navajo language joined the military and developed

204-449: A Super Bowl had been carried in a Native American language. In 2013, the 1977 film Star Wars was translated into Navajo. It was the first major motion picture translated into any Native American language. On October 5, 2018, an early beta of a Navajo course was released on Duolingo , a popular language learning app. After many Navajo schools were closed during World War II, a program aiming to provide education to Navajo children

306-503: A glottalic initiation . Navajo also has a simple glottal stop used after vowels, and every word that would otherwise begin with a vowel is pronounced with an initial glottal stop. Consonant clusters are uncommon, aside from frequent placing /d/ or /t/ before fricatives . The language has four vowel qualities: /a/ , /e/ , /i/ , and /o/ . Each exists in both oral and nasalized forms, and can be either short or long. Navajo also distinguishes for tone between high and low, with

408-541: A root to identify the action and the semblance of a suffix to convey mode and aspect ; however, this suffix is fused beyond separability. The stem is given somewhat more transparent prefixes to indicate, in this order, the following information: postpositional object, postposition, adverb-state, iterativity , number , direct object , deictic information, another adverb-state, mode and aspect, subject, classifier (see later on), mirativity and two-tier evidentiality . Some of these prefixes may be null; for example, there

510-449: A subject–object–verb language. However, some speakers order the subject and object based on "noun ranking". In this system, nouns are ranked in three categories—humans, animals, and inanimate objects—and within these categories, nouns are ranked by strength, size, and intelligence. Whichever of the subject and object has a higher rank comes first. As a result, the agent of an action may be syntactically ambiguous. The highest rank position

612-491: A "j" despite his personal objections. The Navajo refer to themselves as the Diné ('People'), with their language known as Diné bizaad ('People's language') or Naabeehó bizaad . Navajo is an Athabaskan language ; Navajo and Apache languages make up the southernmost branch of the family. Most of the other Athabaskan languages are located in Alaska, northwestern Canada, and along

714-892: A "very extended study of all the various existing stocks of languages, in order to determine the most fundamental properties of language" – almost a program statement for the modern study of linguistic typology , and a very Boasian approach. In 1906 he finished his coursework, having focused the last year on courses in anthropology and taking seminars such as Primitive Culture with Farrand, Ethnology with Boas, Archaeology and courses in Chinese language and culture with Berthold Laufer . He also maintained his Indo-European studies with courses in Celtic , Old Saxon, Swedish, and Sanskrit. Having finished his coursework, Sapir moved on to his doctoral fieldwork, spending several years in short-term appointments while working on his dissertation. Sapir's first fieldwork

816-475: A 1933 article which would become influential in the characterization of the phoneme . Although noted for his work on American linguistics, Sapir wrote prolifically in linguistics in general. His book Language provides everything from a grammar-typological classification of languages (with examples ranging from Chinese to Nootka) to speculation on the phenomenon of language drift , and the arbitrariness of associations between language, race, and culture. Sapir

918-491: A code based on Navajo. The language was considered ideal because of its grammar, which differs strongly from that of German and Japanese , and because no published Navajo dictionaries existed at the time. By the 1960s, Indigenous languages of the United States had been declining in use for some time. Native American language use began to decline more quickly in this decade as paved roads were built and English-language radio

1020-665: A code for sending secret messages. These code talkers ' messages are widely credited with saving many lives and winning some of the most decisive battles in the war. Navajo has a fairly large phonemic inventory, including several consonants that are not found in English. Its four basic vowel qualities are distinguished for nasality , length , and tone . Navajo has both agglutinative and fusional elements: it uses affixes to modify verbs, and nouns are typically created from multiple morphemes, but in both cases these morphemes are fused irregularly and beyond easy recognition. Basic word order

1122-484: A fairly high percentage overall but less than among other Americans speaking a different Native American language (85.4 percent). Navajo was the only Native American language afforded its own category in the survey; domestic Navajo speakers represented 46.4 percent of all domestic Native language speakers (only 195,407 Americans have a different home Native language). As of July 2014, Ethnologue classes Navajo as "6b" (In Trouble), signifying that few, but some, parents teach

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1224-499: A female professional academic. Though they were very close friends for a while, it was ultimately the differences in worldview and personality that led their friendship to fray. Before departing Canada, Sapir had a short affair with Margaret Mead , Benedict's protégé at Columbia. But Sapir's conservative ideas about marriage and the woman's role were anathema to Mead, as they had been to Benedict, and as Mead left to do field work in Samoa ,

1326-534: A formal student of Sapir. (For a time he dated Sapir's daughter.) In 1936 Sapir clashed with the Institute for Human Relations over the research proposal by anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker , who proposed a study of the black community of Indianola, Mississippi. Sapir argued that her research should be funded instead of the more sociological work of John Dollard . Sapir eventually lost the discussion and Powdermaker had to leave Yale. During his tenure at Yale, Sapir

1428-544: A leave from Yale, during which Benjamin Lee Whorf taught his courses and G. P. Murdock advised some of his students. After Sapir's death in 1939, G. P. Murdock became the chair of the anthropology department. Murdock, who despised the Boasian paradigm of cultural anthropology, dismantled most of Sapir's efforts to integrate anthropology, psychology, and linguistics. Sapir's anthropological thought has been described as isolated within

1530-403: A major language dictionary published that same year, and continued to work on studying and documenting the language in major works for the next few decades. Today an AM radio station, KTNN , broadcasts in Navajo and English, with programming including music and NFL games; AM station KNDN broadcasts only in Navajo. When Super Bowl XXX was broadcast in Navajo in 1996, it was the first time

1632-521: A military word, code talkers used descriptive words. For example, the Navajo did not have a word for submarine , so they translated it as iron fish . These Navajo code talkers are widely recognized for their contributions to WWII. Major Howard Connor, 5th Marine Division Signal Officer stated, "Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima." Navajo lands were initially colonized by

1734-511: A nationality. Edward Sapir's first language was Yiddish , and later English. In 1888, when he was four years old, the family moved to Liverpool, England, and in 1890 to the United States, to Richmond , Virginia . Here Edward Sapir lost his younger brother Max to typhoid fever . His father had difficulty keeping a job in a synagogue and finally settled in New York on the Lower East Side , where

1836-684: A number of Southern Paiute songs that Tillohash knew. This fruitful collaboration laid the ground work for the classical description of the Southern Paiute language published in 1930, and enabled Sapir to produce conclusive evidence linking the Shoshonean languages to the Nahuan languages – establishing the Uto-Aztecan language family . Sapir's description of Southern Paiute is known by linguistics as "a model of analytical excellence". At Pennsylvania, Sapir

1938-521: A stable appointment for his student, and by his recommendation Sapir ended up being hired by the Canadian Geological Survey, who wanted him to lead the institutionalization of anthropology in Canada. Sapir, who by then had given up the hope of working at one of the few American research universities, accepted the appointment and moved to Ottawa. In the years 1910–25 Sapir established and directed

2040-413: A trait of fusional languages. In general, Navajo verbs contain more morphemes than nouns do (on average, 11 for verbs compared to 4–5 for nouns), but noun morphology is less transparent. Depending on the source, Navajo is either classified as a fusional agglutinative or even polysynthetic language, as it shows mechanisms from all three. In terms of basic word order , Navajo has been classified as

2142-553: Is subject–object–verb , though it is highly flexible to pragmatic factors. Verbs are conjugated for aspect and mood , and given affixes for the person and number of both subjects and objects , as well as a host of other variables. The language's orthography , which was developed in the late 1930s, is based on the Latin script . Most Navajo vocabulary is Athabaskan in origin, as the language has been conservative with loanwords due to its highly complex noun morphology. The word Navajo

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2244-402: Is a close relation between Sapir's literary interests and his anthropological thought. His literary theory saw individual aesthetic sensibilities and creativity to interact with learned cultural traditions to produce unique and new poetic forms, echoing the way that he also saw individuals and cultural patterns to dialectically influence each other. Sapir's special focus among American languages

2346-470: Is an exonym : it comes from the Tewa word Navahu , which combines the roots nava ('field') and hu ('valley') to mean 'large field'. It was borrowed into Spanish to refer to an area of present-day northwestern New Mexico , and later into English for the Navajo tribe and their language. The alternative spelling Navaho is considered antiquated; even the anthropologist Berard Haile spelled it with

2448-413: Is by far the most time-consuming and nerve-racking that I have ever undertaken. Ishi's imperturbable good humor alone made the work possible, though it also at times added to my exasperation". The First World War took its toll on the Canadian Geological Survey, cutting funding for anthropology and making the academic climate less agreeable. Sapir continued work on Athabascan, working with two speakers of

2550-406: Is held by humans and lightning. Other linguists such as Eloise Jelinek consider Navajo to be a discourse configurational language , in which word order is not fixed by syntactic rules, but determined by pragmatic factors in the communicative context. In Navajo, verbs are the main elements of their sentences, imparting a large amount of information. The verb is based on a stem , which is made of

2652-481: Is important for the ways in which culture and society develop. Among his major contributions to linguistics is his classification of Indigenous languages of the Americas , upon which he elaborated for most of his professional life. He played an important role in developing the modern concept of the phoneme , greatly advancing the understanding of phonology . Before Sapir it was generally considered impossible to apply

2754-412: Is mandatory: Béégashii cow sitį́. 3 . SUBJ -lie( 1 ). PERF Béégashii sitį́. cow 3.SUBJ-lie( 1 ).PERF 'The (one) cow lies.' Béégashii cow shitéézh. 3 . SUBJ -lie( 2 ). PERF Edward Sapir Edward Sapir ( / s ə ˈ p ɪər / ; January 26, 1884 – February 4, 1939) was an American anthropologist - linguist , who is widely considered to be one of

2856-529: Is most closely related to Western Apache , with which it shares a similar tonal scheme and more than 92 percent of its vocabulary, and to Chiricahua-Mescalero Apache . It is estimated that the Apachean linguistic groups separated and became established as distinct societies, of which the Navajo were one, somewhere between 1300 and 1525. Navajo is generally considered mutually intelligible with all other Apachean languages. The Apachean languages, of which Navajo

2958-520: Is one, are thought to have arrived in the American Southwest from the north by 1500, probably passing through Alberta and Wyoming. Archaeological finds considered to be proto-Navajo have been located in the far northern New Mexico around the La Plata, Animas and Pine rivers, dating to around 1500. In 1936, linguist Edward Sapir showed how the arrival of the Navajo people in the new arid climate among

3060-405: Is only a plural marker ( da/daa ) and no readily identifiable marker for the other grammatical numbers. Navajo does not distinguish strict tense per se; instead, an action's position in time is conveyed through mode, aspect, but also via time adverbials or context. Each verb has an inherent aspect and can be conjugated in up to seven modes. For any verb, the usitative and iterative modes share

3162-548: Is the marker of the Continuative aspect (to play about). Navajo distinguishes between the first, second, third, and fourth persons in the singular, dual, and plural numbers. The fourth person is similar to the third person, but is generally used for indefinite, theoretical actors rather than defined ones. Despite the potential for extreme verb complexity, only the mode/aspect, subject, classifier, and stem are absolutely necessary. Furthermore, Navajo negates clauses by surrounding

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3264-401: Is usually encoded directly in the verb through the use of various prefixes or aspects, though this is by no means mandatory. In the following example, the verb on the right is used with the plural prefix da- and switches to the distributive aspect. Some verbal roots encode number in their lexical definition (see classificatory verbs above). When available, the use of the correct verbal root

3366-519: The Chicago School of Sociology , and his friendship with psychologist Harry Stack Sullivan . From 1931 until his death in 1939, Sapir taught at Yale University , where he became the head of the Department of Anthropology. He was invited to Yale to found an interdisciplinary program combining anthropology, linguistics and psychology, aimed at studying "the impact of culture on personality". While Sapir

3468-529: The Nootka language. Apart from Sapir the division had two other staff members, Marius Barbeau and Harlan I. Smith. Sapir insisted that the discipline of linguistics was of integral importance for ethnographic description, arguing that just as nobody would dream of discussing the history of the Catholic Church without knowing Latin or study German folksongs without knowing German, so it made little sense to approach

3570-549: The Southern Paiute language ; he decided to work with Tony Tillohash , who proved to be the perfect informant. Tillohash's strong intuition about the sound patterns of his language led Sapir to propose that the phoneme is not just an abstraction existing at the structural level of language, but in fact has psychological reality for speakers. Tillohash became a good friend of Sapir, and visited him at his home in New York and Philadelphia. Sapir worked with his father to transcribe

3672-642: The Spanish in the early seventeenth century, shortly after this area was annexed as part of the Spanish viceroyalty of New Spain . When the United States annexed these territories in 1848 following the Mexican–American War , the English-speaking settlers allowed Navajo children to attend their schools. In some cases, the United States established separate schools for Navajo and other Native American children. In

3774-557: The phoneme . In 1907–1908 Sapir was offered a position at the University of California at Berkeley , where Boas' first student Alfred Kroeber was the head of a project under the California state survey to document the Indigenous languages of California. Kroeber suggested that Sapir study the nearly extinct Yana language , and Sapir set to work. Sapir worked first with Betty Brown, one of

3876-530: The Aboriginal American Culture (1916), in which he laid out an approach to using historical linguistics to study the prehistory of Native American cultures. Particularly important for establishing him in the field was his seminal book Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech (1921), which was a layman's introduction to the discipline of linguistics as Sapir envisioned it. He also participated in

3978-524: The Alaskan languages Kutchin and Ingalik . Sapir was now more preoccupied with testing hypotheses about historical relationships between the Na-Dene languages than with documenting endangered languages, in effect becoming a theoretician. He was also growing to feel isolated from his American colleagues. From 1912 Florence's health deteriorated due to a lung abscess , and a resulting depression. The Sapir household

4080-675: The Anthropological Division in the Geological Survey of Canada in Ottawa. When he was hired, he was one of the first full-time anthropologists in Canada. He brought his parents with him to Ottawa, and also quickly established his own family, marrying Florence Delson, who also had Lithuanian Jewish roots. Neither the Sapirs nor the Delsons were in favor of the match. The Delsons, who hailed from

4182-514: The Chinook sound system than Boas. In the summer of 1906 he worked on Takelma and Chasta Costa . Sapir's work on Takelma became his doctoral dissertation, which he defended in 1908. The dissertation foreshadowed several important trends in Sapir's work, particularly the careful attention to the intuition of native speakers regarding sound patterns that later would become the basis for Sapir's formulation of

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4284-725: The Iroquois in 1988.) He also argued for the reversal of a Canadian law prohibiting the Potlatch ceremony of the West Coast tribes. In 1915 Sapir returned to California, where his expertise on the Yana language made him urgently needed. Kroeber had come into contact with Ishi , the last native speaker of the Yahi language , closely related to Yana, and needed someone to document the language urgently. Ishi , who had grown up without contact with European-Americans,

4386-530: The Navajo Agency of the Bureau of Indian Affairs , developed and published a practical orthography in 1937. It helped spread education among Navajo speakers. In 1943 the men collaborated on The Navajo Language , a dictionary organized by the roots of the language. In World War II , the United States military used speakers of Navajo as code talkers —to transmit top-secret military messages over telephone and radio in

4488-409: The Navajo language to relay secret messages. At the end of the war the code remained unbroken. The code used Navajo words for each letter of the English alphabet. Messages could be encoded and decoded by using a simple substitution cipher where the ciphertext was the Navajo word. Type two code was informal and directly translated from English into Navajo. If there was no word in Navajo to describe

4590-574: The Navajo language, and no English, while five English language teachers instruct in the English language. Kindergarten and first grade are taught completely in the Navajo language, while English is incorporated into the program during third grade, when it is used for about 10% of instruction. According to the Navajo Nation Education Policies, the Navajo Tribal Council requests that schools teach both English and Navajo so that

4692-463: The Navajo word for "corn" is naadą́ą́ʼ , derived from two Proto-Athabaskan roots meaning "enemy" and "food", suggesting that the Navajo originally considered corn to be "food of the enemy" when they first arrived among the Pueblo people. During World Wars I and II, the U.S. government employed speakers of the Navajo language as Navajo code talkers . These Navajo soldiers and sailors used a code based on

4794-951: The North American Pacific coast. Most languages in the Athabaskan family have tones . However, this feature evolved independently in all subgroups; Proto-Athabaskan had no tones. In each case, tone evolved from glottalic consonants at the ends of morphemes; however, the progression of these consonants into tones has not been consistent, with some related morphemes being pronounced with high tones in some Athabaskan languages and low tones in others. It has been posited that Navajo and Chipewyan , which have no common ancestor more recent than Proto-Athabaskan and possess many pairs of corresponding but opposite tones, evolved from different dialects of Proto-Athabaskan that pronounced these glottalic consonants differently. Proto-Athabaskan diverged fully into separate languages c.  500 BC . Navajo

4896-470: The Origin of Language , and included examples from Inuit and Native American languages, not at all familiar to a Germanicist. The thesis criticized Herder for retaining a Biblical chronology, too shallow to allow for the observable diversification of languages, but he also argued with Herder that all of the world's languages have equal aesthetic potentials and grammatical complexity. He ended the paper by calling for

4998-510: The Yana material for publication until 1910, to Kroeber's deep disappointment. Sapir ended up leaving California early to take up a fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania , where he taught Ethnology and American Linguistics. At Pennsylvania he worked closely with another student of Boas, Frank Speck , and the two undertook work on Catawba in the summer of 1909. Also in the summer of 1909, Sapir went to Utah with his student J. Alden Mason . Intending originally to work on Hopi, he studied

5100-419: The administrative pressures to which Kroeber was subject, among them the need for a speedy completion and a focus on the broader classification issues. In the end Sapir didn't finish the work during the allotted year, and Kroeber was unable to offer him a longer appointment. Disappointed at not being able to stay at Berkeley, Sapir devoted his best efforts to other work, and did not get around to preparing any of

5202-498: The assistance of Sally Midgette (Navajo). This work is organized by root , the basis of Athabaskan languages. A 1991 survey of 682 preschoolers on the Navajo Reservation Head Start program found that 54 percent were monolingual English speakers, 28 percent were bilingual in English and Navajo, and 18 percent spoke only Navajo. This study noted that while the preschool staff knew both languages, they spoke English to

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5304-492: The chance to establish their own bilingual education programs. However, qualified teachers who were fluent in Native languages were scarce, and these programs were largely unsuccessful. However, data collected in 1980 showed that 85 percent of Navajo first-graders were bilingual, compared to 62 percent of Navajo of all ages—early evidence of a resurgence of use of their traditional language among younger people. In 1984, to counteract

5406-469: The children most of the time. In addition, most of the children's parents spoke to the children in English more often than in Navajo. The study concluded that the preschoolers were in "almost total immersion in English". An American Community Survey taken in 2011 found that 169,369 Americans spoke Navajo at home—0.3 percent of Americans whose primary home language was not English. Of primary Navajo speakers, 78.8 percent reported they spoke English "very well",

5508-558: The children would remain bilingual, though their influence over the school systems was very low. A small number of preschool programs provided the Navajo immersion curriculum, which taught children basic Navajo vocabulary and grammar under the assumption that they have no prior knowledge in the Navajo language. Navajo has a fairly large consonant inventory. Its stop consonants exist in three laryngeal forms: aspirated , unaspirated, and ejective —for example, /tʃʰ/ , /tʃ/ , and /tʃʼ/ . Ejective consonants are those that are pronounced with

5610-504: The corn agriculturalists of the Pueblo area was reflected in their language by tracing the changing meanings of words from Proto-Athabaskan to Navajo. For example, the word * dè: , which in Proto-Athabaskan meant "horn" and "dipper made from animal horn", in Navajo became a-deeʼ, which meant "gourd" or "dipper made from gourd". Likewise, the Proto-Athabaskan word * ł-yəx̣s "snow lies on the ground" in Navajo became yas "snow". Similarly,

5712-544: The course "Introduction to Anthropology", with Professor Livingston Farrand , who taught the Boas "four field" approach to anthropology. He also enrolled in an advanced anthropology seminar taught by Franz Boas , a course that would completely change the direction of his career. Although still in college, Sapir was allowed to participate in the Boas graduate seminar on American Languages, which included translations of Native American and Inuit myths collected by Boas. In this way Sapir

5814-444: The end of his life he was professor of anthropology at Yale . Among his many students were the linguists Mary Haas and Morris Swadesh , and anthropologists such as Fred Eggan and Hortense Powdermaker . With his linguistic background, Sapir became the one student of Boas to develop most completely the relationship between linguistics and anthropology. Sapir studied the ways in which language and culture influence each other, and he

5916-409: The family lived in poverty. As Jacob Sapir could not provide for his family, Sapir's mother, Eva Seagal Sapir, opened a shop to supply the basic necessities. They formally divorced in 1910. After settling in New York, Edward Sapir was raised mostly by his mother, who stressed the importance of education for upward social mobility, and turned the family increasingly away from Judaism. Even though Eva Sapir

6018-452: The field of anthropology in his own days. Instead of searching for the ways in which culture influences human behavior, Sapir was interested in understanding how cultural patterns themselves were shaped by the composition of individual personalities that make up a society. This made Sapir cultivate an interest in individual psychology and his view of culture was more psychological than many of his contemporaries. It has been suggested that there

6120-720: The first based on evidence from modern comparative linguistics. He was the first to produce evidence for the classification of the Algic , Uto-Aztecan , and Na-Dene languages . He proposed some language families that are not considered to have been adequately demonstrated, but which continue to generate investigation such as Hokan and Penutian . He specialized in the study of Athabascan languages , Chinookan languages , and Uto-Aztecan languages, producing important grammatical descriptions of Takelma , Wishram , Southern Paiute . Later in his career he also worked with Yiddish , Hebrew , and Chinese , as well as Germanic languages , and he also

6222-670: The formulation of a report to the American Anthropological Association regarding the standardization of orthographic principles for writing Indigenous languages. While in Ottawa, he also collected and published French Canadian Folk Songs, and wrote a volume of his own poetry. His interest in poetry led him to form a close friendship with another Boasian anthropologist and poet, Ruth Benedict . Sapir initially wrote to Benedict to commend her for her dissertation on "The Guardian Spirit", but soon realized that Benedict had published poetry pseudonymously. In their correspondence

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6324-459: The indigenous languages there. He was employed by the Geological Survey of Canada for fifteen years, where he came into his own as one of the most significant linguists in North America, the other being Leonard Bloomfield . He was offered a professorship at the University of Chicago , and stayed for several years continuing to work for the professionalization of the discipline of linguistics. By

6426-416: The language to their offspring and that concerted efforts at revitalization could easily protect the language. Navajo had a high population for a language in this category. About half of all Navajo people live on Navajo Nation land, an area spanning parts of Arizona , New Mexico , and Utah ; others are dispersed throughout the United States. Under tribal law, fluency in Navajo is mandatory for candidates to

6528-482: The language's few remaining speakers. Later he began work with Sam Batwi, who spoke another dialect of Yana, but whose knowledge of Yana mythology was an important fount of knowledge. Sapir described the way in which the Yana language distinguishes grammatically and lexically between the speech of men and women. The collaboration between Kroeber and Sapir was made difficult by the fact that Sapir largely followed his own interest in detailed linguistic description, ignoring

6630-531: The language's historical decline, the Navajo Nation Council decreed that the Navajo language would be available and comprehensive for students of all grade levels in schools of the Navajo Nation . This effort was aided by the fact that, largely due to the work of Young and Morgan, Navajo is one of the best-documented Native American languages. In 1980 they published a monumental expansion of their work on

6732-657: The language, organized by word (first initial of vowel or consonant) in the pattern of English dictionaries, as requested by Navajo students. The Navajo Language: A Grammar and Colloquial Dictionary also included a 400-page grammar, making it invaluable for both native speakers and students of the language. Particularly in its organization of verbs, it was oriented to Navajo speakers. They expanded this work again in 1987, with several significant additions, and this edition continues to be used as an important text. The Native American language education movement has been met with adversity, such as by English-only campaigns in some areas in

6834-632: The languages of the North West Coast. During his time in Canada, together with Speck, Sapir also acted as an advocate for Indigenous rights, arguing publicly for introduction of better medical care for Indigenous communities, and assisting the Six Nation Iroquois in trying to recover eleven wampum belts that had been stolen from the reservation and were on display in the museum of the University of Pennsylvania. (The belts were finally returned to

6936-469: The late 1990s. However, Navajo-immersion programs have cropped up across the Navajo Nation. Statistical evidence shows that Navajo-immersion students generally do better on standardized tests than their counterparts educated only in English. Some educators have remarked that students who know their native languages feel a sense of pride and identity validation. Since 1989, Diné College , a Navajo tribal community college , has offered an associate degree in

7038-552: The late 19th century, it founded boarding schools, often operated by religious missionary groups. In efforts to acculturate the children, school authorities insisted that they learn to speak English and practice Christianity. Students routinely had their mouths washed out with lye soap as a punishment if they did speak Navajo. Consequently, when these students grew up and had children of their own, they often did not teach them Navajo, in order to prevent them from being punished. Robert W. Young and William Morgan , who both worked for

7140-530: The low tone typically regarded as the default. However, some linguists have suggested that Navajo does not possess true tones, but only a pitch accent system similar to that of Japanese . In general, Navajo speech also has a slower speech tempo than English does. Navajo is difficult to classify in terms of broad morphological typology : it relies heavily on affixes —mainly prefixes—like agglutinative languages, but these affixes are joined in unpredictable, overlapping ways that make them difficult to segment,

7242-410: The lung abscess, and she died in 1924 due to an infection following surgery, providing the final incentive for Sapir to leave Canada. When the University of Chicago offered him a position, he happily accepted. During his period in Canada, Sapir came into his own as the leading figure in linguistics in North America. Among his substantial publications from this period were his book on Time Perspective in

7344-848: The major universities, in order to professionalize the discipline. Sapir enlisted the assistance of fellow Boasians: Frank Speck , Paul Radin and Alexander Goldenweiser , who with Barbeau worked on the peoples of the Eastern Woodlands: the Ojibwa , the Iroquois, the Huron and the Wyandot . Sapir initiated work on the Athabascan languages of the Mackenzie valley and the Yukon , but it proved too difficult to find adequate assistance, and he concentrated mainly on Nootka and

7446-497: The methods of historical linguistics to languages of indigenous peoples because they were believed to be more primitive than the Indo-European languages . Sapir was the first to prove that the methods of comparative linguistics were equally valid when applied to indigenous languages. In the 1929 edition of Encyclopædia Britannica he published what was then the most authoritative classification of Native American languages, and

7548-555: The most important figures in the development of the discipline of linguistics in the United States. Sapir was born in German Pomerania , in what is now northern Poland. His family emigrated to the United States of America when he was a child. He studied Germanic linguistics at Columbia , where he came under the influence of Franz Boas , who inspired him to work on Native American languages . While finishing his Ph.D. he went to California to work with Alfred Kroeber documenting

7650-645: The number of monolingual Navajo speakers have been in the decline, and most younger Navajo people are bilingual. Near the 1990s, many Navajo children have little to no knowledge in Navajo language, only knowing English. In 1968, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Bilingual Education Act , which provided funds for educating young students who are not native English speakers. The Act had mainly been intended for Spanish-speaking children—particularly Mexican Americans —but it applied to all recognized linguistic minorities. Many Native American tribes seized

7752-651: The office of the President of the Navajo Nation . Both original and translated media have been produced in Navajo. The first works tended to be religious texts translated by missionaries, including the Bible. From 1943 to about 1957, the Navajo Agency of the BIA published Ádahooníłígíí ("Events" ), the first newspaper in Navajo and the only one to be written entirely in Navajo. It was edited by Robert W. Young and William Morgan, Sr. (Navajo). They had collaborated on The Navajo Language ,

7854-613: The prestigious Jewish center of Vilna , considered the Sapirs to be rural upstarts and were less than impressed with Sapir's career in an unpronounceable academic field. Edward and Florence had three children together: Herbert Michael, Helen Ruth, and Philip. As director of the Anthropological division of the Geological Survey of Canada, Sapir embarked on a project to document the Indigenous cultures and languages of Canada. His first fieldwork took him to Vancouver Island to work on

7956-575: The same stem, as do the progressive and future modes; these modes are distinguished with prefixes. However, pairs of modes other than these may also share the same stem, as illustrated in the following example, where the verb "to play" is conjugated into each of the five mode paradigms: The basic set of subject prefixes for the imperfective mode, as well as the actual conjugation of the verb into these person and number categories, are as follows. The remaining piece of these conjugated verbs—the prefix na- —is called an "outer" or "disjunct" prefix. It

8058-1115: The scholarship Sapir supplemented his mother's meager earnings. Sapir entered Columbia in 1901, still paying with the Pulitzer scholarship. Columbia at this time was one of the few elite private universities that did not limit admission of Jewish applicants with implicit quotas around 12 percent—approximately 40% of incoming students at Columbia were Jewish. Sapir earned both a B.A. (1904) and an M.A. (1905) in Germanic philology from Columbia , before embarking on his Ph.D. in Anthropology which he completed in 1909. Sapir emphasized language study in his college years at Columbia, studying Latin, Greek, and French for eight semesters. From his sophomore year he additionally began to focus on Germanic languages, completing coursework in Gothic , Old High German , Old Saxon , Icelandic , Dutch , Swedish , and Danish . Through Germanics professor William Carpenter , Sapir

8160-688: The study of Indigenous folklore without knowledge of the indigenous languages. At this point the only Canadian first nation languages that were well known were Kwakiutl, described by Boas, Tshimshian and Haida. Sapir explicitly used the standard of documentation of European languages, to argue that the amassing knowledge of indigenous languages was of paramount importance. By introducing the high standards of Boasian anthropology, Sapir incited antagonism from those amateur ethnologists who felt that they had contributed important work. Unsatisfied with efforts by amateur and governmental anthropologists, Sapir worked to introduce an academic program of anthropology at one of

8262-451: The subject of Navajo. This program includes language, literature, culture, medical terminology, and teaching courses and produces the highest number of Navajo teachers of any institution in the United States. About 600 students attend per semester. One major university that teaches classes in the Navajo language is Arizona State University . In 1992, Young and Morgan published another major work on Navajo: Analytical Lexicon of Navajo , with

8364-411: The summer of 1915, having to invent new methods for working with a monolingual speaker. The information from Ishi was invaluable for understanding the relation between the different dialects of Yana. Ishi died of his illness in early 1916, and Kroeber partly blamed the exacting nature of working with Sapir for his failure to recover. Sapir described the work: "I think I may safely say that my work with Ishi

8466-476: The two critiqued each other's work, both submitting to the same publishers, and both being rejected. They also were both interested in psychology and the relation between individual personalities and cultural patterns, and in their correspondences they frequently psychoanalyzed each other. However, Sapir often showed little understanding for Benedict's private thoughts and feelings , and particularly his conservative gender ideology jarred with Benedict's struggles as

8568-616: The two separated permanently. Mead received news of Sapir's remarriage while still in Samoa, and burned their correspondence there on the beach. Settling in Chicago reinvigorated Sapir intellectually and personally. He socialized with intellectuals, gave lectures, participated in poetry and music clubs. His first graduate student at Chicago was Li Fang-Kuei . The Sapir household continued to be managed largely by Grandmother Eva, until Sapir remarried in 1926. Sapir's second wife, Jean Victoria McClenaghan,

8670-559: The verb with the circum clitic doo= ... =da (e.g. mósí doo nitsaa da 'the cat is not big'). Dooda , as a single word, corresponds to English no . Nouns are not required to form a complete Navajo sentence. Besides the extensive information that can be communicated with a verb, Navajo speakers may alternate between the third and fourth person to distinguish between two already specified actors, similarly to how speakers of languages with grammatical gender may repeatedly use pronouns. Most nouns are not inflected for number, and plurality

8772-485: Was also a pioneer in Yiddish studies (his first language) in the United States (cf. Notes on Judeo-German phonology , 1915). Sapir was active in the international auxiliary language movement. In his paper "The Function of an International Auxiliary Language", he argued for the benefits of a regular grammar and advocated a critical focus on the fundamentals of language, unbiased by the idiosyncrasies of national languages, in

8874-401: Was an important influence, Sapir received his lust for knowledge and interest in scholarship, aesthetics, and music from his father. At age 14 Sapir won a Pulitzer scholarship to the prestigious Horace Mann high school , but he chose not to attend the school which he found too posh, going instead to DeWitt Clinton High School , and saving the scholarship money for his college education. Through

8976-463: Was broadcast to tribal areas. Navajo was no exception, although its large speaker pool—larger than that of any other Native language in the United States—gave it more staying power than most. Adding to the language's decline, federal acts passed in the 1950s to increase educational opportunities for Navajo children had resulted in pervasive use of English in their schools. In more recent years,

9078-401: Was denied membership to the faculty club where the senior faculty discussed academic business. At Yale, Sapir's graduate students included Morris Swadesh , Benjamin Lee Whorf , Mary Haas , Charles Hockett , and Harry Hoijer , several of whom he brought with him from Chicago. Sapir came to regard a young Semiticist named Zellig Harris as his intellectual heir, although Harris was never

9180-781: Was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , the United States National Academy of Sciences , and the American Philosophical Society . In the summer of 1937 while teaching at the Linguistic Institute of the Linguistic Society of America in Ann Arbor , Sapir began having problems with a heart condition that had been diagnosed a couple of years earlier. In 1938, he had to take

9282-447: Was explicitly given the task of founding a distinct anthropology department, this was not well received by the department of sociology who worked by William Graham Sumner 's "Evolutionary sociology", which was anathema to Sapir's Boasian approach, nor by the two anthropologists of the Institute for Human Relations Clark Wissler and G. P. Murdock . Sapir never thrived at Yale, where as one of only four Jewish faculty members out of 569 he

9384-477: Was exposed to methods of comparative linguistics that were being developed into a more scientific framework than the traditional philological approach. He also took courses in Sanskrit, and complemented his language studies by studying music in the department of the famous composer Edward MacDowell (though it is uncertain whether Sapir ever studied with MacDowell himself). In his last year in college Sapir enrolled in

9486-762: Was funded in the 1950s, where the number of students quickly doubled in the next decade. The Navajo Nation operates Tséhootsooí Diné Bi'ólta', a Navajo language immersion school for grades K-8 in Fort Defiance, Arizona . Located on the Arizona-New Mexico border in the southeastern quarter of the Navajo Reservation , the school strives to revitalize Navajo among children of the Window Rock Unified School District . Tséhootsooí Diné Bi'ólta' has thirteen Navajo language teachers who instruct only in

9588-570: Was in the Athabaskan languages, a family which especially fascinated him. In a private letter, he wrote: " Dene is probably the son-of-a-bitchiest language in America to actually know ...most fascinating of all languages ever invented." Sapir also studied the languages and cultures of Wishram Chinook , Navajo , Nootka , Colorado River Numic , Takelma , and Yana . His research on Southern Paiute, in collaboration with consultant Tony Tillohash , led to

9690-461: Was interested in the relation between linguistic differences, and differences in cultural world views. This part of his thinking was developed by his student Benjamin Lee Whorf into the principle of linguistic relativity or the "Sapir–Whorf" hypothesis. In anthropology Sapir is known as an early proponent of the importance of psychology to anthropology , maintaining that studying the nature of relationships between different individual personalities

9792-505: Was introduced to Indigenous American languages while he kept working on his M.A. in Germanic linguistics. Robert Lowie later said that Sapir's fascination with indigenous languages stemmed from the seminar with Boas in which Boas used examples from Native American languages to disprove all of Sapir's common-sense assumptions about the basic nature of language. Sapir's 1905 Master's thesis was an analysis of Johann Gottfried Herder 's Treatise on

9894-569: Was invested in the development of an International Auxiliary Language . Sapir was born into a family of Lithuanian Jews in Lauenburg (now Lębork) in the Province of Pomerania where his father, Jacob David Sapir, worked as a cantor . The family was not Orthodox , and his father maintained his ties to Judaism through its music. The Sapir family did not stay long in Pomerania and never accepted German as

9996-404: Was largely run by Eva Sapir, who did not get along well with Florence, and this added to the strain on both Florence and Edward. Sapir's parents had by now divorced and his father seemed to develop psychosis, which made it necessary for him to leave Canada for Philadelphia , where Edward continued to support him financially. Florence was hospitalized for long periods both for her depressions and for

10098-524: Was monolingual in Yahi and was the last surviving member of his people. He had been adopted by the Kroebers, but had fallen ill with tuberculosis , and was not expected to live long. Sam Batwi, the speaker of Yana who had worked with Sapir, was unable to understand the Yahi variety, and Krober was convinced that only Sapir would be able to communicate with Ishi. Sapir traveled to San Francisco and worked with Ishi over

10200-529: Was on the Wishram Chinook language in the summer of 1905, funded by the Bureau of American Ethnology. This first experience with Native American languages in the field was closely overseen by Boas, who was particularly interested in having Sapir gather ethnological information for the Bureau. Sapir gathered a volume of Wishram texts, published 1909, and he managed to achieve a much more sophisticated understanding of

10302-486: Was sixteen years younger than he. She had first met Sapir when a student in Ottawa, but had since also come to work at the University of Chicago's department of Juvenile Research. Their son Paul Edward Sapir was born in 1928. Their other son J. David Sapir became a linguist and anthropologist specializing in West African Languages, especially Jola languages . Sapir also exerted influence through his membership in

10404-481: Was urged to work at a quicker pace than he felt comfortable. His "Grammar of Southern Paiute" was supposed to be published in Boas' Handbook of American Indian Languages , and Boas urged him to complete a preliminary version while funding for the publication remained available, but Sapir did not want to compromise on quality, and in the end the Handbook had to go to press without Sapir's piece. Boas kept working to secure

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