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92-598: Dennehotso ( Navajo : Deinihootso ) is a census-designated place (CDP) in Apache County , Arizona , United States. The population was 746 at the 2010 census . According to the United States Census Bureau , the CDP has a total area of 10.0 square miles (25.8 km), all land. As of the census of 2000, there were 734 people, 168 households, and 141 families residing in the CDP. The population density

184-449: 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

276-503: 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

368-541: 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

460-449: 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

552-536: A "completed action") correspond to the imperfect and perfect forms of the equivalent verbs in French and Spanish, savoir and saber . This is also true when the sense of verb "to know" is "to know somebody", in this case opposed in aspect to the verb "to meet" (or even to the construction "to get to know"). These correspond to imperfect and perfect forms of conocer in Spanish, and connaître in French. In German, on

644-491: 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

736-491: 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

828-484: 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

920-476: A female householder with no husband present, and 15.5% were non-families. 14.9% of all households were made up of individuals, and 5.4% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 4.4 and the average family size was 4.9. In the CDP, the age distribution of the population shows 44.6% under the age of 18, 9.4% from 18 to 24, 24.5% from 25 to 44, 15.4% from 45 to 64, and 6.1% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age

1012-599: A kind of lexical aspect, except that it is typically not a property of a verb in isolation, but rather a property of an entire verb phrase . Achievements, accomplishments and semelfactives have telic situation aspect, while states and activities have atelic situation aspect. The other factor in situation aspect is duration, which is also a property of a verb phrase. Accomplishments, states, and activities have duration, while achievements and semelfactives do not. In some languages, aspect and time are very clearly separated, making them much more distinct to their speakers. There are

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1104-452: 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

1196-521: 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

1288-613: A more elaborate paradigm of aspectual distinctions (often at the expense of tense). The following table, appearing originally in Green (2002) shows the possible aspectual distinctions in AAVE in their prototypical, negative and stressed /emphatic affirmative forms: (see Habitual be ) (see ) Although Standard German does not have aspects, many Upper German and all West Central German dialects, and some more vernacular forms of German do make an aspectual distinction which partly corresponds with

1380-475: A number of languages that mark aspect much more saliently than time. Prominent in this category are Chinese and American Sign Language , which both differentiate many aspects but rely exclusively on optional time-indicating terms to pinpoint an action with respect to time. In other language groups, for example in most modern Indo-European languages (except Slavic languages and some Indo-Aryan languages like Hindi ), aspect has become almost entirely conflated, in

1472-775: A past tense, it relates the action to the present time. One cannot say of someone now deceased that they "have eaten" or "have been eating". The present auxiliary implies that they are in some way present (alive), even when the action denoted is completed (perfect) or partially completed (progressive perfect).) Aspects of the past tense: Aspects can also be marked on non-finite forms of the verb: "(to) be eating" ( infinitive with progressive aspect), "(to) have eaten" (infinitive with perfect aspect), "having eaten" ( present participle or gerund with perfect aspect), etc. The perfect infinitive can further be governed by modal verbs to express various meanings, mostly combining modality with past reference: "I should have eaten" etc. In particular,

1564-454: A prepositional for -phrase describing a time duration: "I had a car for five hours", "I shopped for five hours", but not "*I bought a car for five hours". Lexical aspect is sometimes called Aktionsart , especially by German and Slavic linguists. Lexical or situation aspect is marked in Athabaskan languages . One of the factors in situation aspect is telicity . Telicity might be considered

1656-427: A relation between the time of the event and the time of reference. This is the case with the perfect aspect , which indicates that an event occurred prior to (but has continuing relevance at) the time of reference: "I have eaten"; "I had eaten"; "I will have eaten". Different languages make different grammatical aspectual distinctions; some (such as Standard German ; see below ) do not make any. The marking of aspect

1748-511: A specific aspectual sense beyond the incompleteness implied by the tense: يَضْرِبُ ( yaḍribu , he strikes/is striking/will strike/etc.). Those are the only two "tenses" in Arabic (not counting أَمْر amr , command or imperative, which is traditionally considered as denoting future events.) To explicitly mark aspect, Arabic uses a variety of lexical and syntactic devices. Contemporary Arabic dialects are another matter. One major change from al-fuṣḥā

1840-413: 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

1932-458: A verbal noun. In the Tyrolean and other Bavarian regiolect the prefix *da can be found, which form perfective aspects. "I hu's gleant" (Ich habe es gelernt = I learnt it) vs. "I hu's daleant" (*Ich habe es DAlernt = I succeeded in learning). In Dutch (a West Germanic language ), two types of continuous form are used. Both types are considered Standard Dutch. The first type is very similar to

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2024-553: 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

2116-502: Is a past habitual , as in "I used to go to school," and going to / gonna + VERB is a prospective , a future situation highlighting current intention or expectation, as in "I'm going to go to school next year." The aspectual systems of certain dialects of English, such as African-American Vernacular English (see for example habitual be ), and of creoles based on English vocabulary, such as Hawaiian Creole English , are quite different from those of standard English, and often reflect

2208-518: 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

2300-471: Is clearly similar if not identical to the Greek aorist, which is considered a tense but is more of an aspect marker. In the Arabic, aorist aspect is the logical consequence of past tense. By contrast, the "Verb of Similarity" ( الْفِعْل الْمُضَارِع al-fiʿl al-muḍāriʿ ), so called because of its resemblance to the active participial noun, is considered to denote an event in the present or future without committing to

2392-406: 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

2484-412: Is inferred through use of these aspectual markers, along with optional inclusion of adverbs. There is a distinction between grammatical aspect, as described here, and lexical aspect . Other terms for the contrast lexical vs. grammatical include: situation vs. viewpoint and inner vs. outer . Lexical aspect, also known as Aktionsart , is an inherent property of a verb or verb-complement phrase, and

2576-420: 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 Grammatical aspect In linguistics , aspect is a grammatical category that expresses how a verbal action, event, or state, extends over time. For instance, perfective aspect

2668-529: 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

2760-430: Is not (necessarily) when the event occurs, but how the time in which it occurs is viewed: as complete, ongoing, consequential, planned, etc. In most dialects of Ancient Greek, aspect is indicated uniquely by verbal morphology. For example, the very frequently used aorist , though a functional preterite in the indicative mood, conveys historic or 'immediate' aspect in the subjunctive and optative. The perfect in all moods

2852-518: Is not marked formally. The distinctions made as part of lexical aspect are different from those of grammatical aspect. Typical distinctions are between states ("I owned"), activities ("I shopped"), accomplishments ("I painted a picture"), achievements ("I bought"), and punctual, or semelfactive , events ("I sneezed"). These distinctions are often relevant syntactically. For example, states and activities, but not usually achievements, can be used in English with

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2944-766: Is often conflated with the marking of tense and mood (see tense–aspect–mood ). Aspectual distinctions may be restricted to certain tenses: in Latin and the Romance languages , for example, the perfective–imperfective distinction is marked in the past tense , by the division between preterites and imperfects . Explicit consideration of aspect as a category first arose out of study of the Slavic languages ; here verbs often occur in pairs, with two related verbs being used respectively for imperfective and perfective meanings. The concept of grammatical aspect (or verbal aspect ) should not be confused with perfect and imperfect verb forms ;

3036-436: Is often confused with the closely related concept of tense , because they both convey information about time. While tense relates the time of referent to some other time, commonly the speech event, aspect conveys other temporal information, such as duration, completion, or frequency, as it relates to the time of action. Thus tense refers to temporally when while aspect refers to temporally how . Aspect can be said to describe

3128-520: 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

3220-405: 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

3312-448: Is the aspect marker and the second element (the copula) is the common tense/mood marker. In literary Arabic ( الْفُصْحَى al-fuṣḥā ) the verb has two aspect-tenses: perfective (past), and imperfective (non-past). There is some disagreement among grammarians whether to view the distinction as a distinction in aspect, or tense, or both. The past verb ( الْفِعْل الْمَاضِي al-fiʿl al-māḍī ) denotes an event ( حَدَث ḥadaṯ ) completed in

3404-558: Is the basic aspectual distinction in the Slavic languages. It semantically corresponds to the distinction between the morphological forms known respectively as the aorist and imperfect in Greek , the preterite and imperfect in Spanish, the simple past ( passé simple ) and imperfect in French, and the perfect and imperfect in Latin (from the Latin perfectus , meaning "completed"). Essentially,

3496-548: 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

3588-456: Is the use of a prefix particle ( بِ bi in Egyptian and Levantine dialects—though it may have a slightly different range of functions in each dialect) to explicitly mark progressive, continuous, or habitual aspect: بيكتب , bi-yiktib , he is now writing, writes all the time, etc. Aspect can mark the stage of an action. The prospective aspect is a combination of tense and aspect that indicates

3680-635: Is used as an aspectual marker, conveying the sense of a resultant state. E.g. ὁράω – I see (present); εἶδον – I saw (aorist); οἶδα – I am in a state of having seen = I know (perfect). Turkish has a same/similar aspect, such as in Görmüş bulunuyorum/durumdayım , where görmüş means "having seen" and bulunuyorum/durumdayım means "I am in the state". In many Sino-Tibetan languages, such as Mandarin , verbs lack grammatical markers of tense, but are rich in aspect (Heine, Kuteva 2010, p. 10). Markers of aspect are attached to verbs to indicate aspect. Event time

3772-515: Is used in referring to an event conceived as bounded and unitary, without reference to any flow of time during the event ("I helped him"). Imperfective aspect is used for situations conceived as existing continuously or habitually as time flows ("I was helping him"; "I used to help people"). Further distinctions can be made, for example, to distinguish states and ongoing actions ( continuous and progressive aspects ) from repetitive actions ( habitual aspect ). Certain aspectual distinctions express

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3864-401: 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

3956-592: 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

4048-721: The poverty line , including 47.9% of those under age 18 and 28.9% of those age 65 or over. The area is a part of the Red Mesa Unified School District . The city is served by Red Mesa K–8 School and Red Mesa High School . Originally the territory was within the Chinle School District . In July 1983 the Red Mesa Unified School District formed, splitting from the Chinle School District. The Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) operates

4140-611: The Dennehotso Boarding School, serving grades K–8. The two buildings are OFMC projects: a 46,545-square-foot (4,324.2 m) school facility for 186 students and a 10,072-square-foot (935.7 m) dormitory for 33 students. The scheduled groundbreaking was February 11, 2013. The previous buildings scheduled for demolition had a total of 78,626 square feet (7,304.6 m) of space. The school provides transportation for students between Baby Rocks and Mexican Water and asks families living outside of that area and/or distant from

4232-399: The English continuous form : alongside the standard present tense Ich esse ('I eat') and past Ich aß ('I ate') there is the form Ich bin/war am essen/Essen ('I am/was at the eating'; capitalization varies). This is formed by the conjugated auxiliary verb sein ("to be") followed by the preposition and article am (= an dem ) and the infinitive, which German uses in many constructions as

4324-413: The English language between the simple past "X-ed," as compared to the progressive "was X-ing". Compare "I wrote the letters this morning" (i.e. finished writing the letters: an action completed) and "I was writing the letters this morning" (the letters may still be unfinished). In describing longer time periods, English needs context to maintain the distinction between the habitual ("I called him often in

4416-530: 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

4508-409: 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

4600-574: 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

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4784-951: 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

4876-558: The action is in preparation to take place. The inceptive aspect identifies the beginning stage of an action (e.g. Esperanto uses ek- , e.g. Mi ekmanĝas , "I am beginning to eat".) and inchoative and ingressive aspects identify a change of state ( The flowers started blooming ) or the start of an action ( He started running ). Aspects of stage continue through progressive, pausative, resumptive, cessive, and terminative. Important qualifications: The English tense–aspect system has two morphologically distinct tenses, past and non-past ,

4968-565: The action pertains to the present. Grammatical aspect is a formal property of a language , distinguished through overt inflection , derivational affixes, or independent words that serve as grammatically required markers of those aspects. For example, the Kʼicheʼ language spoken in Guatemala has the inflectional prefixes k - and x - to mark incompletive and completive aspect; Mandarin Chinese has

5060-490: The aspect markers - le 了, - zhe 着, zài - 在, and - guò 过 to mark the perfective, durative stative, durative progressive, and experiential aspects, and also marks aspect with adverbs ; and English marks the continuous aspect with the verb to be coupled with present participle and the perfect with the verb to have coupled with past participle . Even languages that do not mark aspect morphologically or through auxiliary verbs , however, can convey such distinctions by

5152-498: 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

5244-492: 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

5336-469: 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",

5428-558: 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

5520-504: 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,

5612-500: The highway to use the dormitory. 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 a code for sending secret messages. These code talkers ' messages are widely credited with saving many lives and winning some of

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5704-506: The imperfective and perfective. Yaska also applied this distinction to a verb versus an action nominal. Grammarians of the Greek and Latin languages also showed an interest in aspect, but the idea did not enter into the modern Western grammatical tradition until the 19th century via the study of the grammar of the Slavic languages . The earliest use of the term recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary dates from 1853. Aspect

5796-416: 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

5888-531: 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

5980-657: 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

6072-469: 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

6164-552: 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

6256-474: The latter of which is also known as the present-future or, more commonly and less formally, simply the present . No marker of a distinct future tense exists on the verb in English; the futurity of an event may be expressed through the use of the auxiliary verbs " will " and " shall ", by a non-past form plus an adverb , as in "tomorrow we go to New York City", or by some other means. Past is distinguished from non-past, in contrast, with internal modifications of

6348-530: 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,

6440-418: The meanings of the latter terms are somewhat different, and in some languages, the common names used for verb forms may not follow the actual aspects precisely. The Indian linguist Yaska ( c.  7th century BCE ) dealt with grammatical aspect, distinguishing actions that are processes ( bhāva ), from those where the action is considered as a completed whole ( mūrta ). This is the key distinction between

6532-453: The modals will and shall and their subjunctive forms would and should are used to combine future or hypothetical reference with aspectual meaning: The uses of the progressive and perfect aspects are quite complex. They may refer to the viewpoint of the speaker: But they can have other illocutionary forces or additional modal components: English expresses some other aspectual distinctions with other constructions. Used to + VERB

6624-485: 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

6716-449: The non-standard German type. It is formed by the conjugated auxiliary verb zijn ("to be"), followed by aan het and the gerund (which in Dutch matches the infinitive). For example: The second type is formed by one of the conjugated auxiliary verbs liggen ("to lie"), zitten ("to sit"), hangen ("to hang"), staan ("to stand") or lopen ("to walk"), followed by the preposition te and

6808-645: 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

6900-651: 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 ,

6992-530: The other hand, the distinction is also lexical (as in English) through verbs kennen and kennenlernen , although the semantic relation between both forms is much more straightforward since kennen means "to know" and lernen means "to learn". The Germanic languages combine the concept of aspect with the concept of tense . Although English largely separates tense and aspect formally, its aspects (neutral, progressive, perfect, progressive perfect, and [in

7084-431: The past tense] habitual) do not correspond very closely to the distinction of perfective vs. imperfective that is found in most languages with aspect. Furthermore, the separation of tense and aspect in English is not maintained rigidly. One instance of this is the alternation, in some forms of English, between sentences such as "Have you eaten?" and "Did you eat?". In European languages, rather than locating an event time,

7176-473: The past" – a habit that has no point of completion) and perfective ("I called him once" – an action completed), although the construct "used to" marks both habitual aspect and past tense and can be used if the aspectual distinction otherwise is not clear. Sometimes, English has a lexical distinction where other languages may use the distinction in grammatical aspect. For example, the English verbs "to know" (the state of knowing) and "to find out" (knowing viewed as

7268-421: The past, but it says nothing about the relation of this past event to present status. For example, وَصَلَ waṣala , "arrived", indicates that arrival occurred in the past without saying anything about the present status of the arriver – maybe they stuck around, maybe they turned around and left, etc. – nor about the aspect of the past event except insofar as completeness can be considered aspectual. This past verb

7360-400: The perfective aspect looks at an event as a complete action, while the imperfective aspect views an event as the process of unfolding or a repeated or habitual event (thus corresponding to the progressive/continuous aspect for events of short-term duration and to habitual aspect for longer terms). For events of short durations in the past, the distinction often coincides with the distinction in

7452-575: 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

7544-451: 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

7636-525: The texture of the time in which a situation occurs, such as a single point of time, a continuous range of time, a sequence of discrete points in time, etc., whereas tense indicates its location in time. For example, consider the following sentences: "I eat", "I am eating", "I have eaten", and "I have been eating". All are in the present tense , indicated by the present-tense verb of each sentence ( eat , am , and have ). Yet since they differ in aspect each conveys different information or points of view as to how

7728-400: The use of adverbs or other syntactic constructions. Grammatical aspect is distinguished from lexical aspect or Aktionsart , which is an inherent feature of verbs or verb phrases and is determined by the nature of the situation that the verb describes. The most fundamental aspectual distinction, represented in many languages, is between perfective aspect and imperfective aspect. This

7820-559: 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

7912-399: The verb. These two tenses may be modified further for progressive aspect (also called continuous aspect), for the perfect , or for both. These two aspectual forms are also referred to as BE +ING and HAVE +EN, respectively, which avoids what may be unfamiliar terminology. Aspects of the present tense: (While many elementary discussions of English grammar classify the present perfect as

8004-479: The verbal morphological system, with time. In Russian , aspect is more salient than tense in narrative. Russian, like other Slavic languages, uses different lexical entries for the different aspects, whereas other languages mark them morphologically , and still others with auxiliaries (e.g., English). In Hindi , the aspect marker is overtly separated from the tense/mood marker. Periphrastic Hindi verb forms consist of two elements. The first of these two elements

8096-522: The way tense does, aspect describes "the internal temporal constituency of a situation", or in other words, aspect is a way "of conceiving the flow of the process itself". English aspectual distinctions in the past tense include "I went, I used to go, I was going, I had gone"; in the present tense "I lose, I am losing, I have lost, I have been losing, I am going to lose"; and with the future modal "I will see, I will be seeing, I will have seen, I am going to see". What distinguishes these aspects within each tense

8188-409: Was 21 years. For every 100 females, there were 100.5 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 106.6 males. The median income for a household in the CDP was $ 19,844, and the median income for a family was $ 21,944. Males had a median income of $ 27,143 versus $ 16,250 for females. The per capita income for the CDP was $ 5,445. About 37.0% of families and 40.6% of the population were below

8280-457: Was 73.8 inhabitants per square mile (28.5/km). There were 233 housing units at an average density of 23.4 per square mile (9.0/km). The racial makeup of the CDP was 98.6% Native American , 0.8% White , and 0.5% from two or more races. 0.3% of the population were Hispanic or Latino of any race. There were 168 households, out of which 56.5% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 55.4% were married couples living together, 24.4% had

8372-463: 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,

8464-762: 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

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