jantonio09
Posted: Thu Dec 17, 2009 3:19 pmNavajo spoken in the southwest United States by the Navajo people. It is geographically and linguistically one of the Southern Athabaskan languages (the majority of Athabaskan languages are spoken in northwest Canada and Alaska). Navajo claims more speakers than any other Native American language north of the U.S.-Mexico border, with more than 140,000 native speakers, and this number has increased with time. During World War II, a code based on Navajo was used by code talkers to send secure military messages over radio.
Many concepts expressed using nouns in other languages appear as verbs in Navajo.
Navajo has two tones, low and high. Syllables are low tone by default.
Possession in Navajo is expressed with personal pronoun prefixes.
Postpositions are morphologically similar to nouns in that they are also inflected with possessive prefixes.
The key element in Navajo is the verb, which is notoriously complex. Every verb must have at least one prefix. The prefixes are affixed to the verb in a specified order.
To compare with English, Navajo has no single verb that corresponds to the English word give.
Many concepts expressed using nouns in other languages appear as verbs in Navajo.
Navajo has two tones, low and high. Syllables are low tone by default.
Possession in Navajo is expressed with personal pronoun prefixes.
Postpositions are morphologically similar to nouns in that they are also inflected with possessive prefixes.
The key element in Navajo is the verb, which is notoriously complex. Every verb must have at least one prefix. The prefixes are affixed to the verb in a specified order.
To compare with English, Navajo has no single verb that corresponds to the English word give.