Re: Navajo codetalking

The Gray Wizard wrote:

>Great find, John.  I'll spend some time with this and my "Analytical Lexicon
>of Navaho"
Good luck. The forms they cite on the web do not match the forms in my
Navajo dictionary (the standard one by Young and Morgan). For example, the
website gives the form cha-yes-desi meaning 'rolled hat'. Clearly "cha" is
supposed to be hat, but the dictionary gives the word as "ch'ah". That just
stood out at me because "cha" just happens to be one of the perhaps dozen
Navajo words I recognize. I also could not find the word for "hair" in
ceh-yehs-besi "braided hair". The closest I can find is a bunch of words
related to hair that include bitsii. Given that <i> is pronounced as [I],
the <e> from the web may make sense (but what do they use for [e]/[E] -
they are a phonemic contrast with [i]/[I]).

Marcus