12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Indispensible, April 28, 2000
This review is from: Analytical Lexicon of Navajo (Hardcover)
This book is not terribly easy to use. But that's because Navajo is not terribly easy to speak -- or (looking at it the other way) to analyze. So I caution readers that they should spend some time learning the organization of the lexicon before they expect to be able to use it fluently.
However, this book is /the/ must-own book for anyone who studies Navajo language or culture. Its thoroughness (somewhere over twenty-five thousand entries, I think) is astounding.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Intimidating and indispensible, August 22, 2006
This review is from: Analytical Lexicon of Navajo (Hardcover)
The first reviewer for this book commented on its difficulty and stated that "it is not good to use when first learning Navajo" or words to that effect. The second reviewer praised its accuracy, breadth and scope, and said that the difficulty of the book reflects the difficulty of the language itself.
Both reviewers are right. This book is praiseworthy for its clarity and completeness, but is daunting. The fact is that Navajo grammar is both unfamiliar and very complex, and any attempt to explain it or employ it must either convey or assume a lot of background knowledge: the "slot and filler" template used by Young and Morgan to explain how prefixes are added to verb stems to produce words, the difference between required prefixes and optional prefixes, the intricate mode/aspect system, and so on. It is NOT true the this book is only useful for linguists, but it is true that you must learn a lot of linguistics to understand the way Navajo works. Young and Morgan (and their collaborators) explain as much as they can as often as they can in an attempt to make their book "user useful".
I find it deeply tragic that this work (which represents the life's work of at least three incredibly capable scholars) has gone out of print. I find it equally tragic that the many efforts to convert this classic text to a more accessible electronic format have so far been unfruitful. However, these are small tragedies in the face of an even larger tragedy, the potential loss of Navajo itself. One can only hope that the intended audience for this book (Navajo speakers wanting to understand and teach their language to both Navajos and non-Navajos) will be able to rise to their great self-imposed task and help preserve their beautiful language for future generations.
To sum up: (1) There is a huge need for a book on Navajo grammar someplace between the first principles taught in "Dine Bizaad: Speak, Read and Write Navajo" and the admittedly daunting works of Young and Morgan, including this one. I am thinking of something like "Principles of Navajo Grammar and Composition". (2) With that said, any work on Navajo must rely extensively on the Analytical Lexicon and will succeed only as far as it presents what Young and Morgan have done in a more accessible way.
If you are interested in Navajo, you will need this book. It's really that simple.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Analytical Lexicon, August 13, 2004
This review is from: Analytical Lexicon of Navajo (Hardcover)
This book contains more information about the Navajo language than any other I've seen, and for its size the price is a bargain (this is a 1466-page hardback tome). However, you should be aware that this is an academic linguistics text and not at all a language lesson or even a dictionary--the copious amount of information about Navajo grammar is arranged in such a user-unfriendly way that no one could possibly learn the language from it, and the lexicon is broken down into linguistic categories such that it's irritating for even trained linguists to use (looking up a root or word in the index, for example, you are told it is word #142 in the Noun Class I list--but not what page that's on, so you have to go back to the table of contents to find which page the Noun Class I list starts on and then thumb through that to word #142).
If you can get past annoyances such as these, it's a fantastic linguistic reference. If you're trying to learn Navajo yourself or study it as a living language, though, this is not a book for you.
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