tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Tue Sep 26 22:37:17 2000

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Re: Navajo code-talkers



In a message dated 9/25/2000 1:37:07 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email protected] writes:

<< Okrand wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on Mutsun, which is an extinct 
Costanoan (a
 group of languages - also called Costano, Ohlone, Penutian - spoken in the 
San
 Francisco Bay area of California) dialect.  Here's the bibliographic record 
for
 his 1977 dissertation for those interested: >>

Thank you for your excellent explanation.

I will add a few I have discerned from other languages, not including 
outright puns from English:

'e' (type 5 noun suffix) is pronounced approximately the same way and means 
the same thing in Quechua and Mayan.  In romanization it is spelled the same 
way.  It means "as for, referring to."

jay' (intensive) is pronounced jai in Hindi, is always the last word of the 
sentence, and is a intensifier for the entire sentence.

Navajo has suffixes (particles) similar to Klingon's type 5 suffixes for 
locative, vocative, beneficial.  I have not discovered any which come close 
to any pronounciation in Klingon.

Very many of the American Indian languages of the western part or the USA 
have pronominal verb prefixes (or infixes) which indicate both the subject 
and the object, i.e., who is doing the verb to whom.  I am not sure enough to 
give concrete examples of these.  I do know that the Ute and Navajo of 
Colorado (where I live) fit into this category.  However, I do not claim 
proficiency in either language.  So, I will leave further discussion to 
someone who does know more about Amerind languages.

I will retrieve Marc Okrand's dissertation.  It sounds quite interesting.

peHruS


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