Trip of the Tongue by Elizabeth Little Page A

impossibly worst-case scenario. It is nevertheless still intimidatingly different from the verb tables we’re used to seeing in our French, Spanish, or even Latin textbooks. But once you familiarize yourself with the ins and outs of each prefix, it’s really not so bad.
    The verb stem, as you can see, is slotted in on the right. Most stems are one syllable—the stem for “cry,” for instance, is - cha . Information about the subject of the verb is found in positions III, V, and VIII. For the most basic subjects, you only have to worry about this last position—take the second-person subject pronoun ni , slot it in with “cry,” and you get nicha , “you’re crying.” j
    After that things get more interesting. Position V can be used for the so-called fourth-person prefix ji- . This indicates, broadly, a subject other than the speaker or the hearer—you could potentially use this to distinguish between two characters in a story. (This serves a similar function to that of Crow’s switch-reference markers.) Position III, meanwhile, is allotted for what’s known as a distributive plural, used to indicate that the subject or direct object of the verb numbers three or more.
    To complicate matters further, Navajo verbs don’t really use what English-speakers think of as “tense.” This isn’t to say that Navajo verbs don’t communicate similar information; they just go about it a bit differently. So if you look at position VII, you’ll find information about the temporal flow of the action (for example, whether it’s ongoing, habitual, or completed), but positions I, II, and VI can make even finer distinctions. The prefix hi- (position VIc) can be used, for instance, when three or more subjects act in succession as opposed to in a larger group—the difference between “the chickens flew the coop one by one” and “the chickens flew the coop all at once.” The prefix náá- (position I) indicates repeated action of a very specific kind. Called a “semeliterative prefix,” náá- can be translated as “another one” or “one more time.”
    My favorite feature of Navajo verbs deals not with prefixes but rather with stems. While many verbs—such as cha —have only one stem, some transitive verbs require a different stem based on the physical properties of the object they’re acting upon. A rock, paper, and scissors, for example, could each require the use of a different verb stem. Young and Morgan (names you’ll grow extremely familiar with if you have even the most cursory interest in the Navajo language) identified twelve categories of verb stem—known as “classificatory verb stems”—each loosely grouped around certain common physical qualities. There are groups of “solid roundish objects” such as apples, eggs, and balls; “mushy matter” such as lard, dough, and scrambled eggs; and “slender flexible objects,” which include not only strings of beads and pieces of rope but constellations and the words in a language.
    Of course, it’s all fun and games until you actually have to learn to speak the language. The existence of classificatory verb stems in Navajo is surely cause for no small amount of angst for students of the language. And it’s probably no less vexing for instructors. I know it has at the very least presented some interesting challenges for Rosetta Stone’s Endangered Language Program, which was asked by Navajo Nation to assist in the creation of language-learning software. Danny Hieber, a content editor for Rosetta Stone, blogged about the difficulties involved with teaching the Navajo verb “to be sitting there” through pictures. Because the verb stem changes depending on the physical properties of the object in question—it is different for a man; it is different for a computer; it is different again