Grammar
Typologically, Navajo is an agglutinating, polysynthetic head-marking language, but many of its affixes combine into contractions more like fusional languages. The canonical word order of Navajo is SOV. Athabaskan words are modified primarily by prefixes, which is unusual for an SOV language (suffixes are expected).
Navajo is a "verb-heavy" language — it has a great preponderance of verbs but relatively few nouns. In addition to verbs and nouns, Navajo has other elements such as pronouns, clitics of various functions, demonstratives, numerals, postpositions, adverbs, and conjunctions, among others. Harry Hoijer grouped all of the above into a word-class which he called particles (i.e., Navajo would then have verbs, nouns, and particles). Navajo has no separate words that correspond to the adjectives in English grammar: verbs provide the adjectival functionality.
Read more about this topic: Navajo Language
Famous quotes containing the word grammar:
“The new grammar of race is constructed in a way that George Orwell would have appreciated, because its rules make some ideas impossible to expressunless, of course, one wants to be called a racist.”
—Stephen Carter (b. 1954)
“The old saying of Buffons that style is the man himself is as near the truth as we can getbut then most men mistake grammar for style, as they mistake correct spelling for words or schooling for education.”
—Samuel Butler (18351902)
“I went to a very militantly Republican grammar school and, under its influence, began to revolt against the Establishment, on the simple rule of thumb, highly satisfying to a ten-year-old, that Irish equals good, English equals bad.”
—Bernadette Devlin (b. 1947)