Word: navajoized
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...have before me a copy of the Navajo language written in 1905 and it looks somewhat like the Navajo printed in your magazine...
...would take the trouble to check these facts with the American Bible Society you would find out that in 1905 the Rev. Herman Frijling and the Rev. Leonard P. Brink began the reduction of the language of the Navajo Indians to print. This work has been progressing continuously ever since...
...visit to the Navajo Reservation in 1933 I saw the school maintained by the Presbyterian Church at Ganado and I am quite sure that written Navajo was in use at that time. However, as I remember it, English was the language of the classroom...
Recently the language difficulty reached a crisis. Though the Navajos are famed silversmiths and rug makers, their livelihood depends largely on sheep raising. The Government found their lands 40% overgrazed, their soil rapidly becoming eroded, concluded that the Navajos must be persuaded to reduce their stocks. But how to tell them? The Navajos had no written language. The Government's experts had developed a scientific jargon which they called Navajo, but the Navajos couldn't understand it. In their own vernacular, the Navajos had no words for such paleface facts as "sheep units," "wholesale," "retail." Navajo translation...
Thereupon the Office of Indian Affairs created a new Navajo language. Its authors: Novelist-Ethnologist Oliver (Laughing Boy) La Farge and Smithsonian Institution's Dr. John P. Harrington. The new language used the English alphabet, created words which resembled the scientists' jargon and the Navajos' vernacular closely enough so that both sides could make head & tail of them. Last week posters drawn by Navajo artists and designed to teach Navajos the language by means of pictures and text (see cut) were displayed all over the reservation. Passed around in Navajo classrooms was the first Navajo primer...