{"id":35326,"date":"2017-11-07T15:53:54","date_gmt":"2017-11-07T20:53:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=35326"},"modified":"2017-11-07T15:54:35","modified_gmt":"2017-11-07T20:54:35","slug":"annotating-the-first-page-of-the-first-navajo-english-dictionary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=35326","title":{"rendered":"Annotating the First Page of the First Navajo-English Dictionary"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Don't miss Danielle Geller's remarkable, moving personal essay in <em>The New Yorker<\/em>, \"<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/culture\/personal-history\/annotating-the-first-page-of-the-first-navajo-english-dictionary\">Annotating the First Page of the First Navajo-English Dictionary<\/a>.\" Here's how it starts:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\" data-reactid=\"147\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">The\u00a0first, incomplete Navajo-English Dictionary was compiled, in 1958, by Leon Wall, an official in the U.S. government\u2019s Bureau of Indian Affairs. Wall, who was in charge of a literacy program on the Navajo reservation, worked on the dictionary with William Morgan, a Navajo translator.<\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\" data-reactid=\"151\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\"><strong data-reactid=\"152\"><em data-reactid=\"153\">\u2019\u0105\u0105\u2019<\/em>: \u201cwell (anticipation, as when a person approaches one as though to speak but says nothing)\u201d<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\" data-reactid=\"156\"><span style=\"color: #000080;\">I could begin and end here. My mother was a full-blooded Navajo woman, raised on the reservation, but she was never taught to speak her mother\u2019s language. There was a time when most words were better left unspoken. I am still drawn to the nasal vowels and slushy consonants, though I feel no hope of ever learning the language. It is one thing to play dress-up, to imitate pronunciations and understanding; it is another thing to think or dream or live in a language not your own.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Don't miss Danielle Geller's remarkable, moving personal essay in The New Yorker, \"Annotating the First Page of the First Navajo-English Dictionary.\" Here's how it starts: The\u00a0first, incomplete Navajo-English Dictionary was compiled, in 1958, by Leon Wall, an official in the U.S. government\u2019s Bureau of Indian Affairs. Wall, who was in charge of a literacy program [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[181,218,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dictionaries","category-language-and-literature","category-language-contact"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35326"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35326\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35328,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35326\/revisions\/35328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}