Linguapax
Navajo: a tongue for the young
By Alysa Landry The Daily Times
Posted: 06/04/2011 01:00:00 AM MDT
USA
FARMINGTON - Colleagues of Margaret Speas are accustomed to her rattling off strings of Navajo words.
To them, working within the red brick walls of a century-old building on the campus of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Speas is an expert on the language.
Not true, Speas said during a phone interview Wednesday. Pronouncing the high tones and glottal stops of the American Indian language allow even the most novice speaker to impress in areas far from the 27,000-square-mile reservation, she said.
"I really don't like being thought of as an expert in Navajo," she said. "So that can be awkward."
Speas, a specialist in syntactic theory in the university's Linguistics Department, has studied the language for more than two decades. Yet she's still a beginner, she said.
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