Talk:wááshindoon

Additional definition?

Can this also mean "capital city"? 71.66.97.228 18:38, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

I can’t think of an example where it means that. It means something like administrative headquarters, which could be a building or a town. —Stephen (Talk) 05:09, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

Maybe I am thinking of biwááshindoon? What does it mean? 71.66.97.228 06:05, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

Its government, its administrative headquarters. —Stephen (Talk) 03:42, 25 October 2010 (UTC)

"official"

Is "official" a noun or an adjective here? If a noun, does it refer to a person? 71.66.97.228 06:07, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

Official is an adjective...wááshindoon bizaad = official language. —Stephen (Talk) 07:07, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

So "official" should be listed under "Adjective," not "Noun," then. 71.66.97.228 07:18, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

This is the problem that I have mentioned several times. The English is an adjective, the Navajo is a noun. We should not have Noun, Adjective, Verb, etc., as headers...and certainly not Proper noun, which is almost nonexistant in Navajo. —Stephen (Talk) 07:59, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

If you say łichííʼ it can mean "penny" (noun) or "red" (adjective), in different contexts. It seems to me if you use "wááshindoon" to mean "official" (such as saying "official papers," or something), then the word is functioning to modify the papers, making them official, thus an adjective. Are you saying that in this context it would be noun + noun = 2 nouns? 71.66.97.228 16:45, 23 October 2010 (UTC)

It is not an adjective. When you use it where the English would be official papers, the Navajo is saying literally, papers of the government, papers of the administration, or something along those lines. It stands in relation to another noun as a noun, and it cannot modify a noun as though it were an adjective. łichííʼ isn’t an adjective, either, but a verb. tsoh isn’t an adjective, but a noun. The English translations are adjectives, but the Navajo words are not. —Stephen (Talk) 03:50, 25 October 2010 (UTC)

Those Navajo words are not listed that way in their respective entries right now. You mean that as "red" łichííʼ means "being red"? I can't see how tsoh (big) could be a noun, though. 71.66.97.228 05:08, 25 October 2010 (UTC)

Not "being red", but "it is red". Sometimes a suffix is used on a verb that means "the one that..." or "the one who...". We have lots of nouns in English that mean big, including vastness, greatness, extensiveness, hugeness, grandeur, abundance, immensity, and so on. Tsoh is like that, except it means big. —Stephen (Talk) 05:25, 25 October 2010 (UTC)

Should we change the part of speech in the łichííʼ entry from adjective to verb, and change the definition from "red" to "it is red"? Or could this be solved by leaving it as an adjective and adding a usage note saying that it really means, in the Navajo conception, "it is red"? 71.66.97.228 05:35, 25 October 2010 (UTC)

I don’t know, it’s a big problem. It’s why I’ve always said that part-of-speech names do not make good headers. I would not change łichííʼ to "it is red", just leave it "red". I don’t think a usage note is a good idea, because you would have to repeat it more or less for each and every word that get translated as an adjective. Just as the function of adjectives is fulfilled in Japanese by verbs, in Navajo most "translated-as" adjectives are verbs, but a few are nouns. In Thai, there are very few real adjectives, and most are nouns, verbs, or other particles. The headers that we use are unsuitable, we should have headers like they use on the Russian Wiktionary. There they use Морфологические и синтаксические свойства, which means "Morphology and syntax", and under that heading they address part of speech, gender, etc., and that one header works well for every word in every language. Since we don’t use the Morphology and syntax header here, I have no good solution. —Stephen (Talk) 05:54, 25 October 2010 (UTC)