Talk:Navajo grammar

bad external links
Here to say that most of the external links are defunct. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.67.187.167 (talk) 22:11, 26 April 2017 (UTC)


 * Updated the external links. —Stephen (talk) 03:44, 27 April 2017 (UTC)

External links modified (February 2018)
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 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20121212023309/http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/research/Chee%20et%20al_vol15.pdf to http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/research/Chee%20et%20al_vol15.pdf

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"et cetera"
English language style guides suggest, with good reason, that "etc." be only used when the reader might effortlessly extend the list at will. Thus: farm animals are cows, chickens, pigs, etc.

A good example of what does not constitute such a list is:

rope, mittens, socks, pile of fried onions, etc.

I am not contesting the idea which "etc." attempts to express here: "and many more." I am claiming that for a non-Navajo speaker, it is not at all obvious what else might constitute a Slender Flexible Object. Obviously everybody can assent to rope being a Slender Flexible Object (rope is probably what motivated the acronym here). Mittens and socks are a tad surprising, but OK, languages are flexible like that, a notion such as this might be generalised. Fine. Then we get a pile of fried onions. At this point my chances of extending the list correctly at will are pretty much nil. What else is an SFO? A string of tooth paste that has left the tube? Pantyhose? A fire hose? Spaghetti laid end on end?

Perhaps some of these might prompt a Navajo speaker to reflect: "Hmm, would I call that a -lá thing?" And the only way to know is to to just say something about a fire hose, and notice if -lá crops up spontaneously in the verb.

My suggestion for improvement is to replace the misleading etc. by three dots, and perhaps also to extend the lists of examples in the table. That might make the table more unwieldy, but this is internet content, we are not typesetting a table for a paper page. 2A01:CB0C:CD:D800:AC17:CE7F:F698:53FE (talk) 06:45, 29 September 2023 (UTC)