Talk:yíhoołʼaah

Relation to bíhooshʼaah?

I learned the first person singular conjugation of "I am learning it" is bíhooshʼaah (specifically, page 159 of Diné Bizaad Bínáhooʼaah (ISBN: 9781893354739)). I noticed there is no page for bíhooshʼaah; the closest I could find is bóhooshʼaah which is a first person singular conjugation in one of the tables for yíhoołʼaah. Can someone explain why there is no page for bíhooshʼaah? Baltakatei (talk) 12:05, 7 February 2023 (UTC)

Our coverage for Navajo is a bit spotty -- not really surprising for a language with a smaller speech community and less of a written corpus.

There has also been some variance over time in terms of how various words and morphemes are spelled. The bóhooshʼaah term you found is also spelled in other sources as bíhooshʼaah, and indeed this is how it's listed in Wall & Morgan's Navajo-English Dictionary, Neundorf's Navajo/English Dictionary of Verbs, Faltz's The Navajo Verb, and Goossen's textbook Diné Bizaad: Speak, Read, Write Navajo. The only book I've got on my shelf that uses the bóhoosh’aah spelling is Garth Wilson's tiny pocket edition of his Conversational Navajo Dictionary: English to Navajo.

Arguably, we should probably update the conjugation table at the main yíhoołʼaah entry, then move the conjugated entry to the bíhooshʼaah spelling and change bóhooshʼaah into an "alternative form" entry.

Re: how yíhoołʼaah is related to bíhooshʼaah:

• yíhoołʼaah = yí- (third-person object for a third-person subject) + -hoo- (lexical infix) + (null third-person subject marker) + -ł- (verb classifier) + -’aah (verb stem)
• bíhooshʼaah = bí- (third-person object for non-third-person subject) + -hoo- (lexical infix) + -sh- (first-person subject marker, which fuses with the verb classifier -ł-) + -’aah (verb stem)

HTH! ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 01:31, 8 February 2023 (UTC)