Online Navajo Language Survey

[Berkson, Kelly]

Greetings all,

I've had a few requests for more information about the online Navajo language survey for which I am seeking participants, and so I attach some more details.

First--a big thank you to the people who have done the survey already.  I am grateful to you for being so generous with your time and knowledge.

I am investigating sibilant harmony in Navajo as reflected in the spelling of the first person possessive morpheme, which appears as shi- most of the time but sometimes harmonizes and surfaces as si-.  The survey involves creating the first person possessed forms of a variety of nouns, and the word list was designed to gather information about the role various factors may play in determining when harmony is applied and when it is not.  The survey also asks for grammaticality judgments, to determine whether harmonized forms are acceptable.

Please feel free to contact me if you would like any additional details, or if you have ideas you'd be willing to share about other venues where I might publicize this survey.  (So far I've had the best luck with Facebook of all things, if you can believe it!)  I am still seeking more participants, and the survey can be found at:

http://kuclas.qualtrics.com/SE?SID=SV_bjYOfwThYeJeQIc&SVID=Prod

Please feel free to distribute the link, and my info, widely.  It takes about 45 minutes to complete, which is a serious time commitment, but the site saves your info so you can come back to it (from the same computer) anytime within 3 months and it'll put you right back to where you left off.  Again, I know this is a big time commitment and am deeply grateful to the people who have been so generous with their time and energy thus far.

All best wishes

Kelly Harper Berkson
University of Kansas
Departments of Linguistics and Global Indigenous Nations Studies  
kelly764 at ku.edu

***************************************************
The world in which you were born is just one
model of reality. Other cultures are not failed
attempts at being you, they are unique 
manifestations of the human spirit. 
~Wade Davis