Native American welcomes at Olympic opening

[Mike Cleven]

Liland Brajant Ros' wrote:
>
> >From: Mike Cleven <ironmtn at bigfoot.com>
> >Reply-To: Mike Cleven <ironmtn at bigfoot.com>
> >To: CHINOOK at listserv.linguistlist.org
> >Subject: Native American welcomes at Olympic opening
> >Date: Fri, 8 Feb 2002 10:39:11 -0800
> >
> >Did any of you who might have watched the ceremonial greeting by native
> >chiefs at tonight's opening of the Winter Games happen to understand the
> >welcomes in any of the five native languages represented - Shoshone,
> >Ute, Paiute, Dineh and - ? Gasho?
>
> Dineh? I didn't watch the ceremonies, but I'm wondering about "Dineh".
> Without the h it's Navajo for Navajo, but then it's probably also Apache of
> many varieties for Apache of many varieties. (It's the same word as the
> "Dene" in the language family "Na-Dene", the bulk of which are the
> Athapaskan tongues. Means "People", I believe.)

It does.  But I deliberately used the "Dineh" spelling because it's the
one I've seen on Navajo cultural, political and linguistic sites.  The
'h' doesn't have a phonetic value, I think - it's more an indication of
the length of the 'e'.

I just had a look through my bookmarks, which were amassed a few years
ago so many are out of date.  I did find a defunct Navajo/Dineh link
which demonstrates use of the spelling:

http://www.primenet.com/~dineh/   - which was the Dineh Alliance
homepage at one time and titled as such.

The new Navajo Nation Homepage at http://www.navajo.org uses Dine',
however, so maybe the final 'h' in the other version might be a glottal
stop?

But I also found this, which I think y'all might find more than useful:

http://www.csusm.edu/nadp/nadp.htm

and:

http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jar/TIL_20.html which is a survey of attitudes
towards the Navajo language among its community.

I just checked my bookmarks fully; used to have 20 working links for
Navajo, now only 2 of them are still there.  I did a search and found
this site which addresses font issues for native languages:

http://jeff.cs.mcgill.ca/~luc/native.html

and from here:

http://www.naaog.de/englisch/Links_Languages.html

I found:

http://www.angelfire.com/nv/navaholang/
http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq61-4.htm  (the US Navy codetalker
handbook!)


 Anybody know what specific
> People the Dineh chief was speaking for?

Southern Utah has a large Dineh community; not sure what division they
are - I don't think the announcers said, other than as "southern Utah
Navajo-Dineh people" or something close to that; maybe "northern
Navajo-Dineh", perhaps, come to think of it; would have to see the
footage again.

 And if, as I suspect, he was
> Navajo, whether the nomenclature signals a movement akin to that for
> replacing Eskimo with Inuit/Inuktitut/Yupik etc., or what.

Doesn't appear to be equivalent to the Eskimo-Inuit change, as the
Navajo Nation sites use "Navajo" as well as Dine' (formerly they used
Dineh, as noted); they appear comfortable with both, although I'm sure
that if one was speaking in Dine' one would use Dine'.  As far as
"Eskimo" goes, as we know this was originally a Cree (or Ojibway?)
derisive which got picked up by the French ("esquimaux") and is no
longer acceptable (officially) in Canada.  However, one correspondent I
know from UseNet insists that it's the norm in Alaska, where it is fully
acceptable and the term "Inuit" (or whatever the local dialect version
is) doesn't figure in English and is commonplace.

--
Mike Cleven
http://www.cayoosh.net (early BC history)
http://www.hiyu.net (Cayoosh Jargon phrasebook/history)