Navaho Phonology and Hoijer's Analysis

Source: International Journal of American Linguistics, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Oct., 1945), — pp. 239-246
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1262986Linguists who are interested in American Indian languages owe a debt of gratitude
to Hoijer for organizing and presenting Sapir's copious Navaho material, with his
own additions. The presentation is carefully done, with useful arrangements of the
information on allophones, phonemic clusters, and morphophonemics.
Considerableattention is paid to the phonetic values of the positional variants, and to individual peculiarities of distribution among the phonemes. On p. 15-7, for example, Hoijer gives a very neat treatment of the x, h, xw, hw phonemes. He lists 10 sets of environments in which various allophones or freely varying pairs of allophones are heard, and then shows by a simple chart that they can
all be grouped into the four phonemes mentioned above.