This pre-primer is one of three little books based on material prepared
by J. B. Enochs, who once taught in the sanitarium school at Kayenta. It
deals entirely with typical life experiences among the Navaho, the
largest Indian tribe in the United States, numbering approximately
65,000. Nine out of ten Navahos do not speak English, and the tribe has
never had a written language.
Missionaries and scientists for many years have had alphabets with which
to record this difficult language. But these alphabets have usually
included letters not found in English, and have been peppered with
diacritical marks to indicate inflection, tonal change and nasalization.
Thus they proved too complicated for popular use. Space does not permit
mention of many who have worked with the Navaho language. Finally Dr.
John Harrington, of the Smithsonian Institution, and Mr. Oliver LaFarge,
author and linguist, collaborated to produce a simplified alphabet which
might be written with an ordinary typewriter. Mr. Robert W. Young,
associate of Dr. Harrington, experimentally recorded a great deal of
material in this new alphabet. The Navaho portions of later pamphlets in
this bi-lingual series are the joint work of Harrington and Young.
=Little Man's Family= has been expressed in Navaho, using the
Harrington-LaFarge alphabet, by Willetto Antonio, a Navaho teacher on
the reservation, and Dr. Edward Kennard, formerly a specialist in Indian
languages for the Indian Service. Both the recordings and the
interpretation in these books have been checked by Chic Sandoval, Howard
Gorman, and Adolph Bitanny, Navaho interpreters, and by Robert W. Young.
Back pages contain an explanation of the sound values represented by the
alphabet, and the indications of tonal change and nasalization which are
used.
These bi-lingual texts are an attempt to speed up Indian understanding
of modern life. Use of native languages to speed up acquisition of
English in Federal schools is a new departure in Indian policy, which
has proved very successful.
The type used for these books has been selected because of its
similarity in design to the alphabet used for manuscript writing. In the
primers, only proper names and the pronoun I have to be capitalized, so
as to further minimize the new learnings often encountered by the
primary child when faced with several different alphabets at once.