Ebook: Begishe - A Lexemic Typology of Navajo Anatomical Terms I: The Foot

Source: International Journal of American Linguistics, Vol. 36, No. 4, Hans Wolff Memorial
Issue: Fascicle III (Oct., 1970), pp. 247-265
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1264250The aims of this paper are two fold:
(1) Casual inspection of English anatomical naming units seems to indicate that most are composed of single morphemes. Extension of anatomical terms appears to procede always from the body to other cultural domains. It is not our intention to investigate in any detail the anatomical domain of English. However, similarly casual investigation of the Navajo anatomical terminology indicates a different situation. Therefore, (1) looking at the domain of the origin and the extensions of Navajo anatomical terms restricted in this paper to the 47 Navajo customary terms of the foot, is our first goal. This task is preparatory to the second, main goal, (2) to refine the universal propositions of principles of nomenclature by Berlin and Conklin. Our major emphasis rests on this second goal. We will start with the propositions of Berlin and Conklin. We will then expand these and propose modifications and extensions. Finally, we will present the evidence in the form of a lexicon.