Place-Naming, Environment, and Perception among the Canyon de Chelly Navajo of Arizona

Abstract

Place-names may provide insights into cultures' linguistics, histories, habitats, and spatial and environmental perceptions. To yield such insights, I analyze a comprehensive inventory of 245 Navajo place-names of the Canyon de Chelly system, Arizona. The analysis first identifies positional and directional linguistic elements in place-names. Frequencies of references to natural features such as canyons, prominent rocks, water features, and so forth, as well as cultural features such as trails and prehistoric Anasazi ruins and petrographs, are then tallied. These names reflect interaction between the character of the environment and what the Navajo residents perceive as important within it. Rocks of various kinds constitute the largest category of named natural features, with canyons a close second; plant and animal referents are quite common. Preexisting non-Navajo place-names were not borrowed when Navajos took over the area in the 1600s. The great majority of Navajo place-names are translatable and literally descriptive; relatively few are commemorative, only four including personal names, and none is allusive to other places or to abstract qualities. The place-names appear to have been quite stable over time. The aforementioned onamastic traits, as well as frequent “non-specificity,” are also characteristics of Athapaskan place-names elsewhere in the Southwest and in Alaska; however, Navajo practice differs from Alaskan in the former's occasional use of duplicated and alternative place-names.

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