s - Wyższa Szkoła Filologiczna we Wrocławiu

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Richard L. Lanigan
family dwelling attached to the next in one large building complex. These domestic
areas are the square shaped rooms depicted in Figures 4 and 5. The circular
rooms are the Kivas which were meeting rooms for men. Such rooms
were basically for religious purposes formed a unique bond among its members
(Newcomb 1964). Pueblo Bonito is very important because it shows the development
of the Grand Kiva or Kiva of smaller Kivas. For our communicological
purposes, the Kiva system represents a sociocentric cultural organization for
communication in which group identity is paramount. It is critical to understand
that a major characteristic of the Kiva was the doctrine of secrecy and group
silence about the communication and rituals that took place there. This would
prove to be a major asset for the development and necessary secrecy of the Navajo
code in WWII. It is worth noting here that even the code talkers’ families
did not know what they had done in the war until 1969 when a veteran’s association
of former members of the Fourth Marine Division worked to locate former
code talkers to honor them at a meeting in Chicago, Illinois (Paul 1973:
117). Even then, many of the talkers would not discuss the details of the code
which partially for many inaccurate accounts of the code (e.g., Wrixon 1998:
371).
2. Tonal languages
The Navajo and Japanese languages are usually classified as a “tonal” language
and are often thought, therefore, to have a tonal system like the four tones
of Chinese (Halliday 2005). The Chinese system is: (1) high-level [ma =
mother], (2) high-rising [ma = hemp], (3) low-falling-rising [ma = horse], and
(4) high-falling [ma = scold]. This Japanese “tone” description is controversial,
to say the least. For example, Bernard Comrie (1987: 869) argues that “the
Japanese accentual system is characteristically distinct from the archetypal tone
languages of the Chinese type”. The short version of the dispute is say that both
Japanese, in particular, and Navajo are best described not as “tone” languages,
but as pitch-accent languages (Ding 2006). The point to be made is precisely
that Navajo and Japanese are more alike than they are dissimilar in phonological
terms. For an explicit comparison of English, Japanese, and Chinese, see
Halliday and Matthiessen (1999: 297).
2.1. The language of the people
The Navajo language (Diné bizaad) is spoken by approximately 149 000
persons according to the 1990 census of the United States population (Crystal
1997: 36). In 1970, the number of speaker was 100 000 which makes Navajo
the fastest growing Native American language. We may speculate that this due