Talk:Ééʼ neishoodii

Alternate definition?

Can this also mean (without being capitalized) missionary or missionaries? Other sources indicate this. 71.66.97.228 05:51, 29 January 2010 (UTC)

I don’t know the different terminology and what the differences are in them, but it means clergyman. If a missionary is a clergyman, then I guess it can. It shouldn’t be capitalized in any case. Capitalizing everything is something that English and German does, and there is no reason to capitalize clergyman in Navajo. —Stephen 06:44, 29 January 2010 (UTC)

This makes sense, but right now the definition is listed as Catholic Church (the institution) rather than the people who make it up. Not sure if that's correct, being an example of synecdoche. That's why it's capitalized, because I thought it meant the actual Catholic Church. 71.66.97.228 06:48, 29 January 2010 (UTC)

Yes, it can also mean the Catholic Church. It’s a figure of speech where a part stands for the whole. Navajo barely capitalizes anything. Even the word for Navajo, diné, doesn’t have to be capitalized, nor the word for the old Navajo country, dinétah. When you envelope a so-called proper noun in a veil of grammar and affixes and change it from a noun into a verb, it is hard to decide if you should capitalize the first letter of the first prefix, or the first letter of the first root word on which the meaning is based, or whether anything at all should be capitalized. So capitalizing is a big handicap in polysynthetic languages such as this and is not observed. —Stephen 06:59, 29 January 2010 (UTC)