Ya'll come talk to me when you have to deal with names like, Dziłnaa'ooditłee, łééchąą'í, łįį', dloziłgaii, and (my personal favorite) tł'izichǫǫ (if you can say this word without breaking your tongue then you are a candidate for learning the Navajo language).
I'll give you a little pronunciation guide to help you understand the difficulty.
This ł is called the voiceless L. The best way to describe how it sounds is to say the word clue without the C. Say it a couple of times and then take out the UE and just pronounce that L sound. Now apply that to the words above.
The apostrophe is called a glottal stop. Say uh oh. The glottal stop is what happens between uh and oh. Uh with a cutoff and then oh. UH - OH.
Any vowel with a hook underneath is nasalized. They are pronounced like regular vowels but using your mouth and nose to produce the right sound. Think of the french word bon or the fran in Français.
Any letter with this ń on top of it is a high tone. You go up in pitch. If it doesn't have the accent mark then you keep the same tone. You'll find a lot of words that combine the two. Get the tone wrong and you can be saying a completely different word and usually with negative consequences.
Finally and also my favorite. The infamous tł combination. The letter t combined with a voiceless L. Which brings us back to this word: tł'izichǫǫ and why I think it's the one word that shows proficiency in Navajo and deserves a certificate or medal or some shit like that. To pronounce this monster you need to think about the word clue again. Only this time replace the c with t and practice.
After you think you have it down, remove the ue in and just pronounce the tl. At this point you should be spitting out of the side of your mouth like a cat. Now, the hard part. Yes it gets harder. Add the glottal stop. You should sound a bit like a flat tire going round and round tl' tl' tl' tl' Once again, you don't pronounce the L like an English L it's voiceless.
Now give this a try: tł'izi (this means goat) Now the full word. tł'izichǫǫ Which means Billy Goat or male goat. You have to be very careful here. If you don't nasalize the o sound it will mean goat gonads. If you go more towards an A (without nasalization) sound you're saying goat hat. If you nasalize it and it sounds like an A? goat shit.
Now do you see why the Navajo Code Talkers were so successful during WWII? It's a tough language to learn.
. My kids have regular names..but my grandkids names I can't even spell!...lol
