Dineh Bizad, Navaho, His Language

This small 4 x 6 inch handbook written by Presbyterian missionary Frederick G Mitchel is  “ . .  the fruit of a sincere desire to help those who seek a working knowledge of the Navaho language.”   It includes an alphabet with English sound words, conjugated verbs, an English-Navaho word list and other subject-oriented word lists for places, travel, greetings, time and seasons, money and numbers, personal pronouns, parts of the body, and family relations.  In warning the reader how difficult Navaho is to learn, Mitchell could never have dreamed that difficulty would turn into an asset decades later during World War II.