Young, Robert W., 1959-....

Robert W. Young, linguist, was born on May 18, 1912 in Chicago, IL. Following graduation from the University of Illinois, in 1935, he enrolled in anthropology at the University of New Mexico. There he became interested in the Navajo language and he was invited to collaborate with John P. Harrington of the Smithsonian Institution in the translation of a series of primers for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In 1939-40, he accompanied Harrington to Canada for comparative fieldwork with four Athabaskan languages.

Subsequently, during the period 1940-1971, he was employed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, first as a Specialist in Indian Languages, and after 1950, in Navajo Tribal Relations. In 1971, he joined the staff of the Modern Languages Department at the University of New Mexico where he taught classes in Navajo Linguistics and collaborated with Professor Bernard Spolsky in research conducted by the Navajo Reading Study. It was during this period that a grant was received from the National Endowment for the Humanities to permit Young, jointly with his longtime Navajo colleague, William Morgan Sr., to embark on a major project designed for the compilation of an extensive bilingual Navajo-English/English-Navajo dictionary and grammar. It was published in 1980 under the title, The Navajo Language: A Grammar and Colloquial Dictionary . This work was published again in 1987 in revised form, and this was followed in 1992 by An Analytical Lexicon of Navajo, compiled with the assistance of Sally Midgette. Both works were published by the University of New Mexico Press.

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