Hehehe, Mindboxer, that's close to being right --- I never knew that Snowboarders magazine was a good source of linguistics lessons, LOL! In Navajo, the natural world is seen as ranked hierarchically. It's a little hard to explain though: it's not so much that one kind of creature (eg, a human) is smarter or more advanced than another (eg, a horse); it's just that they are thought to have more independent will, if that makes any sense. The creature who is ranked higher is in control of the situation, and therefore is the subject in any sentence, while the lower creature is the object. Thus: The man allowed the horse to kick him, rather than the horse kicked the man.

Too late at night for me to launch into a proper explanation of the ideological significance of this way of linguistically ordering the world. The SFC Institute of Linguistics will, however, return sometime later with an explanation of how the Hopi categorize every object by shape and conjugate verbs accordingly, or some other equally inane piece of trivia, the moment something triggers my automatic lecture mode switch again! *giggling*

--- sweetstuff

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