táni-l’ái can anyone tell me how to pronounce in Navajo?

Question

Looking for the Navajo way to pronounce this word. Phonetically would be great.

Need the pronouniation for the word for dragonfly (táni-l’ái) in Navajo. Phonetically would be great!

Answer 1

You spelt it incorrectly. The correct spelling is

tániil'éí

As previosly mentioned, the letters with the accent ague symbolize a high-tone sound.

á is similar to saying "ahhh" except it is a short sound.

The two i's together are called a glide vowel which means the sound is slightly elongated. The "i" is also pronounced like the English vowel "e".

The ' is a glottal stop. Think of the sound you make if you were to say "huh?" to someone. That feeling at the back of your throat is a glottal stop. This glottal stop occurs at the beginning of the dipthong, éí.

'éí is pronounced like "eh" and "e" put together.

The etymology goes something likes this. "tá" implies movement. "niil" implies being motionless, and " 'éí" means 'that one' or 'that thing'. Put it all together and you get "that thing that moves around and stops". The Diné, or Navajo, language is a metaphorical language. Many of the words we use actually describe an object or action. If you've ever seen a dragonfly, you'll understand why it's called "tániil'éí".

Answer 2

I am not an expert on Navajo, but this is my guess based on my knowledge of linguistics.

One thing I know for sure is that Navajo is a tone language, (with two tones -- high pitch and low pitch, I assume).
Therefore, I suspect that the marks above the "a"s are tone markers, indicating that those two syllables should be pronounced with high pitch.
The apostrophe after the l is probably a marker of glottal stop, which is a consonant that is produced when you simply bring the vocal chords together and stop vibrating them. It's the sound that some English speakers produce at the end of a word like "cut", when we don't articulate the "t" with the tongue but rather in the throat.
I have no idea what the hyphen is for, but I'm guessing it's representing the origin of the word, not the pronunciation.

My guess is the "a" would represent the same vowel sound as in the English "cot", and the "i" would represent the same vowel sound as in the English "see" (but shorter than in either of these English words).

So, putting this all together, you have:
ta (high pitch, same vowel as "cot"), ni (same vowel as "see", low pitch), l a (high pitch), i (low pitch) -- making a total of four syllables

This guess is consistent with the wikipedia article on the Navajo language. But I don't speak Navajo at all. You might want to have a Navajo speaker pronounce it for you and then imitate the pronunciation.

Answer 3

Nav Ah ho