h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Could anyone tell me what the Navajo word tse'gíhi means? I've looked in many translating sites, but none of them seem to have Navajo in them. If it helps, this word can be found untranslated in the Navajo poem The Night Chant. Thank you for your help.

don't give up. Ask the gurus - particularly Wandrin' Star. Go to her page and post the question there or go to the British English thread and ask everyone in that. There's some pretty clever people in there. Sorry can't help myself.

A dictionary of American Indian terms gives Tsegihi as a "sacred place of unknown location".

That sounds good! I mean I can't help *you*' myself.

I'd thought it meant graveyard, but since I can't think why I thought that it's probably not right. I'd go with the dictionary answer if I were you.
HTH,
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Here's a more elaborate discussion:



32Evers ("Words and Place") makes much this same case when he points out that Ben's Night Chant "begins with the culturally significant geographical reference: Tségihi" and goes on to imply that, as a healing song, the Night Chant (or any other healing chant) would be less efficacious were it not grounded in a particular landscape: "ceremonial words are bound efficaciously to place" (225). In The Names, Momaday translates "Tsegi" as "`place among the rocks,' sacred ground (Navajo)" (170); a better translation, perhaps, would be "canyon." The suffix -hi, in the Navajo language, is a particularizing and noun-forming inflitic.
Among Navajos today, I'm told, the word "tsegi" is commonly used to refer to the canyon country around Kayenta (the place Ben thinks of as "home"); a few generations ago it would probably have more commonly denoted the place named by the Spanish "Cañon de Chelly." In Landmarks of Healing Scarberry-García says that Tségihi is "the name of a canyon north of the San Juan River in Navajo country" (7) and that Tségihi is the name given to Canyon de Chelly in the story informing the Night Chant (78).

I plonked that chunk of text into the discussion because I don't know anything about Navajo myself, so I would only confuse things by commenting on it. Make of it what you will.

Thank you for all your answers, it's just what I needed.