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Why Navajo is one of the most difficult languages (2023)

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Re: Why Navajo is one of the most difficult languages (2023)

#31

Post by lolinder »

shiroiushi wrote: post #26
ViktorRay wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excellent comment. English is hard to learn also because the alphabet doesn’t convey this complexity. In other languages one can easily tell the precise pronunciation of a word just from how it was written because the alphabet of those languages contain all the consonants and vowels. This isn’t the case with English. Sometimes I wonder about how unfortunate perhaps it may be that a language like English became the “d…

>Sometimes I wonder about how unfortunate perhaps it may be that a language like English became the “default one” for the world. The language is so sloppy with accents and different pronunciations that people can use tiny differences to “other” people based on social status, geography, and so on. It arguably became the default international language of trade because it's so sloppy, and more precisely because the lang…

> it's pretty easy to understand "broken English", which again is part of why it works so well for trade.

Which, while I'm here geeking out about linguistics anyway, allows me to break out one of my favorite tidbits about the history of English:

"Broken English" is super easy to understand in large part due to the fact that Modern English was forged as a sort of pidgin at the intersection of Old English, Scandinavian, and then French. The crazy admixture of peoples in England between 800 and 1200 meant that most of the complicated grammatical bits of the language got sanded down to the essentials. English lost grammatical gender, its full case system, noun classes (mostly), most declensions, and on and on.

What replaced all that is actually a relatively simple grammatical system (on the scale of Indo-European systems) that relies a lot more on adding words than on modifying suffixes. And adding words is a game anyone can play—you may not pick the same modifiers as a native would, but you'll get your point across!

Re: Why Navajo is one of the most difficult languages (2023)

#32

Post by FredPret »

I did a linguistics course by the amazing John McWhorter.

He discussed how much-used languages have lots of adults learning it, badly. This smooths the rough edges away over time.

But tiny languages can be as hard as our brains can accommodate, which is very hard.

Re: Why Navajo is one of the most difficult languages (2023)

#33

Post by sinkasapa »

yongjik wrote: post #14

The comment by cool_dude85 was a bit impolite but I agree that this is a low quality article. E.g., almost any linguist will tell you that you can't objectively measure a language's difficulty, because it always depends on what's the native language of the person asking the question. Also, of course, comparing the number of sounds to the number of English alphabets makes absolutely zero sense.

Right, these are exactly the types of claims we try to debunk in Linguistics 101. It is a horribly misleading article. If one wants to see if something about a language is difficult for human beings, I suppose one can look at the point in development that children master the concept. But even that can be misleading, since there are language internal factors that can lead children to pick up a particular aspect of grammar faster in one language than another. In English, noun-verb agreement comprehension is relatively late, but the same concept is comprehended relatively early in French, though according to one article, not necessarily in Spanish [1]. One can't simply look at a language in isolation and say it seems hard to me, so it must be universally difficult. Navajo may seem relatively easy to pick up if one already speaks an Athabaskan language.

1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00243...

Re: Why Navajo is one of the most difficult languages (2023)

#34

Post by sinkasapa »

Cupertino95014 wrote: post #2

What I like about the code talkers is: the Japanese knew it was Navajo. But even that wasn't enough, because they used particular code words, so even if you knew Navago it didn't solve the problem.

The code talkers didn't just talk in Navajo but utilized a code system based on Navajo [1]. There were also code talkers who spoke other Native American languages.

1. https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/navajo-code-talkers-and-th...

Re: Why Navajo is one of the most difficult languages (2023)

#35

Post by CorrectHorseBat »

fastball wrote: post #7
cool_dude85 wrote: post #3

[flagged]

I'm not really understanding your criticism. It seems reasonable to assume that a more complex alphabet generally results in a more complex language. After all, when teaching language, a decent amount of time is spent just memorizing letters. Almost double the number of letters would make that task alone twice as hard. Of course, you could then make the argument that these vowels are encapsulated in English (as the s…

For the vast majority of history, the vast majority of people could not read or write. We also only learn to read or write long after we learn to speak, so it does not seam reasonable to me that more complex alphabet results in a more complex language.

Chinese and Japanese have arguably some of the most complex "alphabets" (yes, Japanese has hiragana/katana, but they are more recent and Chinese only uses pinyin/bopomofo since the last century) and they have some of the least complex sounds of all languages.

Re: Why Navajo is one of the most difficult languages (2023)

#36

Post by jandrewrogers »

ViktorRay wrote: post #24
lolinder wrote: post #17

> Navajo also has a complex phenology [sic], featuring sounds that don’t exist in many other languages. It counts 33 consonants, including affricates and fricatives, and 12 vowels. (By comparison, the English alphabet has 21 and 5, respectively). Someone else clarified this [0] but got flagged to death for being a bit too harsh, but I do think it's worth mentioning because this is used mistakenly as a prominent examp…

Excellent comment. English is hard to learn also because the alphabet doesn’t convey this complexity. In other languages one can easily tell the precise pronunciation of a word just from how it was written because the alphabet of those languages contain all the consonants and vowels. This isn’t the case with English. Sometimes I wonder about how unfortunate perhaps it may be that a language like English became the “d…

English is a mess but the pronunciation seems to be fault tolerant. Most skilled speakers can understand people that butcher the complicated pronunciation because it is highly diverse even among native speakers that notionally speak the same dialect. I do wonder if the extreme globalization of English has distilled a robust core that is pronunciation resistant. I have noticed that international English makes word choices that limit pronunciation ambiguity.

Re: Why Navajo is one of the most difficult languages (2023)

#37

Post by gumby »

ViktorRay wrote: post #24
lolinder wrote: post #17

> Navajo also has a complex phenology [sic], featuring sounds that don’t exist in many other languages. It counts 33 consonants, including affricates and fricatives, and 12 vowels. (By comparison, the English alphabet has 21 and 5, respectively). Someone else clarified this [0] but got flagged to death for being a bit too harsh, but I do think it's worth mentioning because this is used mistakenly as a prominent examp…

Excellent comment. English is hard to learn also because the alphabet doesn’t convey this complexity. In other languages one can easily tell the precise pronunciation of a word just from how it was written because the alphabet of those languages contain all the consonants and vowels. This isn’t the case with English. Sometimes I wonder about how unfortunate perhaps it may be that a language like English became the “d…

> In other languages one can easily tell the precise pronunciation of a word just from how it was written

Some other languages. Just considering the Latin alphabet: French pronunciation is so far from spelling that spelling bees used to be (may still be) prime time television. Words in Spanish and Portuguese may be written in a deterministic fashion, yet pronounced quite differently in different countries.

And sure, German spelling does reflect pronunciation…because the spelling has been changed from time to time to match shifts in pronunciation…specifically the pronunciation used by a small number of people in Niedersachsen. Elsewhere in Germany (much less Switzerland) the local pronunciation can be incomprehensible. (This was the case in the UK and France until the advent of radio and then especially TV).

And that’s just four examples using basically the same alphabet. This phenomenon is common to all living languages. Even dead languages, for that matter: the Latin and (classical) Greek pronunciation I had to use in high school was a UK version different from that typically used in the USA or (based on one person I met), Sweden!

And do you really think the same thing doesn’t happen with Arabic, Hindi et al?

English ain’t so special.

Re: Why Navajo is one of the most difficult languages (2023)

#38

Post by Retric »

yongjik wrote: post #29
shiroiushi wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Sometimes I wonder about how unfortunate perhaps it may be that a language like English became the “default one” for the world. The language is so sloppy with accents and different pronunciations that people can use tiny differences to “other” people based on social status, geography, and so on. It arguably became the default international language of trade because it's so sloppy, and more precisely because the lang…

I think you reversed cause and effect. English became the world's lingua franca not because of its inherent quality, but because the British Empire once conquered the world, and then the United States took up the baton. Basically the same reason why Latin America speaks Spanish and Portuguese. It's not because the languages were "better" in some way, but because it was conquered by speakers of those languages. And a…

Most languages weren’t in the running. However, Spanish, French, Latin, or English could easily have become the international trade language. German was in the running for Scientific publishing etc yet somehow English won in multiple domains.

And it doesn’t just win officially. I’ve seen groups without a common language default to English with people translating back and forth to other languages as needed even when more than one language was known to several members of the group. It’s not absolute, but there does seem to be an inherent advantage to English when translating across multiple languages.

Re: Why Navajo is one of the most difficult languages (2023)

#39

Post by brettp »

shiroiushi wrote: post #26
ViktorRay wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excellent comment. English is hard to learn also because the alphabet doesn’t convey this complexity. In other languages one can easily tell the precise pronunciation of a word just from how it was written because the alphabet of those languages contain all the consonants and vowels. This isn’t the case with English. Sometimes I wonder about how unfortunate perhaps it may be that a language like English became the “d…

>Sometimes I wonder about how unfortunate perhaps it may be that a language like English became the “default one” for the world. The language is so sloppy with accents and different pronunciations that people can use tiny differences to “other” people based on social status, geography, and so on. It arguably became the default international language of trade because it's so sloppy, and more precisely because the lang…

English is not "sloppy", not any more than any other language. Any language with a large number and geographic spread of speakers will develop varieties and accents. In fact people do it deliberately to distinguish themselves from other speakers of the same language (just take a look at how teenagers' language innovates). French, Spanish, and German all have huge variation in dialects and accents too.

English, like many other languages learnt widely as a trade language by non-native speakers, has lost a lot of complexity, notably case system and gender. (Indonesian is perhaps the canonical example of this.) Unfortunately its spelling was standardized just before it underwent a huge change in pronunciation, and its habit of borrowing words from other languages without changing their spelling, has left it with fairly chaotic orthography. A few phonetic features - unusual consonants like th, difficult to learn rules around stressed syllables, nasty consonant clusters (squirrel!) - do make it tricker than it could be for second language learners.

It didn't become the default international language of trade due to any features of the language itself (it did that thanks to the British Empire and in particular its former colony in North America) - but many features of modern English are the result of so many people learning and speaking it.

Because it is so widely spoken by so many people, it does have a large vocabulary and a lot of idioms. But the grammar is generally not too difficult - no grammatical gender, no case aside from a few pronouns, outside of a handful of irregular verbs conjugations are pretty easy ("put an 's' on the third person singular"), and so on.

Re: Why Navajo is one of the most difficult languages (2023)

#40

Post by FabHK »

lolinder wrote: post #13
xarope wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's reasonably legit. By way of other languages as examples: - words for half-empty/full - Eskimo-Aleut has 50 (?) words for different forms of snow - tonality adds complexity; mandarin (4 tones + neutral), cantonese (9? tones) - and various patois, not just in other languages, but also english (my exceedingly limited source being Graham Norton's youtube videos with the British/Scottish and Americans haha)

> Eskimo-Aleut has 50 (?) words for different forms of snow This one is actually a very good example of the problem that OP is describing of non-linguists writing linguistics pieces. The "50 words for snow" story is one of the first linguistics cautionary tales they'll teach you in a college linguistics course these days, on the same level as the Hyatt Regency walkway collapse is for engineering. The short of it is t…

The excellent Language Log blog has a whole series of articles about the "Eskimo words for snow" myth:

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3497

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=37

https://snowclones.org/2007/05/31/if-eskimos-have-n-words-fo...

And a book:

https://www.amazon.com/Eskimo-Vocabulary-Irreverent-Essays-L...

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