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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)

#41

Post by idontwantthis »

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…

English is the lingua franca, because English is the only language adaptable enough that it can refer to itself with a Latin phrase that literally means “French”.

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

#42

Post by philwelch »

lolinder wrote: post #31
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…

> 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…

Is this also why English has so many words? I know we doubled up on words by keeping both the Anglo-Saxon and Norman French words for the same basic concepts, but did we really be up with even more to make up for the simpler grammar?

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

#43

Post by philwelch »

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…

What’s the minimum number of phonemes you could use in English and still be understood, even if you’d easily be clocked as having a foreign accent? I bet you could get it under 40.

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

#44

Post by yongjik »

Retric wrote: post #38
yongjik wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

The "inherent advantage" of English is basically the same advantage of Facebook and Instagram: people use them because other people use them. When a Korean meets a Greek, chances are that neither knows each other's language but they both know English. So they converse in English.

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

#45

Post by lolinder »

idontwantthis wrote: post #41
yongjik wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

English is the lingua franca, because English is the only language adaptable enough that it can refer to itself with a Latin phrase that literally means “French”.

Sorry, I have to chime in here again with more linguistic pedantry: "Lingua Franca" doesn't mean "French". The term referred to a trade language spoken throughout the Mediterranean [0], named for Western European traders (the Byzantines called all Western Europeans Franks).

French later became one of many lingua francas, but that was after the term was already in common usage to refer to any language used as a bridge.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca

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

#46

Post by xwolfi »

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…

Hum but English has simpler features that make it easier to learn than most languages. Sure, the phonetic is hard and I'll always have an accent and people will always just guess my country at the first sentence I utter, but:

- nouns have no gender !!!!

- conjugation is extremely simple (only one variation for 3rd person singular for most verbs!!)

- tenses are limited !

- vocabulary is 40% French-Latin and 60% Germanic, most of Europe and America can use the subset they prefer

- the writing is latin, simple to learn, complete enough to describe well the sounds

- the native community is immense, with a large interesting cultural body of work, making it interesting to learn

- it's easy to start communicating but it can be extremely rich in higher levels of language: you start talking quickly and then can move to beautiful structures later: there is a quick reward and a long term reward

There is nothing unfortunate it became default, there is simply no better lingua franca today. We could try Japanese or Chinese, Hindi or Spanish, but they all have way more quirks and way less qualities !

I strongly reject people saying that English became default by historical chance, it could have stayed French, moved to German or Spanish, it SHOULD be Chinese, but all of them are too hard for adults to learn as quickly as English and never as rewarding. Just think of the time it takes to learn an ideogram-based writing system, all that to end up able to read only communist propaganda or very old poetry for instance...

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

#47

Post by lolinder »

philwelch wrote: post #42
lolinder wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Is this also why English has so many words? I know we doubled up on words by keeping both the Anglo-Saxon and Norman French words for the same basic concepts, but did we really be up with even more to make up for the simpler grammar?

Probably not.

Most of our words are content words, and the near-duplicates are, as you say, the result of borrowing from various other languages. These words don't serve a grammatical role and we could make do without them just fine.

The words that serve to replace grammatical features that exist in other Indo-European languages are a very small subset of our words—words like "will", "may" the prepositions, and similar. Non-natives will reach for other words to substitute for these grammar words when they're unsure which grammar word to use, but I don't think that's why those other words exist.

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

#48

Post by shiroiushi »

brettp wrote: post #39
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…

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 m…

>English is not "sloppy", not any more than any other language.

Yes it is, and you say so yourself:

>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.

Most other languages don't borrow words so profligately, and have much more regular relationships between their written form and their pronunciation.

>but many features of modern English are the result of so many people learning and speaking it.

Right, and that makes the language "sloppy", which was my point before. You can't have a language shared by so many different people and cultures as a common trade language and have it stay as orderly and precise as German, for example.

>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

Yes, and these features all make the language much easier for people to adopt as an international language, despite the sloppiness. I have a hard time imagining Russian or German having had this success in a parallel universe. As an example, look at Dutch: the Netherlands is another country that got rich from trade, and was also a colonial power. But who outside of the Netherlands speaks Dutch? South Africa is the only place the language actually went anywhere. Meanwhile, the former colonies of Spain all still use Spanish.

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

#49

Post by lolinder »

philwelch wrote: post #43
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…

What’s the minimum number of phonemes you could use in English and still be understood, even if you’d easily be clocked as having a foreign accent? I bet you could get it under 40.

The definition of a phoneme is that there exists some pair of words that are only distinguishable because of a difference in that specific sound (called 'minimal pairs').

As a trivial example: "hat" and "bat" => /h/ and /b/ are phonemes.

A more complicated example: "teeth" and "teethe" => /θ/ (voiceless th) and /ð/ (voiced th) are phonemes.

We have many other sound variants—phones [0]—which are important to get right if you want to not have an accent but which aren't actually used to distinguish one word from another. Pairs of these are called allophones [1], and probably the easiest example to think of in English is all the many ways we pronounce /t/.

What this definition means is that you can't get it under 40 if your goal is to be understood 100% of the time. We have 40-49 sounds (depending on accent) that are used to distinguish words, and if you don't have one of those in your toolbox then you will occasionally be misunderstood.

You could probably select a few that make it unlikely to come up often (/θ/ and /ð/ are good candidates), but you could also likely do the same for any other language, Navajo included.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phone_(phonetics)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone

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

#50

Post by philwelch »

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.

> 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.

Eh, I’m not sure. There are probably ways to infer whether or not e.g. Mandarin Chinese is harder for Chinese children to learn than English is for American children to learn. In fact I’ve seen a fairly convincing argument that this is the case!

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