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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)

#51

Post by brettp »

shiroiushi wrote: post #48
brettp wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Dutch isn't an international language because they just weren't as good at colonisation as Britain, or Spain. (And Belgium would like a word with you if you think no-one else speaks Dutch.)

Look at the international languages before English - Latin and Greek - both beasts of languages to learn. Vulgar Latin's simplified offspring (French, Italian, Spanish) are largely the result of second language learners casting off the bits of Latin they couldn't or wouldn't learn.

I don't believe that English borrows more profligately than any other language. Historically it was hugely influenced by Norman French but nowadays I'd suggest more languages borrow from English than English does from other languages. The eternal fight between the Académie française and the people who actually speak French over borrowed words vs "native" ones is a good example of this.

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

#52

Post by brettp »

shiroiushi wrote: post #48
brettp wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

... and if you think that German is "orderly and precise" then you've obviously never had to learn its plurals.

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

#53

Post by Retric »

yongjik wrote: post #44
Retric wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’ve seen groups use English even when other languages are more well known in terms of number of people or levels of fluency.

Broken English works better than broken French / German. Not sure about Spanish, but something is going on beyond English winning because it was already ahead.

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

#54

Post by gattilorenz »

brettp wrote: post #51
shiroiushi wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Dutch isn't an international language because they just weren't as good at colonisation as Britain, or Spain. (And Belgium would like a word with you if you think no-one else speaks Dutch.) Look at the international languages before English - Latin and Greek - both beasts of languages to learn. Vulgar Latin's simplified offspring (French, Italian, Spanish) are largely the result of second language learners casting of…

> Vulgar Latin's simplified offspring (French, Italian, Spanish) are largely the result of second language learners casting off the bits of Latin they couldn't or wouldn't learn

If Latin was tbe second language and Spanish/Italian was not there yet, what was their main language then?

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

#55

Post by sersi »

shiroiushi wrote: post #48
brettp wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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?

That has more to do with the way the Dutch administered their colonies than anything else. Take Indonesia for example, they didn't push Dutch that much and instead let Bahasa Indonesia stay the lingua franca. While some people could speak Dutch and there were some schools, it's not been pushed on the population. See this answer on reddit discussing this https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/hg6sz3/how_c...

On the other hand, French is also a frustrating language with complicated grammar yet a lot of people in Africa still speak the language. That's due to the different philosophy of French colonialism which was the so-called "mission civilisatrice" (as an example see Jules Ferry's speeches among many others). A part of that was enforcing the use of French within its colonies.

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

#56

Post by [deleted] »

brettp wrote: post #51
shiroiushi wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Dutch isn't an international language because they just weren't as good at colonisation as Britain, or Spain. (And Belgium would like a word with you if you think no-one else speaks Dutch.) Look at the international languages before English - Latin and Greek - both beasts of languages to learn. Vulgar Latin's simplified offspring (French, Italian, Spanish) are largely the result of second language learners casting of…

[deleted]

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

#57

Post by sersi »

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…

> 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.

I speak a few languages (French, English, Japanese, German, Spanish, Chinese), some fluently, some less so and, honestly, in all of these languages, I can use tiny differences to other people based on social status, geography etc... It's easy in Mandarin despite me not being able to speak it that well. Japanese has a lot of variation between regions. I can quickly tell the level of education of someone speaking French (my native language) as well as guess where they're likely to be from, etc... I don't think that English is any different from any other languages on those points.

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

#58

Post by brettp »

gumby wrote: post #37
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…

> 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,…

It's actually not that difficult to tell the pronunciation of a French word from its spelling - the rules are pretty consistent (much more consistent and fewer of them than English). However, it's much more difficult to guess the spelling from the pronunciation due to the number of homophones and silent letters.

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

#59

Post by brettp »

gattilorenz wrote: post #54
brettp wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dutch isn't an international language because they just weren't as good at colonisation as Britain, or Spain. (And Belgium would like a word with you if you think no-one else speaks Dutch.) Look at the international languages before English - Latin and Greek - both beasts of languages to learn. Vulgar Latin's simplified offspring (French, Italian, Spanish) are largely the result of second language learners casting of…

> Vulgar Latin's simplified offspring (French, Italian, Spanish) are largely the result of second language learners casting off the bits of Latin they couldn't or wouldn't learn If Latin was tbe second language and Spanish/Italian was not there yet, what was their main language then?

Celtic languages like Gaulish or Germanic ones like Frankish.

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

#60

Post by Symbiote »

g15jv2dp wrote: post #28
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 becoming the "international" language for the west has nothing to do with English as a language, and everything to do with geopolitics and economics. As for being treated as an outsider, I actually moved and lived to the US for close to a year. I made tons of effort to try and speak good English. On the face of it, the locals were very appreciative - French accent is so romantic, am I right? In reality, they…

I would like to hear from someone who lived in Britain for a year, but I think British people are far more tolerant and willing to listen.

(Failing to realise the L in would, should and could is silent, so would and wood are pronounced identically, is half the French accent.)

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