Not to pile on, but this article makes a fairly egregious history blunder, as well. Navajos (and athabascans generally) did originate in western Canada, but the Navajo and Apache people were resident in the US Southwest long before Europeans showed up. The "Long Walk" was a forced re-location from one part of New Mexico to another, and unrelated to Navajo migration from the north.
Why Navajo is one of the most difficult languages (2023)
61–70 of 91 posts
Re: Why Navajo is one of the most difficult languages (2023)
#62Earlier 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…
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% German…
Arguably English became the default by a very large historical chance: that Napoleon sold off his North American colonies - a huge swathe of what is now the United States - to finance his wars in Europe. At the same time that both France and England were sniffing around Australia, France again was distracted by its wars.
Both the United States and Australia could very easily have been French speaking, and if they had been, I suggest we'd be having this discussion sur internet en français
Re: Why Navajo is one of the most difficult languages (2023)
#63Earlier 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”.
> English is the only language adaptable enough that it can refer to itself with a Latin phrase that literally means “French”.
lolinder has already pointed out that this is untrue, but I should note that it's also logically impossible - the Latin phrase referring to French would be lingua Latina, the Latin tongue. If you interpret lingua Franca as Latin, you get "the Frankish tongue", which is a variety of Germanic.
Re: Why Navajo is one of the most difficult languages (2023)
#64Earlier 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…
"The Year 1000" by Lacey and Danziger explains this well in slightly more detail, with some references, for anyone that would like to learn more. The other reference I have on the shelf that I will check for this is David Crystal's "The Stories of English". Any other good references out there?
Re: Why Navajo is one of the most difficult languages (2023)
#65Earlier 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…
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% German…
If you're arguing from simplicity, Mandarin actually has very simple grammar - much simpler than any of the other languages you mention (no gender, no inflections, no declensions at all), and learning to speak it is not as difficult as people seem to think. Learning their ridiculous writing system (which is morphosyllabic, not ideogram-based) is another question.
The reason Mandarin is not an international language and English is, is because learning English as your L2 gives you the ability to speak to people in the United States and England and Australia and New Zealand and India and lot more besides, where learning Mandarin gives you the ability to speak to people in ... China (and even then, historically, only one small part of China).
Re: Why Navajo is one of the most difficult languages (2023)
#66Earlier 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…
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% German…
> nouns have no gender !!!!
English nouns have a person/nonperson gender distinction that requires agreement by relativizers.
Compare:
1. The girl who I met yesterday
2. *The burger who I ate yesterday
This gender distinction is hazily applied to the third-person pronouns he (person), she (person), and it (nonperson), which is why different people may see referring to babies with it as normal usage, or as grossly offensive.
Re: Why Navajo is one of the most difficult languages (2023)
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
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% German…
> nouns have no gender !!!! English nouns have a person/nonperson gender distinction that requires agreement by relativizers. Compare: 1. The girl who I met yesterday 2. *The burger who I ate yesterday This gender distinction is hazily applied to the third-person pronouns he (person), she (person), and it (nonperson), which is why different people may see referring to babies with it as normal usage, or as grossly off…
That's not grammatical gender. Most people can distinguish between persons and nonpersons and map that onto the correct pronoun or relativizer to use.
But in German the girl you met yesterday is neuter, and the burger you ate yesterday is masculine, and you need to know that to form a grammatically correct sentence about them.
Re: Why Navajo is one of the most difficult languages (2023)
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It becomes more correct when you consider that the reason for 'Franks' being applied to all Western Europeans is that it was used as a name for themselves by a big part of that population—the people who went on to become the French.
Re: Why Navajo is one of the most difficult languages (2023)
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> What this definition means is that you can't get it under 40 if your goal is to be understood 100% of the time.
That isn't really right; you can go below 40 without making any detectible dent in how often you're understood. That would cause problems if you only ever spoke in single-word utterances, but if you did that, no one would understand you anyway.
People blame a lot of communication problems on pronunciation when they actually arise from other sources. I once asked a student at an English-immersion school whether a particular class was happening that day, and was confused by his answer of "poss". When he clarified "stop", I was able to guess what he meant, and he got upset and asked whether the difference between "poss" and "pause" was really so important to English speakers.
It isn't; the problem is that you can't use "pause" to refer to the one-off cancellation of a periodic event. If you're using the word appropriately and you can't pronounce /z/, no one is ever going to be confused, not least because there is no word /pɑs/ to be confused about. But if you can't pronounce English and you can't speak it either, people will be confused when you try to say things. Trying to work on your pronunciation is absolutely the wrong approach to that problem; if you get it up to being flawless, most of the confusion you were struggling with will still occur.
Re: Why Navajo is one of the most difficult languages (2023)
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
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”.
> English is the only language adaptable enough that it can refer to itself with a Latin phrase that literally means “French”. lolinder has already pointed out that this is untrue, but I should note that it's also logically impossible - the Latin phrase referring to French would be lingua Latina , the Latin tongue. If you interpret lingua Franca as Latin, you get "the Frankish tongue", which is a variety of Germanic.
Never in the course of history has "the Latin phrase referring to French" been "lingua Latina". If anything "lingua rustica" or "lingua Romana", but that was before vulgar Latin—not Latin—had evolved into a separate language.