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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)

#71

Post by thaumasiotes »

brettp wrote: post #67
thaumasiotes wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That is grammatical gender. Grammatical gender is a property inherent to words that requires agreement by other words. There's no other definition. Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Inanimate_gender .

You failed to distinguish the concepts even in your own terms; a girl is a person, and a burger isn't, and you need to know that to form a grammatical sentence about them.

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

#72

Post by brettp »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #71
brettp wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is grammatical gender. Grammatical gender is a property inherent to words that requires agreement by other words. There's no other definition. Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Inanimate_gender . You failed to distinguish the concepts even in your own terms; a girl is a person, and a burger isn't, and you need to know that to form a grammatical sentence about them.

The point is: grammatical gender (noun classes) are arbitrary.

Even though a girl is a person the gender of a girl (das Mädchen) is neuter in German. You need to know that grammatical gender to form a grammatically correct sentence - you do in fact need to say "it" ("er") in your sentence referring to the girl you met yesterday.

A girl is person and a burger isn't, but in German a girl is an "it" and a burger is a "he".

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

#73

Post by shiroiushi »

brettp wrote: post #52
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…

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

I have. German is complicated, but it's regular. The plurals are crazy, but they're regular: once you know the rule for them and how they map to singular/plural and case and gender, you can apply it everywhere.

"Orderly and precise" doesn't mean simple. A Rube Goldberg machine can be orderly and precise, while still looking like a ridiculous amount of unnecessary complexity.

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

#75

Post by milch »

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…

> In reality, they made absolutely zero effort to understand me when my pronunciation differed slightly from the correct one, on countless occasions. And believe me, I tried.

I found this quite interesting about Japan. I went on vacation there recently, and especially in more rural places many people do not speak English. I don't speak Japanese, just picking up a few words while there. The people there put an immense amount of effort trying to understand what you're saying, e.g. somehow we managed to explain to a taxi driver the location of our hotel using only some elementary words like water, station, train tracks, up/down/left/right, yes/no, please/thank you. They are also very appreciative and often find it quite funny/interesting when you try to speak Japanese, even just simple words. As another example we also had an incident where a random passerby noticed we were trying to find our way, so (I assume) he asked us where we were trying to go, and then led us to the right bus stop. IME any similar situation in the US would more likely lead to people avoiding eye contact or pretending to be busy than trying to help, certainly not proactively without being asked to

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

#76

Post by kamaal »

xwolfi wrote: post #46
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…

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…

>>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 !

All of this is secondary, the real deal is more knowledge, especially useful knowledge is generated, and has been generated in the English language for a while now.

If you want access to the knowledge ecosystem of the world, want to learn skills, trade, want jobs, want to do business you have to learn english.

The other cultures just never caught on with this one simple thing. You have to make rationality, scientific temper and coherence the very foundational basis for your society. And then you need run these processes for long. Decades to centuries for your language to now become the carrier of knowledge. Until then other arguments are irrelevant.

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

#77

Post by thaumasiotes »

brettp wrote: post #72
thaumasiotes wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is grammatical gender. Grammatical gender is a property inherent to words that requires agreement by other words. There's no other definition. Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Inanimate_gender . You failed to distinguish the concepts even in your own terms; a girl is a person, and a burger isn't, and you need to know that to form a grammatical sentence about them.

The point is: grammatical gender (noun classes) are arbitrary. Even though a girl is a person the gender of a girl (das Mädchen) is neuter in German. You need to know that grammatical gender to form a grammatically correct sentence - you do in fact need to say "it" ("er") in your sentence referring to the girl you met yesterday. A girl is person and a burger isn't, but in German a girl is an "it" and a burger is a "h…

Noun classes aren't arbitrary in general. Conflation of random objects with male and female life forms is arbitrary. But it's more arbitrary than is typical for noun classes.

Taking sex-based gender distinctions for our example, we can observe that Chinese speakers aren't able to correctly choose between the English pronouns he and she, despite the fact that this distinction isn't arbitrary in the slightest (and Chinese speakers routinely make it themselves in other contexts!). The reason is simply that their native language doesn't make the distinction, not that the distinction is theoretically difficult to make.

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

#78

Post by euroderf »

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…

Agreed. For so many words in common usage, English spelling (vis-à-vis pronunciation) is aggressively misleading, deceptive, pain-inducing.

In the grand scheme of things, it's unfortunate that English lazily conquered the internet without any kind of preventive maintenance rooted in critical thinking. It's not nutty (maybe just futile) to argue that English desperately needs fixing. The distributed nature of English should be encouraging for experimentation.

Most native English speakers just roll over and succumb to Stockholm Syndrome.

Every would-be/aspiring spelling reformer has mentally composed a manifesto of righteousness.

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

#79

Post by maxerickson »

euroderf wrote: post #78
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…

Agreed. For so many words in common usage, English spelling (vis-à-vis pronunciation) is aggressively misleading, deceptive, pain-inducing. In the grand scheme of things, it's unfortunate that English lazily conquered the internet without any kind of preventive maintenance rooted in critical thinking. It's not nutty (maybe just futile) to argue that English desperately needs fixing. The distributed nature of English…

If you want to reform spelling of English words, the thing to do is to start. There's no one to make a prescriptive mandate, and it anyway wouldn't work.

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

#80

Post by euroderf »

maxerickson wrote: post #79
euroderf wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. For so many words in common usage, English spelling (vis-à-vis pronunciation) is aggressively misleading, deceptive, pain-inducing. In the grand scheme of things, it's unfortunate that English lazily conquered the internet without any kind of preventive maintenance rooted in critical thinking. It's not nutty (maybe just futile) to argue that English desperately needs fixing. The distributed nature of English…

If you want to reform spelling of English words, the thing to do is to start. There's no one to make a prescriptive mandate, and it anyway wouldn't work.

Distributed means opt-in only. Which means naming & categorizing & organizing.
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