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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)

#81

Post by fastball »

CorrectHorseBat wrote: post #35
fastball wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/bopom…

How exactly do you figure that Chinese has some of the least complex sounds? Chinese not only has just as many sounds as other languages, they also have the added dimension of "tones" which can be very easily described as "sounds" and trip up most people learning the language.

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

#82

Post by lolinder »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #69
lolinder wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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

I meant 100% literally. You can drop below 100% and still not have a detectable dent in understanding, and I even suggest a few phonemes that would make it extremely unlikely to come up.

The fact remains that phonemes are definitionally sounds that can cause confusion if you combine them or drop them, and to arrive at the set of phonemes we already dropped dozens of other sounds that a native speaker would use in certain contexts but that are understandable if you mix them up.

And the fact also remains that if you apply the drop-phonemes-and-see-if-people-understand-you technique to other languages you can reduce their number of phonemes as well, which makes the whole exercise kind of pointless in the context of trying to judge relative difficulties of phonologies.

The definition of phoneme that we use isn't some sort of natural category, but it is what it is because other definitions would be even more arbitrary and less useful.

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

#83

Post by philwelch »

lolinder wrote: post #49
philwelch wrote: post #43

Earlier 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…

> 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.

Okay, what about “cot” and “caught”? In some English dialects those are distinct phonemes, while in other dialects they are not. Yet someone who speaks a dialect without the cot-caught merger can still understand someone who speaks a dialect with the merger, even in the rare case that they use the words “cot” and “caught”, probably because you would never sleep on a caught or say that you cot a cold. Surely the “caught” vowel is one of the nine phonemes between 40 and 49, but I’m arguing that if you can drop nine whole phonemes and still remain mutually intelligible, you could probably drop a couple more and still be understood. For instance, while it isn’t any standard native dialect, Elmer Fudd’s “r/w” merger, while rendering him an object of ridicule, doesn’t seem to impede his intelligibility.

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

#84

Post by thaumasiotes »

lolinder wrote: post #82
thaumasiotes wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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 I meant 100% literally. You can drop below 100% and still not have a detectable dent in understanding, and I even suggest a few phonemes that would make it extremely unlikely to come up. The fact remains that phonemes are definitio…

> I meant 100% literally. You can drop below 100% and still not have a detectable dent in understanding, and I even suggest a few phonemes that would make it extremely unlikely to come up.

Combining /θ/ and /ð/ will mean that it never comes up, not even once, unless you intentionally force the issue by using a sentence like "we saw her teeth" that positions the word in a context where it's not clear whether it's a noun or a verb. In most cases that can't be done, as witnessed by the fact that English nouns regularly zero-derive into verbs - for the zero-derivation to work, you have to be able to tell the difference between a noun and a verb even though they're pronounced identically.

On the other hand, you can't actually have meant 100% literally, because that's not an achievable goal. No native speaker can reach a 100% rate of being understood.

But a foreign speaker can easily achieve a rate of being understood equal to that of a native speaker while dropping some of the English phonemic inventory.

> And the fact also remains that if you apply the drop-phonemes-and-see-if-people-understand-you technique to other languages you can reduce their number of phonemes as well

That's true, but the question I saw was just "how many phonemes could you drop from English while still being understood?". And the answer is that English, like every other language, features a lot of redundancy; many things can go wrong before you stop being understood, but every time you do get something wrong, your odds get a bit worse. The amount of slack you have in terms of phonemes depends on how good you are with the rest of the language.

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

#85

Post by lolinder »

philwelch wrote: post #83
lolinder wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Okay, what about “cot” and “caught”? In some English dialects those are distinct phonemes, while in other dialects they are not. Yet someone who speaks a dialect without the cot-ca…

Conceded.

I'd assumed you were trying to figure out if English really had about as complicated a phonology as Navajo, and fiddling about with dropping phonemes isn't a useful approach for that because you could apply it to Navajo just as easily if you knew Navajo. If you get American English down to 35 I'd assume you could also get Navajo down to 40 by the same processes.

But yes, you can drop phonemes and be understood from other context as long as there is other context (which there usually is).

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

#86

Post by yencabulator »

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.

Figuring out that hummingbird means fighter plane isn't the challenging part. Getting to reliably recognize the hummingbird word sound is.

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

#87

Post by philwelch »

lolinder wrote: post #85
philwelch wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Okay, what about “cot” and “caught”? In some English dialects those are distinct phonemes, while in other dialects they are not. Yet someone who speaks a dialect without the cot-ca…

Conceded. I'd assumed you were trying to figure out if English really had about as complicated a phonology as Navajo, and fiddling about with dropping phonemes isn't a useful approach for that because you could apply it to Navajo just as easily if you knew Navajo. If you get American English down to 35 I'd assume you could also get Navajo down to 40 by the same processes. But yes, you can drop phonemes and be underst…

I don't know if you could get Navajo down by the same amount though. English speakers are accustomed to dealing with a wide variety of dialects so the language is clearly well adapted to sloppy and inconsistent phonology. Is the same true of Navajo, or are Navajo speakers accustomed to a more limited and consistent set of dialects? I don't know and I'm not really trying to argue a point here, it's just something to ponder.

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

#88

Post by xwolfi »

brettp wrote: post #62
xwolfi wrote: post #46

Earlier 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…

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…

Sure maybe, but French, my native language btw, is inherently more complex, less rich in vocabulary, idiosyncratic in its habit to follow latin in writing but deviating from it in spoken form, it's just not as good as English so we're quite lucky at least.

I feel it's hard for me to make spelling mistakes in English, which is not my native tongue, but VERY EASY to make them in French, that I studied and used for decades: there is an inherent beauty to English, in its simplicity, we should not dismiss. (yes I'm re-reading three times to make sure I didn't spell anything wrong lol)

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

#89

Post by xwolfi »

brettp wrote: post #65
xwolfi wrote: post #46

Earlier 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…

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 a…

Yes, I live in Hong Kong now and I know the Chinese languages have ridiculously simple formal grammar (that doesn't mean their brain doesn't have to do complex inference - is it better not to say what you meant or simpler to just write it ?).

The ridiculous writing system is indeed my problem with it - and the ridiculous variations in tones too but they swear it's easy if you're born in it... which is ofc the problem: a lingua franca works if adult merchants can learn it.

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

#90

Post by xwolfi »

kamaal wrote: post #76
xwolfi wrote: post #46

Earlier 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…

>>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 o…

What are the other languages you speak fluently ? You're right of course, the diversity of English knowledge (and entertainment, sometimes as important) is dizzying and that's why I even learned it in the first place.

But there's something strange with English knowledge: it's never quite deep. I find French materials are always a bit deeper, a bit more complex, we don't try to explain to 5 yo all the time, we don't always insist so much on the high level introductory stuff - we have a way to explain extremely complex concepts to more people I find. Just a feeling: when I want to explore I use English but when I want to dig I find more interesting stuff in French.

It's very frustrating because I live abroad now, in Hong Kong, and only use English with my friends, partners etc. And sometimes I want to explain to them, give them something to read, but it's only in French because no English speaker ever tried to think to dig deeper, to give more perspective, to ask the right questions etc :D

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