> 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).<p>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 example of Navajo's difficulty: the raw numbers of consonants and vowels are not particularly extreme in Navajo, and the numbers that TFA cites for English are wrong.<p>They seem to have done a relatively simple analysis of the alphabet, but that's not how linguists think about phonology. The alphabet is our way of representing a much more complex system that underlies English, and English's vowel system in particular is <i>far</i> more complex than the alphabet makes it appear.<p>Our total number of consonants sits at about 24—the alphabet alone would make you forget about some of <i>our</i> affricates (ch as in charge) and some of <i>our</i> fricatives (sh as in shush, zh as in vision, th as in theme, dh as in though), plus a nasal (ng as in ring).<p>Our vowel system, meanwhile, has anywhere between ~16 in American English to ~25 in Received Pronunciation. Native speakers don't tend to realize just how complicated our vowels are, but getting them wrong is one of the most common ways to get recognized for having an accent.<p>All told, English has between 40 and 49 phonemes (again, depending on accent), which is quite comparable to Navajo's 45.<p>I've no doubt that Navajo <i>is</i> harder to learn for most people than English is, but I don't think the phonology plays a big role in that. English's phonology is plenty difficult.<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41097443">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41097443</a>
So many things wrong in this article it makes me doubt the rest of the (undeniably interesting) content.<p>- English does not have 5 vowels; depending on the variety that you speak and counting diphthongs it has about 20<p>- "phenology"?<p>- tonal languages, while challenging to learn for someone who doesn't speak one natively, are not that uncommon, and 4 tones (assuming they're counting correctly) isn't that many. Mandarin has 4. Cantonese has (depending on whom you ask) up to 9. There are American languages with 10-20<p>- English has 24 consonants by most counts (confusing the Latin alphabet with English phonology again), but there are African languages with famously many, many more than that<p>- "like Spanish, Navajo is a verb-centric language in which syntax centres on actions" - I'm not sure what that even means. Spanish, like Italian, is a pro-drop language which means you can drop the redundant pronoun if you want because the verb inflection tells you everything you need to know. Navajo is (depending again on who you ask) an agglutinative/fusional/polysynthetic language which, while weird to English speakers, is not that unusual (e.g. Turkish, Finnish)
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.<p>Also, of course, comparing the number of sounds to the number of English alphabets makes absolutely zero sense.
What I like about the code talkers is: the Japanese <i>knew</i> 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.
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.
I did a linguistics course by the amazing John McWhorter.<p>He discussed how much-used languages have lots of adults learning it, badly. This smooths the rough edges away over time.<p>But tiny languages can be as hard as our brains can accommodate, which is very hard.
"Most hopeful of all: while the number of Navajo speakers may be going down, the number of tribe members is increasing, rising from 300,000 in 2020 to over 390,000 in 2021"<p>I'm sure they meant 2000...
<i>Navajo is tonal, meaning that words with the exact same spelling have different meanings depending on the way they are pronounced</i><p>Ouch that hurts, Mr Brinkhof