7 ms·

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

71 points by ohjeez 2y ago

Cupertino95014 2y ago
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.
- xivzgrev 2y ago
  It wasn’t so much what words they used. The Japanese just didn’t have any way of translating / understanding Navajo. Kind of like you may hear a language, and recognize what it is, but no idea what they are saying. The Navajo language was not written at the time, and it’s very different than others and subtle differences in tone can make all the difference. Their written notes of what they heard were probably generally inaccurate which made breaking the code impossible (vs enigma which was exactly copied, and the output is German, they just then needed to break it)
  - Cupertino95014 2y ago
    You could imagine a top-secret Japanese effort to infiltrate the US and kidnap a Navajo person. Might not work, of course, but there are a lot of Navajos. But even that wouldn't have worked.
    - ahazred8ta 2y ago
      A Navajo was captured in the Philippines at the beginning of the war, and interrogated. It didn't help. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Kieyoomia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Kieyoomia There were Cherokee, Choctaw and Lakota code talkers in World War I.
- sinkasapa 2y ago
  The code talkers didn't just talk in Navajo but utilized a code system based on Navajo [1]. There were also code talkers who spoke other Native American languages. 1. https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/navajo-code-talkers-and-the-unbreakable-code/ https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/navajo-code-talkers-and-th...
- yencabulator 2y ago
  Figuring out that hummingbird means fighter plane isn't the challenging part. Getting to reliably recognize the hummingbird word sound is.
cool_dude85 2y ago
[flagged]
- fastball 2y ago
  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 same vowels in English have different sounds), but I think the article makes it clear in the sentences around your quote that these extra letters exist because Navajo has much more complex tonal sounds than English, not because they are making something implicit in English explicit in their language.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    What they're saying is that English doesn't have 21 consonant sounds and 5 vowel sounds, which is 100% accurate. English has 21 letters which we identify as consonants and 5 letters which we identify as vowels, which are used to write ~24 consonants (depending on accent, but generally clustered around there) and a large number of vowels that is impossible to neatly catalog because it varies widely by accent—it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 14-25, depending on accent.
  - CorrectHorseBat 2y ago
    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/bopomofo since the last century) and they have some of the least complex sounds of all languages.
    - fastball 2y ago
exabrial 2y ago
Windtalkers surprisingly good movie btw. For Nicholas Cage anyway.
deleted 2y ago
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SoftTalker 2y ago
[flagged]
deleted 2y ago
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yongjik 2y ago
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. Also, of course, comparing the number of sounds to the number of English alphabets makes absolutely zero sense.
- deleted 2y ago
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- sinkasapa 2y ago
  Right, these are exactly the types of claims we try to debunk in Linguistics 101. It is a horribly misleading article. If one wants to see if something about a language is difficult for human beings, I suppose one can look at the point in development that children master the concept. But even that can be misleading, since there are language internal factors that can lead children to pick up a particular aspect of grammar faster in one language than another. In English, noun-verb agreement comprehension is relatively late, but the same concept is comprehended relatively early in French, though according to one article, not necessarily in Spanish [1]. One can't simply look at a language in isolation and say it seems hard to me, so it must be universally difficult. Navajo may seem relatively easy to pick up if one already speaks an Athabaskan language. 1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0024384113001277 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00243...
- philwelch 2y ago
  > 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. Eh, I’m not sure. There are probably ways to infer whether or not e.g. Mandarin Chinese is harder for Chinese children to learn than English is for American children to learn. In fact I’ve seen a fairly convincing argument that this is the case!
loufe 2y ago
"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" I'm sure they meant 2000...
- ViktorRay 2y ago
  No you are the one who is incorrect in this situation. The article references a nytimes article for this data. There was a surge in enrollment in the tribe during the pandemic due to the way aid benefits were set up. (Of course to officially enroll in a tribe you have to prove you are a member of that tribe)
lolinder 2y ago
> 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 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. 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 far more complex than the alphabet makes it appear. Our total number of consonants sits at about 24—the alphabet alone would make you forget about some of our affricates (ch as in charge) and some of our fricatives (sh as in shush, zh as in vision, th as in theme, dh as in though), plus a nasal (ng as in ring). 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. All told, English has between 40 and 49 phonemes (again, depending on accent), which is quite comparable to Navajo's 45. I've no doubt that Navajo is 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. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41097443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41097443
- deleted 2y ago
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- ViktorRay 2y ago
  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 “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.
vbezhenar 2y ago
Every human language is easy because almost 100% of people are able to learn it. Now compare that to C++...
brettp 2y ago
So many things wrong in this article it makes me doubt the rest of the (undeniably interesting) content. - English does not have 5 vowels; depending on the variety that you speak and counting diphthongs it has about 20 - "phenology"? - 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 - 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 - "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)
FredPret 2y ago
I did a linguistics course by the amazing John McWhorter. He discussed how much-used languages have lots of adults learning it, badly. This smooths the rough edges away over time. But tiny languages can be as hard as our brains can accommodate, which is very hard.
eszed 2y ago
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.
DemocracyFTW2 2y ago
Navajo is tonal, meaning that words with the exact same spelling have different meanings depending on the way they are pronounced Ouch that hurts, Mr Brinkhof

71 points by ohjeez 2y ago

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.

xivzgrev 2y ago
It wasn’t so much what words they used. The Japanese just didn’t have any way of translating / understanding Navajo. Kind of like you may hear a language, and recognize what it is, but no idea what they are saying. The Navajo language was not written at the time, and it’s very different than others and subtle differences in tone can make all the difference. Their written notes of what they heard were probably generally inaccurate which made breaking the code impossible (vs enigma which was exactly copied, and the output is German, they just then needed to break it)
- Cupertino95014 2y ago
  You could imagine a top-secret Japanese effort to infiltrate the US and kidnap a Navajo person. Might not work, of course, but there are a lot of Navajos. But even that wouldn't have worked.
  - ahazred8ta 2y ago
    A Navajo was captured in the Philippines at the beginning of the war, and interrogated. It didn't help. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Kieyoomia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Kieyoomia There were Cherokee, Choctaw and Lakota code talkers in World War I.
sinkasapa 2y ago
The code talkers didn't just talk in Navajo but utilized a code system based on Navajo [1]. There were also code talkers who spoke other Native American languages. 1. https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/navajo-code-talkers-and-the-unbreakable-code/ https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/navajo-code-talkers-and-th...
yencabulator 2y ago
Figuring out that hummingbird means fighter plane isn't the challenging part. Getting to reliably recognize the hummingbird word sound is.

cool_dude85 2y ago

[flagged]

fastball 2y ago
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 same vowels in English have different sounds), but I think the article makes it clear in the sentences around your quote that these extra letters exist because Navajo has much more complex tonal sounds than English, not because they are making something implicit in English explicit in their language.
- lolinder 2y ago
  What they're saying is that English doesn't have 21 consonant sounds and 5 vowel sounds, which is 100% accurate. English has 21 letters which we identify as consonants and 5 letters which we identify as vowels, which are used to write ~24 consonants (depending on accent, but generally clustered around there) and a large number of vowels that is impossible to neatly catalog because it varies widely by accent—it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 14-25, depending on accent.
- CorrectHorseBat 2y ago
  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/bopomofo since the last century) and they have some of the least complex sounds of all languages.
  - fastball 2y ago

exabrial 2y ago

Windtalkers surprisingly good movie btw. For Nicholas Cage anyway.

deleted 2y ago

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SoftTalker 2y ago

[flagged]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

yongjik 2y ago

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. Also, of course, comparing the number of sounds to the number of English alphabets makes absolutely zero sense.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
sinkasapa 2y ago
Right, these are exactly the types of claims we try to debunk in Linguistics 101. It is a horribly misleading article. If one wants to see if something about a language is difficult for human beings, I suppose one can look at the point in development that children master the concept. But even that can be misleading, since there are language internal factors that can lead children to pick up a particular aspect of grammar faster in one language than another. In English, noun-verb agreement comprehension is relatively late, but the same concept is comprehended relatively early in French, though according to one article, not necessarily in Spanish [1]. One can't simply look at a language in isolation and say it seems hard to me, so it must be universally difficult. Navajo may seem relatively easy to pick up if one already speaks an Athabaskan language. 1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0024384113001277 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00243...
philwelch 2y ago
> 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. Eh, I’m not sure. There are probably ways to infer whether or not e.g. Mandarin Chinese is harder for Chinese children to learn than English is for American children to learn. In fact I’ve seen a fairly convincing argument that this is the case!

loufe 2y ago

"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" I'm sure they meant 2000...

ViktorRay 2y ago
No you are the one who is incorrect in this situation. The article references a nytimes article for this data. There was a surge in enrollment in the tribe during the pandemic due to the way aid benefits were set up. (Of course to officially enroll in a tribe you have to prove you are a member of that tribe)

lolinder 2y ago

> 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 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. 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 far more complex than the alphabet makes it appear. Our total number of consonants sits at about 24—the alphabet alone would make you forget about some of our affricates (ch as in charge) and some of our fricatives (sh as in shush, zh as in vision, th as in theme, dh as in though), plus a nasal (ng as in ring). 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. All told, English has between 40 and 49 phonemes (again, depending on accent), which is quite comparable to Navajo's 45. I've no doubt that Navajo is 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. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41097443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41097443

deleted 2y ago
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ViktorRay 2y ago
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 “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.

vbezhenar 2y ago

Every human language is easy because almost 100% of people are able to learn it. Now compare that to C++...

brettp 2y ago

So many things wrong in this article it makes me doubt the rest of the (undeniably interesting) content. - English does not have 5 vowels; depending on the variety that you speak and counting diphthongs it has about 20 - "phenology"? - 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 - 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 - "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)

FredPret 2y ago

I did a linguistics course by the amazing John McWhorter. He discussed how much-used languages have lots of adults learning it, badly. This smooths the rough edges away over time. But tiny languages can be as hard as our brains can accommodate, which is very hard.

eszed 2y ago

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.

DemocracyFTW2 2y ago

Navajo is tonal, meaning that words with the exact same spelling have different meanings depending on the way they are pronounced Ouch that hurts, Mr Brinkhof