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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,

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
  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.
  - CorrectHorseBat 2y ago
    Fair enough, it depends on what you exactly mean by a "complex sound". The number of phomenes in (Mandarin) Chinese is indeed not low, but it has only ~1200 different syllables (including those differentiated by only tone differences), which is pretty low compared to other languages. English has 26 letters which represents 44 phomenes, modern Chinese has ~8000 characters for 1200 syllables, I don't think you can find a system in there.

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
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.
- CorrectHorseBat 2y ago
  Fair enough, it depends on what you exactly mean by a "complex sound". The number of phomenes in (Mandarin) Chinese is indeed not low, but it has only ~1200 different syllables (including those differentiated by only tone differences), which is pretty low compared to other languages. English has 26 letters which represents 44 phomenes, modern Chinese has ~8000 characters for 1200 syllables, I don't think you can find a system in there.