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> Navajo also has a complex phenology [sic], featuring sounds that don’t exist in many other languages. It counts 33 consonants, including affricates and fricat

> 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

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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.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  >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 language is a mish-mash of other languages, readily borrowing words from everywhere, and this is why it seems so sloppy. Some other, highly regular language like German would never have become the international language of trade because those languages aren't sloppy, and so aren't very good for non-native speakers to use daily, and aren't products of a culture that got rich from trade. As for tiny differences in pronunciations being used to discriminate against people, try learning German and moving to Germany and see how the natives treat you. You'll always be an outsider there, because you're never going to learn the language or pronunciation to that level as an adult, and the culture is known to be pretty insular. English-speaking cultures are generally far more welcoming to immigrants and people who don't speak the language like a native, and it's pretty easy to understand "broken English", which again is part of why it works so well for trade.
  - gavindean90 2y ago
    I always thought that the reason English is used in international trade is that English-speaking countries have huge economic interests, both historically and currently, and have always flat-out refused to speak anything else.
    - tyre 2y ago
      Yes. Spanish isn’t widespread in the Central and South Americas because of the language, nor Portuguese in Brazil. It’s not a coincidence that stores on the Champs Élysées speak Mandarin. Languages are used because they’re useful.
  - g15jv2dp 2y ago
    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 made absolutely zero effort to understand me when my pronunciation differed slightly from the correct one, on countless occasions. And believe me, I tried.
philwelch 2y ago
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.
- lolinder 2y ago
  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 if you want to not have an accent but which aren't actually used to distinguish one word from another. Pairs of these are called allophones [1], and probably the easiest example to think of in English is all the many ways we pronounce /t/. What this definition means is that you can't get it under 40 if your goal is to be understood 100% of the time. We have 40-49 sounds (depending on accent) that are used to distinguish words, and if you don't have one of those in your toolbox then you will occasionally be misunderstood. You could probably select a few that make it unlikely to come up often (/θ/ and /ð/ are good candidates), but you could also likely do the same for any other language, Navajo included. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phone_(phonetics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phone_(phonetics) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    > 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 when they actually arise from other sources. I once asked a student at an English-immersion school whether a particular class was happening that day, and was confused by his answer of "poss". When he clarified "stop", I was able to guess what he meant, and he got upset and asked whether the difference between "poss" and "pause" was really so important to English speakers. It isn't; the problem is that you can't use "pause" to refer to the one-off cancellation of a periodic event. If you're using the word appropriately and you can't pronounce /z/, no one is ever going to be confused, not least because there is no word /pɑs/ to be confused about. But if you can't pronounce English and you can't speak it either, people will be confused when you try to say things. Trying to work on your pronunciation is absolutely the wrong approach to that problem; if you get it up to being flawless, most of the confusion you were struggling with will still occur.

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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.

shiroiushi 2y ago
>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 language is a mish-mash of other languages, readily borrowing words from everywhere, and this is why it seems so sloppy. Some other, highly regular language like German would never have become the international language of trade because those languages aren't sloppy, and so aren't very good for non-native speakers to use daily, and aren't products of a culture that got rich from trade. As for tiny differences in pronunciations being used to discriminate against people, try learning German and moving to Germany and see how the natives treat you. You'll always be an outsider there, because you're never going to learn the language or pronunciation to that level as an adult, and the culture is known to be pretty insular. English-speaking cultures are generally far more welcoming to immigrants and people who don't speak the language like a native, and it's pretty easy to understand "broken English", which again is part of why it works so well for trade.
- gavindean90 2y ago
  I always thought that the reason English is used in international trade is that English-speaking countries have huge economic interests, both historically and currently, and have always flat-out refused to speak anything else.
  - tyre 2y ago
    Yes. Spanish isn’t widespread in the Central and South Americas because of the language, nor Portuguese in Brazil. It’s not a coincidence that stores on the Champs Élysées speak Mandarin. Languages are used because they’re useful.
- g15jv2dp 2y ago
  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 made absolutely zero effort to understand me when my pronunciation differed slightly from the correct one, on countless occasions. And believe me, I tried.

philwelch 2y ago

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.

lolinder 2y ago
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 if you want to not have an accent but which aren't actually used to distinguish one word from another. Pairs of these are called allophones [1], and probably the easiest example to think of in English is all the many ways we pronounce /t/. What this definition means is that you can't get it under 40 if your goal is to be understood 100% of the time. We have 40-49 sounds (depending on accent) that are used to distinguish words, and if you don't have one of those in your toolbox then you will occasionally be misunderstood. You could probably select a few that make it unlikely to come up often (/θ/ and /ð/ are good candidates), but you could also likely do the same for any other language, Navajo included. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phone_(phonetics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phone_(phonetics) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > 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 when they actually arise from other sources. I once asked a student at an English-immersion school whether a particular class was happening that day, and was confused by his answer of "poss". When he clarified "stop", I was able to guess what he meant, and he got upset and asked whether the difference between "poss" and "pause" was really so important to English speakers. It isn't; the problem is that you can't use "pause" to refer to the one-off cancellation of a periodic event. If you're using the word appropriately and you can't pronounce /z/, no one is ever going to be confused, not least because there is no word /pɑs/ to be confused about. But if you can't pronounce English and you can't speak it either, people will be confused when you try to say things. Trying to work on your pronunciation is absolutely the wrong approach to that problem; if you get it up to being flawless, most of the confusion you were struggling with will still occur.