this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2024
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i thought i had a bit of an ear for parroting spoken sounds from a wide variety of languages (latin languages, turkic, japanese, korean), so when i was working in the four corners area with some guys for some months, i thought to learn some basic Diné bizaad. i could not make my mouth generate like >80% of the sounds and as a result only memorized like 2 nouns with limited use potential. i did learn the term for whites/anglos (thankfully pronounceable by me), so i could get cheap laughs by shaking my head/rolling my eyes at some stupid colonizer b.s. and muttering it.
Yeah American phonology is very unique, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salishan_languages
Diné bizaad has sounds which are comparatively easy to pronounce in isolation, but when you actually have to string them together into actual words, and there's pitch accent to boot, hoo boy...