[flagged]
"Edit out swipes."
If they are using AI, it's not a good one. ChatGPT says: "English has about 14 to 20 vowel sounds, depending on the dialect. Standard American English typically has 14 distinct vowel sounds, while Received Pronunciation (RP) in British English has around 20. This variation occurs because different dialects have different vowel inventories."
- words for half-empty/full - Eskimo-Aleut has 50 (?) words for different forms of snow
- tonality adds complexity; mandarin (4 tones + neutral), cantonese (9? tones)
- and various patois, not just in other languages, but also english (my exceedingly limited source being Graham Norton's youtube videos with the British/Scottish and Americans haha)
This one is actually a very good example of the problem that OP is describing of non-linguists writing linguistics pieces.
The "50 words for snow" story is one of the first linguistics cautionary tales they'll teach you in a college linguistics course these days, on the same level as the Hyatt Regency walkway collapse is for engineering.
The short of it is that it's based on a misunderstanding of the word "word". English is a very analytic language [0] on the scale of things, meaning it doesn't tend to augment its words to create new meanings. Instead we add adjectives and adverbs and prepositions to adjust a word's meaning.
Inuit languages, meanwhile, are highly agglutinative [0], meaning instead of independent adjectives they attach morphemes (meaningful-chunks-of-speech, think prefixes and suffixes) to the word itself to alter its meaning. That's not really the same thing as having X words for Y, because the words are constructed from parts that have their own, independent meaning—these morphemes are essentially a set of adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions that happen to get attached to a word instead of just placed nearby.
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3497
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=37
https://snowclones.org/2007/05/31/if-eskimos-have-n-words-fo...
And a book:
https://www.amazon.com/Eskimo-Vocabulary-Irreverent-Essays-L...
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.
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.
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.
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.