Languages' common grammar

[pgrmdave]

There are many different grammatical structures in all the various languages in the world. My question is, what do they all have in common? What are the various structures that all languages must have in order to be useful communication tools? It seems obvious to me that all languages need nouns, verbs, and some sort of modifiers (adjectives, adverbs, combinations thereof, prefixes, suffixes...). What other commonalities are there among all known languages, and what unusual structures exist?

[moo]

I would think that numbers and some form of math are essential in all but the most primitive languages...

 

moo

[Spiked Blood]

Spelling mistakes. Like dropping an 'e' into grammar.

[pgrmdave]

Darn it! That's one of those words, like vacuum, that I always manage to spell wrong...:)

 

Edit - fixed the title

[Sheeplet]

I can only comment on what I know or have heard, and what I know happens to be scattered amounts of European language. But there's a lack of similarity in some places and a startling similarity in others, in my opinion.

 

My studies in French can only help me so far in Finnish, for example. Whilst French has many tenses which change the ending of the verb, Finnish has many cases that change the ending of the noun - Corresponding to prepositions in English. In fact, from what I know, there aren't many prepositions in Finnish and postpositions are far more common (I'm not a native/good speaker of Finnish though and I'd welcome anyone to correct me on this).

 

You would probably think that all languages changed the verb for tenses, for example: "He runs", "He will run", "He ran" respectively mark the present, future and past tenses (Eh, my brain isn't speaking in a logical order today). However, I recently overheard a conversation between a few language specialists who were saying how Chinese has no tenses in the language. His example being "Today I go to shop" as the literal translation. So not even that is similar.

 

But one thing I do recall being similar between a surprising number of languages is the meaning of the verb "To play". I can no longer find the source, but I recall a list of verbs for "To play a game", "To play an instrument", and "To play a role". Interestingly, even languages that have highly distant origins seemed to share the notion that the same verb should be used. There were exceptions, but it wasn't at all where I expected it to be.

 

So I guess that the similarities in languages lie in the instinctive logic of the human race, rather than anything else. Unfortunately, I can't offer much proof for what I've said, and I can't speak for the entire planet as a whole. I can't think of any other ways to represent nouns, verbs, and adjectives in spoken languages though. And if they exist, they're probably still regarded as nouns, verbs and adjectives.

 

My two cents.

[infamous]

Along with the commonality that languages share, there are also a few peculiarities which differentiate some form others. One which I learned while serving my time in the military based in West Germany struck me as odd even though it is more common amongst other languages.

 

In English we would structure a sentence in the following manner.

 

Example: I'm going to town tomarrow.

 

In German and many of the European languages, it would be constructed in the following way.

 

Example: Tomarrow to town I go.

 

For this very reason, many times you may hear a foreigner here in America say something like this; Tomarrow to town I'm going.

 

I always found this amusing. Conversley, those of different languages must surely also find English amusing.....................Infy

[pgrmdave]

So we have, from Sheeplet's post, a good rule - all languages must be able to denote time somehow - either through changing a word, prepositions, or defined contextual clues. Infy's post shows us that word order is only important in that each language is consistant (although we know from english that unusual word order, while jarring at times, can be understandable and even correct, however some orders cannot).

[Bobo]

I think that one thing that all languages have is the symbolic nature of language. It was Plato that described that that language describes the ideal of that word to each individual, so when I say chair, everyone thinks of a chair and knows what I am talking about, but person 1's mental construct may be a folding chair and another a lazyboy. Two very diferent items but contextually similar so that you think of that thing you sit on. While simple nouns of such physical objects, the variances are slight and inconsequential, but for more abstract ideas the individual constuct or image can vary to almost polar extremes in terms of the connotation (if not the dennotation completely of such a term). The idea of love can be interpreted and expressed in an almost infinite variety, but the single word remains, almost useless in describing the emotion because of its lack of precision and ability for mutation.

Essentailly all language is confining to a consensus of ideals and for expansive thought to occur, new vocabulary must be coined.

[eric l]

I would think that numbers and some form of math are essential in all but the most primitive languages...

 

moo

 

I think that even in the most primitive languages numbers will come well before a lot of "grammar" like tenses to distinct between present, past and future. Not that i know so many languages, you'll find children counting in their games and nursery rhymes. Some languages may be more primitive in this than other, spelling out a number like thirty-two as "three tens and two", other languages may have problems with fractions because they make no distinction between number and rank ("the sixth object" will be translated as "the number six object", and "the number six part" will not necessarily mean that you have six equal parts).

[eric l]

In English we would structure a sentence in the following manner.

 

Example: I'm going to town tomarrow.

 

In German and many of the European languages, it would be constructed in the following way.

 

Example: Tomarrow to town I go.

 

For this very reason, many times you may hear a foreigner here in America say something like this; Tomarrow to town I'm going.

 

I always found this amusing. Conversley, those of different languages must surely also find English amusing.....................Infy

 

Actually in German, as in Dutch (my mother tongue) you have inversion of subject and verb as soon as something is put in front in the sentence. So instead of "Tomorrow to town I go" you can haven either

• "Tomorrow go I to town" (which stresses "tomorrow") or
  
• "To town I go tomorrow" (stressing "to town")
  

You can not put both "to town" and "tomorrow" in front of the verb-subject group.

 

But you can split the verb, and make a sentence like

• "Tomorrow shall I to town go"
  

I agree that this sounds (and looks) rather funny in English.

[ughaibu]

Lack of numbers in the language of the Piraha: http://www.meta-religion.com/Linguistics/Southamerica/amazonian_languages.htm

[eric l]

Lack of numbers in the language of the Piraha: http://www.meta-religion.com/Linguistics/Southamerica/amazonian_languages.htm

Well, obviously one never stops learning !

But it seems strange to me, considering that e.g. bees are reported to be able to communicate to the hive the approximate amount of nectar they have discovered.

[moo]

Yep, Pirahã was the "primitive" language I was allowing for in my previous post, although its alledged lack of numbers is disputed by some.

 

http://linguistlist.org/ask-ling/message-details2.cfm?AsklingID=200368214

Excerpt: "Everett's research has been criticised. For example, that community uses Portuguese alongside Pirahã. We have never found a community with only one language in daily use that did not have numbers. The numbers may have been lost from Piraha rather than never have been there (there are other examples of this)."

 

moo