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posted by cmn32480 on Friday August 07 2015, @10:28AM   Printer-friendly
from the say-that-again dept.

The amateur linguist in me who, for example, finds it fascinating that Hindi and Farsi are far more closely related to European languages such as English or Greek than they are to other languages in that part of the world such as Arabic or Tamil, has come across an Ars Technica article that appears to demonstrate that there is a "language universal" that binds all language families:

Language takes an astonishing variety of forms across the world—to such a huge extent that a long-standing debate rages around the question of whether all languages have even a single property in common. Well, there's a new candidate for the elusive title of "language universal" according to a paper in this week's issue of PNAS[*]. All languages, the authors say, self-organise in such a way that related concepts stay as close together as possible within a sentence, making it easier to piece together the overall meaning.

Language universals are a big deal because they shed light on heavy questions about human cognition. The most famous proponent of the idea of language universals is Noam Chomsky, who suggested a "universal grammar" that underlies all languages. Finding a property that occurs in every single language would suggest that some element of language is genetically predetermined and perhaps that there is specific brain architecture dedicated to language.

The idea that all the major language families is nothing new, and linguists have documented similar words that seem to be present in different language families all over the globe (e.g., milk). This article may be more evidence of these links, or it may just demonstrate something in the language center of the brain that guarantees that all languages are going to have similar characteristics.


[*] Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by mendax on Friday August 07 2015, @06:34PM

    by mendax (2840) on Friday August 07 2015, @06:34PM (#219654)

    Try reading "The Awful German Language" by Mark Twain

    Indeed. Mark Twain had a love/hate relationship with German. I don't know why he learned it, perhaps to have the pleasure of inflicting his peculiar dialect of that language on others.

    In any case, many years ago I sent a copy of that essay to a friend of mine, a native German speaker, to see what she thought about it. She thought it was hilarious and, strangely enough, agreed with some of its conclusions.

    Mark Twain wrote somewhere (I think it was in a speech he gave somehwere) that German compound nouns are so long they have perspective. He also wrote that if a cat got hold of a German irregular verb, no more cat!

    Of course, Twain had no idea of just how awful ancient Greek verbs are. If he did, he would have written an entire book about it, or have gone insane and hanged himself trying to write one. There is a standard, of course, to conjugate verbs, but the majority of verbs have their own way about it. I once read that anyone who said he was an expert at ancient Greek verbs was an expert liar. Thematic verbs, athematic, reduplication, auguments, -mi verbs, -o verbs, moods, etc. etc. etc. Oh, and let's not talk about noun declension. Those are easier but by the time you're done with verbs, you have no patience for noun endings.

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