# What factors do the grammars of all the world's languages have in common? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [September 14, 2012, 2:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-factors-do-the-grammars-of-all-the-worlds-languages-have-in-common/634656 "2012-09-14T02:27:52Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Derleth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b9e5f3/32.png) [@Derleth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Derleth)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2012, 2:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-factors-do-the-grammars-of-all-the-worlds-languages-have-in-common/634656/1 "2012-09-14T02:27:52Z")
Is there a list of grammatical features every single natural language on Earth possesses? I can think up a lot of features at least one language doesn’t have; are there any they _all_ do? ---
**Author:** ![OldGuy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/3bc359/32.png) [@OldGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/OldGuy)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2012, 2:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-factors-do-the-grammars-of-all-the-worlds-languages-have-in-common/634656/2 "2012-09-14T02:47:58Z")
What do you think of as grammatical features? I assume were not considering computer languages? Certainly all languages have nouns and verbs I’d assume and probably other parts of speech. I’d guess adjectives are next most likely. I’d think they have the following: Some way of distinguishing what has, is, and will happen whether or not they have present, past, and future tenses. Some way to indicate and differentiate “me” from “you” and “him” Some way to indicate one vs two vs more than that. (I seem to recall some languages only went about that far in their numbers though) Some way to indicate the difference between subject and object “He hit me” vs “I hit him.” ---
**Author:** ![robert\_columbia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e79b87/32.png) [@robert\_columbia](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robert_columbia)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2012, 2:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-factors-do-the-grammars-of-all-the-worlds-languages-have-in-common/634656/3 "2012-09-14T02:59:42Z")
The Chinese language, iirc, does not have grammatical number, but I believe it is possible to express singular or plural using additional words if you want to. Does this count? If a grammatical feature is absent in a technical sense but its meaning can be expressed/paraphrased using additional language, does the language lack the feathre? ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Drake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ad7895/32.png) [@Dr.Drake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Drake)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2012, 3:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-factors-do-the-grammars-of-all-the-worlds-languages-have-in-common/634656/4 "2012-09-14T03:14:36Z")
> [@OldGuy](#): > > Certainly all languages have nouns and verbs I’d assume I question this assumption. A linguistics professor of mine told me that some Native American languages do not, grammatically speak, have nouns. “A tree” is essentially expressed as “a tree is being,” a verb, even though its referent is a specific concrete object. I suppose you could equally say the same word can function as both noun and verb, which is something you find in English—I love love but I hate hate. I don’t speak these languages and I’m not enough of a linguist to say anything definitive. I don’t know of a language without (a) words or (b) verbs, though. ---
**Author:** ![OldGuy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/3bc359/32.png) [@OldGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/OldGuy)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2012, 3:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-factors-do-the-grammars-of-all-the-worlds-languages-have-in-common/634656/5 "2012-09-14T03:23:13Z")
> [@Dr.Drake](#): > > I question this assumption. A linguistics professor of mine told me that some Native American languages do not, grammatically speak, have nouns. “A tree” is essentially expressed as “a tree is being,” a verb, even though its referent is a specific concrete object. I suppose you could equally say the same word can function as both noun and verb, which is something you find in English—I love love but I hate hate. I don’t speak these languages and I’m not enough of a linguist to say anything definitive. > > I don’t know of a language without (a) words or (b) verbs, though. OK I should have been more careful as I was in my other guesses for example saying they could express number rather having plurals as I was aware of Chinese. I should have said all languages have ways to express things and actions. ---
**Author:** ![Jragon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e19b73/32.png) [@Jragon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jragon)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2012, 3:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-factors-do-the-grammars-of-all-the-worlds-languages-have-in-common/634656/6 "2012-09-14T03:28:39Z")
Let me see if I can find my old linguistics book, there was a section/essay in there on this. It wasn’t anything so obvious as parts of speech or presence of certain pronouns (in fact, Japanese rarely uses pronouns other than “I” in formal speech). It was more things like the way adjectives bind to nouns. ---
**Author:** ![njtt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/ecd19e/32.png) [@njtt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/njtt)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2012, 4:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-factors-do-the-grammars-of-all-the-worlds-languages-have-in-common/634656/7 "2012-09-14T04:12:33Z")
[ul] [/ul][Universal grammar.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar) > [@](#): > > Universal Grammar is made up of a set of rules that apply to most or all natural human languages. Most of these rules come in the form of “if a language has a feature X, it will also have the feature Y.” Rules that are widely considered as part of UG include: > > [ul] > [li]If a language is head-initial (like English), it will have prepositional phrases; if and only if it is head-final (like Japanese) will it have post-positional phrases.[14][/li][li] If a language has a word for purple, it will have a word for red.[/li][/ul] The OP’s question is one that has been been _very_ extensively investigated debated by linguists for decades now, and in many ways lies at the heart of modern linguistics. Unfortunately, though, the issues get very technical very quickly. ---
**Author:** ![Senegoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/senegoid/32/6606_2.png) [@Senegoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Senegoid)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2012, 6:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-factors-do-the-grammars-of-all-the-worlds-languages-have-in-common/634656/8 "2012-09-14T06:25:21Z")
No doubt you’ve read about those studies, mostly with chimpanzees but with other animals too, that attempted to teach “language” to animals. These were especially popular in the 1960’s - 1980’s, I think. They all managed to teach some “rudimentary” language skills. But linguists objected – mostly, they simply didn’t believe that animals could have language. It was considered a major ability that set humans apart. So every time some animal seemed to learn some rudiments of language (which comparative psychologists got all excited over), the linguists would develop some more demanding definition of what language had to include to be language. It became clear that they had never really had a very well-thought-out definition of language. Newer studies kept coming out that were designed to teach animals whatever linguists were demanding this week, that whenever those seemed to have some rudimentary success, the linguists moved the goal posts again. (This was the way we saw it from the experimental psychologists point of view.) A linguist named Charles Hockett came up with a set of criteria – a list of features that he claimed a communication system must have, in order to be called language. This caught on, and experimental psychologists worked to teach animals some communication skills that covered at least the rudiments of Hockett’s criteria. Herman et al specifically worked on a research and training model to demonstrate this with bottlenosed dolphins. (I was a lab assistant on that project for a few years.) We claimed to have accomplished that, at least in some rudimentary form. Here is a page discussing Hockett’s [Features of Human Language](http://people.exeter.ac.uk/bosthaus/Lecture/hockett1.htm). This is all a bit tangential to the OP, but I think question about grammars might involve question about what you are trying to accomplish with language and grammar – so this might be of interest. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2012, 8:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-factors-do-the-grammars-of-all-the-worlds-languages-have-in-common/634656/9 "2012-09-14T08:56:34Z")
OldGuy writes: \> Some way to indicate one vs two vs more than that. Everett claims that it’s not possible to do that in Pirahã. The language supposedly only has two quantity words, one of which means “a little bit of something” and the other of which means “a lot of something”: > **[Pirahã language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language)** > > Pirahã (also spelled Pirahá, Pirahán), or Múra-Pirahã, is the indigenous language of the isolated Pirahã people of Amazonas, Brazil. The Pirahã live along the Maici River, a tributary of the Amazon River. > Pirahã is the only surviving dialect of the Mura language; all others having died out in the last few centuries as most groups of the Mura people have shifted to Portuguese. Suspected relatives, such as Matanawi, are also extinct. Pirahã is estimated to have between 250 and 380 speakers. It is ... As to the Hockett criteria, number 1 is dubious. It isn’t true for sign languages. There are claims that sign language came before spoken language in human history. Note that Everett claims that number 11 isn’t true of Pirahã either. He says that it doesn’t have embedding or recursion and there is a maximum sentence length. Everett also claims that Pirahã contradicts number 10 as well. He says that it’s not possible to talk about anything outside direct personal experience. > **[Pirahã people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_people)** > > The Pirahã (pronounced \[piɾaˈhɐ̃\]) are an indigenous people of the Amazon Rainforest in Brazil. They are the sole surviving subgroup of the Mura people, and are hunter-gatherers. They live mainly on the banks of the Maici River in Humaitá and Manicoré in the state of Amazonas. As of 2018\[update\], they number 800 individuals. The Pirahã people do not call themselves Pirahã but instead the Híaitíihi or Hiáitihí, roughly translated as "the straight ones." > > To the linguistic anthropologist and forme... Yes, all of Everett’s claims are controversial. ---
**Author:** ![TATG](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/50afbb/32.png) [@TATG](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TATG)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2012, 9:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-factors-do-the-grammars-of-all-the-worlds-languages-have-in-common/634656/10 "2012-09-14T09:20:36Z")
Recursion is another candidate, but apparently Pirahã is put forward as a possible counter example. ---
**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2012, 12:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-factors-do-the-grammars-of-all-the-worlds-languages-have-in-common/634656/11 "2012-09-14T12:19:25Z")
Despite Everett, I believe that all languages use embedded clauses. I am reminded of Margaret Mead believing that some Pacific island tribe didn’t know that sex leads to pregnancy. Probably, they were teaching him a child’s version of the language because they saw him as a learner. Chinese does not have tense. I once had an interesting conversation with a Chinese student. He explained that “I come” could mean yesterday, today, tomorrow. So I asked him how he would say “I will come tomorrow” and he answered “I come tomorrow”. So I asked him how to say “I will come sometime in the future” and he answered “I come sometime in the future”. It lacks number as well. I don’t recall if there are different words for “he” and “she” but I don’t doubt they can express that too. Incidentally, he told me that there is no sexual distinction in names. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2012, 12:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-factors-do-the-grammars-of-all-the-worlds-languages-have-in-common/634656/12 "2012-09-14T12:43:58Z")
> [@Dr.Drake](#): > > I question this assumption. A linguistics professor of mine told me that some Native American languages do not, grammatically speak, have nouns. “A tree” is essentially expressed as “a tree is being,” a verb, even though its referent is a specific concrete object. I found that when I looked into Mohawk grammar (an Iroquoian language). But in Algonquian languages like Lenape, some nouns are definitely nouns. Although even Algonquian languages pack a lot of noun-meaning into polysynthetic verb structures. Navajo, a Na-Dene language, functions completely differently from either of the other two. You can’t generalize a thing about American Indian languages as a whole. They range from Quechua, whose grammar is fairly intuitive and non-scary for European-language speakers, to Navajo, whose extreme complexity of verb forms daunted even _me_. ---
**Author:** ![KneadToKnow](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kneadtoknow/32/3999_2.png) [@KneadToKnow](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KneadToKnow)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2012, 2:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-factors-do-the-grammars-of-all-the-worlds-languages-have-in-common/634656/13 "2012-09-14T14:21:14Z")
> [@](#): > > If a language has a word for purple, it will have a word for red. I saw something on TV recently (or perhaps heard on the radio) an interesting discussion of how languages around the world developed their color-words over time. The assertion was made that the last color word any language develops is _blue_. ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Drake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ad7895/32.png) [@Dr.Drake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Drake)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2012, 2:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-factors-do-the-grammars-of-all-the-worlds-languages-have-in-common/634656/14 "2012-09-14T14:23:39Z")
> [@KneadToKnow](#): > > I saw something on TV recently (or perhaps heard on the radio) an interesting discussion of how languages around the world developed their color-words over time. The assertion was made that the last color word any language develops is _blue_. The assertion is incorrect, but what they’re basing it on is a garbling of the Berlin-Kay theory of colour words, overview [here](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term). ---
**Author:** ![Inner\_Stickler](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/inner_stickler/32/318_2.png) [@Inner\_Stickler](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Inner_Stickler)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2012, 2:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-factors-do-the-grammars-of-all-the-worlds-languages-have-in-common/634656/15 "2012-09-14T14:39:36Z")
> [@Senegoid](#): > > So every time some animal seemed to learn some rudiments of language (which comparative psychologists got all excited over), the linguists would develop some more demanding definition of what language had to include to be language. It became clear that they had never really had a very well-thought-out definition of language. Newer studies kept coming out that were designed to teach animals whatever linguists were demanding this week, that whenever those seemed to have some rudimentary success, the linguists moved the goal posts again. (This was the way we saw it from the experimental psychologists point of view.) I’m no linguist but I only ever remember learning about 8 features a language must have. Arbitrariness, productivity, displacement, dual articulation, prevarication, reflexivity, discrete unit composition and creativity of expression. As far as I know, no attempt to teach an animal language has come close to meeting even a few of these standards. There’s really no evidence that chimps or gorillas understand beyond “I make weird shapes with my hands and sometimes I get fruit.” ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2012, 3:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-factors-do-the-grammars-of-all-the-worlds-languages-have-in-common/634656/16 "2012-09-14T15:04:21Z")
Hari Seldon writes: \> Despite Everett, I believe that all languages use embedded clauses. I am \> reminded of Margaret Mead believing that some Pacific island tribe didn’t know \> that sex leads to pregnancy. Probably, they were teaching him a child’s version \> of the language because they saw him as a learner. Have you read any of Everett’s works? I’ve read both of his books and a lot of the articles by and about him. He’s been working on Pirahã for thirty-some years. He still could be wrong, of course, but comparing him to Mead is irrelevant. Mead only spent a few months among the Samoans, and as I recall she lived with non-Samoans and interviewed just a few Samoans. Everett lived with the Pirahã for years. It’s possible that Everett just isn’t good at describing languages. It’s possible that he is dishonest. It’s not possible that he didn’t learn enough about the language. ---
**Author:** ![njtt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/ecd19e/32.png) [@njtt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/njtt)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2012, 3:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-factors-do-the-grammars-of-all-the-worlds-languages-have-in-common/634656/17 "2012-09-14T15:09:45Z")
> [@KneadToKnow](#): > > I saw something on TV recently (or perhaps heard on the radio) an interesting discussion of how languages around the world developed their color-words over time. The assertion was made that the last color word any language develops is _blue_. Yes, how could anyone possibly understand blue unless they already had a word for cerulean? :rolleyes: Incidentally, I am not asserting the statement about purple that I quoted, or the other rule. They are just the examples (perhaps not good ones) quoted by Wikipedia. My point was, however, that the whole issue is a much debated and highly technical matter in linguistics, and not to be solved by the casual anecdotal observations of dopers (except perhaps those who are actual linguists). ---
**Author:** ![septimus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/septimus/32/410_2.png) [@septimus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/septimus)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2012, 5:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-factors-do-the-grammars-of-all-the-worlds-languages-have-in-common/634656/18 "2012-09-14T17:17:35Z")
Thais have a largish number of color words available but, at least in rural Thai, the words for dark, white, red and green are used much more than any other colors. “Green” (เขียว) is often used to describe blue or even yellowish objects. (I even subjected my wife’s family to tests for color blindness to see if that was the problem!) Since the word for Dark does double-duty as Black, a Westerner’s hair color will be described as “Red” even if it’s a dark brown. Skin color is Dark or White (or Dark Dark for very dark, or White White for very White). There are special adjectives meaning “very” which are applied almost exclusively with colors. ปี๋ is appended to Dark or Green to mean “very.” My informant mentions only Bitter among other adjectives which might take this suffix. There’s also a special “very” suffix for use with Red, and another one for use with White. For some reason, special names for shades of brown are in use in rural Thai; I hear “color of cigarette smoke,” “color of pig’s blood,” and “color of mangosteen rind.”) ---
**Author:** ![Gymnopithys](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/fbc32d/32.png) [@Gymnopithys](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gymnopithys)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2012, 8:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-factors-do-the-grammars-of-all-the-worlds-languages-have-in-common/634656/19 "2012-09-14T20:05:13Z")
> [@Dr.Drake](#): > > I don’t know of a language without (a) words or (b) verbs, though. The whistled languages in many parts of the world ? > **[Whistled language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistled_language)** > > Whistled speech is a form of speech surrogacy in which whistling is used to mimic speech. Speakers of more than 80 languages have been found to practice various degrees of whistled speech, most of them in rugged topography or dense forests, where movement to carry messages is challenging, and whistling expands the distance of communication. The practice is generally threatened by increased modernization and faster roads, but successful conservation efforts are recorded. > A whistled language is a... ---
**Author:** ![tapu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/49beb7/32.png) [@tapu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tapu)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2012, 8:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-factors-do-the-grammars-of-all-the-worlds-languages-have-in-common/634656/20 "2012-09-14T20:53:36Z")
We’ll have to define words first. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-factors-do-the-grammars-of-all-the-worlds-languages-have-in-common/634656.md?page=2)