# What factors do the grammars of all the world's languages have in common?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-factors-do-the-grammars-of-all-the-worlds-languages-have-in-common/634656>\
**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:** 2\
**Page:** 3

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**Author:** ![Weedy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/weedy/32/301_2.png) [@Weedy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Weedy)\
**Post date:** [September 17, 2012, 1:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-factors-do-the-grammars-of-all-the-worlds-languages-have-in-common/634656/41 "2012-09-17T01:04:34Z")

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> [@Frylock](#):
>
> I think they’re saying that even if the language has that feature, people could still use it to talk at least obliquely about things they didn’t experience themselves, probably through assertions that are literally false but with an understood alternate meaning.

If there is an idiom that Piraha commonly use to talk about things outside their experience then Daniel Everett is being very misleading in the way he talks about them.

Maybe Inner Stickler could invent something? If his innovation caught on, then that would change the language.

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**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 17, 2012, 1:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-factors-do-the-grammars-of-all-the-worlds-languages-have-in-common/634656/42 "2012-09-17T13:44:14Z")

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Inner Stickler, I disagree a little bit with your statement that “As far as I know, no attempt to teach an animal language has come close to meeting even a few of these standards.” There have been a lot of attempts to teach primates language. Some of them have come closer than you think. Take a look at the article “Apes with Apps” by Ken Schweller in _The IEEE Spectrum_ (or Google on “bonobos”, “apps”, or “Schweller” for other articles) for some more recent experiments with bonobos that seem promising. Maybe this should be a separate thread since it’s wandering off the topic. Actually, we have done threads about this several times in the past.

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