As Universal as Language…

There are certain things common to all languages, or nearly all, and these are called language universals.  Now some of these universals are surprising and some aren’t.

 Some of the not terribly surprising universals are things like how languages function in the mind.  Meaning, most languages have in common things like subjects, verbs, direct objects and so forth.  The surprise comes in how they put them together.  Some languages order them differently.  Other languages, like Latin, have little grammatical tags that say, “Hey, I’m a verb,” “I’m a subject,” and so on.  The very cool part is that one can put these tagged guys in any order they want to, because the grammatical part is all carried intrinsically by the word, instead of being signalled by the order in the sentence.  Talented writers in these languages learn to order them in different ways to create emphasis, rhythm, or rhetorical structure.

These kinds of universals teach us some things about the human mind.  For example, most all of us have a need to express action, or something we’re doing (verb).  We have a need to express who did things (subject).  We need to express who got done unto (direct object).  We construct ideas in our minds based on who did what to whom or what.  If you think about it, many, if not most, sentences you can think of are based that way.

Yet there are some universals that are completely unexpected.  Nearly every child, in any language — now there are exceptions of course, but the great, great majority — express the ideas of mother in words that are vary similar to “ma.”

English: ma, mama
Spanish: mami
French: maman

Now wait a minute, I can hear you say.  These are all related languages.  if you go back far enough, most European languages are related.  Okay. True enough.  Let’s look at some languages that are not related to the above.

Mandarin:  ma
Korean:  oma
Hebrew: em

 You notice that they all have the [m] sound in common, paired with an open vowel, usually [a].  One theory is that the first thing babies see is their parents, and the first sounds they learn are the closed-mouth ones ([m] for example), and the widest open-mouthed ones (like [a]).

Others theorize that maybe, unlike what we discussed before, that maybe certain aspects of language are not random, but hardwired into the human consciousness.  The jury’s been in deliberation on that one for many years, and probably will be for a long time to come.

 For now, though, we study universals for what they can tell us about ourselves.  And they’re telling us quite a lot: mainly that, for all our differences, people aren’t that hugely different after all.

Read more:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_universal
http://www.uni-kassel.de/fb8/misc/lfb/html/text/2frame.html