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

What am I going to do with a blog about language? I’ll tell you. Whatever occurs to me. Here’s what occurs first.

My son has a blog somewhere on myspace. I’ll leave it to you to guess which one of the million-odd profiles is his. In it, he writes, “Look out, I think I’m gonna blog!”

This is a perfect example of words that sound like they should mean one thing and, in fact, mean another. Words sometimes sound a certain way to us. For example, this is an example of an onomotopoeic word — now don’t let the big word throw you. Onomotopoeia is just a greek-derived word for the idea of a word that sounds like the sound it represents, like BAM, SPLASH, BOOM, WHOOSH, and BANG. Blog, if it truly meant regurgitating one’s lunch, would be onomatopoeic because it sounds vaguely like barfing (which is itself slightly onomatopoeic).

But blog is not onomatopoeic because it doesn’t have that meaning. It comes from the last four letters of “web log,” and this has another interpretation altogether. Which brings us to my point today. Many people try to convince us, both in the scholarly world and in the day-to-day, that we give names to something based on their characteristics. After all, don’t we have the whole idea of onomatopoeic as an example?

Well, sure, that one time it works out that way. But we don’t name that thing you drove to work in “car” because it has some inherent element of “car-ness” to it. It just is.

Today’s lesson then? Words are random. They developed from random sounds and random names given to objects.

Except when they didn’t. Next we’ll talk about LANGUAGE UNIVERSALS. Sounds cool, right? Trust me, they are.