linguistics

[the_4thb]

I swear, all languages are the same. From this point on, I declare it my mission in life to discover the secret to unlock languages so I can just listen to a totally foreign language and understand it based on certain basic pieces. I have always been able to see that certain seemingly different words were the same, but I never knew how or why.

Comments

[arababy9]

maybe it's because, to oversimplify, everyone has the same instincts.

[the_4thb]

That's exactly it, if you listen to Noam Chomsky and his followers. He argues that everyone is born with "universal grammar", a set of conventions that all languages follow, and specifics just need to be set and lexicon filled in based upon what a child hears from adults around it. But on a base level, he says, all languages share certain key elements that are unexplainable except as just to say that that's how human language is.

[kumarei]

I really think it's an oversimplification to say that all languages are the same. Sure, there's a base to most western languages, but what about languages that developed individually, and without relation to other languages. Japanese and Korean, for example, are similar, as well as a few languages from the polynesians, but they're very different from any other languages, grammatically. The same applies to Chinese, which has certain elements in similar with other languages, but sound wise is completely differnt, as well as having small grammatical differences that are purely unique.

What about African clicking languages?

[anonymous]

try korean you pussy. take a hard language and then come talk to me

[the_4thb]

Talk to whom? Excellent anonymous comment, dude.

[buskercaleb]

Oh, by the way, I'm learning Finnish and I'm going to be living in Finland for four months this fall.