Language is far more than just the sounds people make or the words that are made up by these sounds. It is easy for people who are monolingual (those who speak only one language) to assume that languages are different only in the words that they use, but the formal structure of language—grammar—can vary greatly from one language to another. While all languages have grammar, there does not appear to be any feature of grammar that is indispensable or universal. In The Ape that Spoke: Language and the Evolution of the Human Mind, John McCrone writes:
“Grammar lays down the rules by which we assemble the chains of words that parade through our conscious plane, so that in many ways our grammar and our style of thinking are very much the same. Our higher mental abilities have been likened to towers built out of language and erected on the foundations of the natural animal mind, so if words are imagined as the building blocks for these edifices, grammar is the style of architecture.”
With regard to grammar, Jared Diamond, in his book The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal, writes:
“Humans don’t just have vocabularies of thousands of words with different meanings. We also combine those words and vary their forms in ways prescribed by grammatical rules (such as rules of word order) that determine the meaning of the word combinations. Grammar thereby lets us construct a potentially infinite number of sentences from a finite number of words.”
In
The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language, Steven Pinker puts it this way:
“First, every sentence that a person utters or understands is a brand-new combination of words, appearing for the first time in the history of the universe. Therefore a language cannot be a repertoire of responses; the brain must contain a recipe or program that can build an unlimited set of sentences out of a finite list of words.”
The basic building blocks of language are sounds (or gestures in sign language) which are organized into words. But words alone do not communicate the complexities and nuances which are common in language. The words are organized into groups which we might call sentences. In a chapter in
The Structure of Language: Readings in the Philosophy of Language, Eric Lenneberg points out:
“We know of no language that concatenates randomly, that is, where any word may be followed by any other.”
As with other parts of language, there is a great deal of variation in syntax. In their book
A Dictionary of Sociolinguistics, Joan Swann, Ana Deumert, Theresa Lillis, and Rajend Mesthrie write:
“Syntactic structures may vary between languages and language varieties, and also socially and stylistically.”
In some languages, such as English, the meaning of a sentence is determined by its word order (isolating languages), while in other languages there may be prefixes, infixes, or suffixes which tell whether a word is the subject of the sentence or an object (fusional languages).
Word order, and its importance, differs greatly from language to language. Writing about the difficulties facing an Ojibwa-speaker in learning English, historian Donald Smith, in his book Sacred Feathers: The Reverend Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby) and the Mississauga Indians, reports:
“In Ojibwa, almost four-fifths of all words are verbs, whereas in English nouns, adjectives, and adverbs predominate. The better Ojibwa orators put the verb first in a sentence, before the noun, so in English the Anishinabeg had, in effect, to talk backward, placing the noun first.”
Another aspect of grammar is number. At its simplest form number refers to singular and plural. In some languages, plural is indicated by adding an infix. In English, for example, “book” is singular while “books” is plural. While the noun, “book” in this case, reflects number, the definite article in English does not: thus we have “
the book” and “
the books.” In many languages, the definite article must also reflect number. Thus in Spanish we have “
el libro” and “
los libros.”
Many languages also have grammatical gender. The term “gender” used in linguistics refers to the original meaning of “kind” which can be seen in some related words such as “generic,” and “genus.” Steven Pinker points out that:
“In just happens that in many European languages the genders correspond to the sexes, at least in pronouns.”
In these languages, all nouns will belong to a category which can be designated as male or female. Keep in mind that these are grammatical categories and may have nothing to do with actual “maleness” or “femaleness” of the object itself. In addition, some languages, such as German, may use a third gender, designated as neuter. In many of these languages the definite and indefinite articles as well as adjectives will also reflect the gender of the noun. In some non-European languages, such a Kivunjo (a Bantu language spoken in Africa), there are as many as 16 genders.
There are also differences in the way men speak and the way women speak in many languages. In Shoshone (an American Indian language), for example, there are some differences between male and female language. Men and women may use different words in referring to the same object. There are also differences when a male is talking to a woman, and vice-versa. Similarly, among the Assiniboine, an Indian nation unrelated to the Shoshone, there was a distinct style of women’s speech which was different from that of men. James Long, in his book Land of the Nakoda: The Story of the Assiniboine Indians, writes:
“The pronunciation of many words differed from that of the men. They also used words not used by the men. Therefore, the men avoided that kind of speech, because they did not wish to be accused of ‘talking like a woman.’”
In Navajo (an American Indian language), an object at rest is placed in one of 15 general categories based on categories such as animateness, size, position, cohesiveness, rigidity, shape, and degree of containment. These general categories are signified by the verb stem. Each of these 15 general categories is further subdivided into 15 categories based on variables such as plurality, grouping, and patterning. Thus anthropologist Gary Witherspoon, in his book
Language and Art in the Navajo Universe, reports:
“When a speaker of Navajo describes an object at rest, he places the object in one of 225 categories.”
Verbs are the action words which describe actions ranging from obvious physical activities such as “play,” “talk,” “sit,” and so on, to mental and emotional concepts such as “love,” “think,” “believe,” and so on. In many languages the verbs are conjugated to indicate when the action takes place. In English, for example, there are only two simple tenses: present and preterite. Further elaboration in time is done with compound tenses: tenses which use helping verbs such as “have.” In English, for example, tense can be indicated as “I see,” “I saw,” “I
have seen,” and “I
will see.” While tense in English is based largely on the use of compound tenses, this is not true of many other languages.
Not all languages view time the same. In some languages, the past tense used will indicate how far in the past the action occurred and whether or not the speaker actually witnessed the action. In Wishram (an American Indian language), for example, there are four preterit tenses which differ in the remoteness of time from the moment of speaking. In looking at differences in tense between English and Shoshone (an American Indian language), Drusilla Gould and Christopher Loether, in their book An Introduction to the Shoshoni Language: Dammen Daigwape, report:
“Shoshoni verbs are very different from English verbs, and there is no one-to-one correspondence between tenses in Shoshoni and English.”
A number of languages use evidentials: features of the word which show how something is known. For example, in Makah (an American Indian language)
wikicaxaw would translate into English as “it’s bad weather” or literally “it bad-weathers.” Now look at the meaning of this word with three different evidential endings:
Wikicaxak-pid: “It’s bad weather—from what it looks like”
Wikicaxak-qad’i: “It’s bad weather—from what I hear”
Wikicaxak-wad: “It’s bad weather—from what they tell me”
It is interesting to note that while language is made up of sentences and these sentences are made up of phrases and words, and the words are made up of sounds, we do not have stored up a list of sentences. Language is a process which constantly involves the generation of new combinations of sounds, words, and sentences which communicate to others. In her chapter in Language and Poverty: Perspectives on a Theme, Paula Menyuk writes:
“Given the fact that we are constantly creating unique sentences (that is, ones never exactly uttered before) and that the number of possible sentences in a language is infinite, it would be impossible to store such a list of utterances in our memory.”
Language, as most students of a foreign language soon discover, is not about muttering memorized phrases and sentences, but the ability to generate unique sentences.