The Nature Of Human Language: Language Universals

On the surface languages such as Chinese and Turkish been quite different from one another. They sound different, seem to have different grammatical rules and to a native English speaker may not even sound like languages at all. The stream of speech coming from someone speaking a totally unfamiliar language sometimes sounds like a continuous rush of gibberish rather than separate words.

However, beneath the surface differences all natural human languages (languages that arose naturally in human society as contrasted with artificially   constructed ones such as computer programming languages) share   some fundamental properties. The most important of these is productivity. Natural languages are productive in two senses. First in every human language there is no upper limit to the number of novel sentences that can be created. (See the upcoming section on phrase-struture rules for an illustration of how a very simple articificial grammer can generate a surprising number of different sentences.) The capacity of hundreds of thousands of words and complex grammatical rules to generate an infinite number of different sentences should not be surprising. Just consider the possibilities we have for conspiring new   melodies and musical compositions from the few notes of the ordinary musical scale.

The second way in which all languages are productive is that the same ideas or thoughts can be expressed in any language. What can be said in English can also be said in French, in Hebrew, or in Swahili. Of course, if a language doesn't have a word for a particular concept then several words may be needed to express the concept. Children who are learning to talk provide clear and often humorous examples of how easily this is accomplished, as when a three-year-old, noticing her father's bald spot for the first time, said, ''Daddy bas a hole in his hair!" Lacking the word bald, she could express the idea nonetheless. much to her father's chagrin.
Underlying the productivity of languages are certain shared fundamental   features of design. Roger Brown (1965) has summarized these features quite nicely.

First, all languages use a limited number of speech sounds, called phonemes. Most languages use fewer than 100 phonemes. English, for example, has about 45 phonemes, while Hawaiian manages with even fewer, about 13. With so few phonemes! a language such as Hawaiian has to render   the English "Merry Christmas'' as "Melly Kalikamaka." Each of the speech sounds of a language is meaningless on its own. For example, the consonant that we represent by the letter k has no meaning. These meaningless   units can be combined to form meaningful units such as words in virtually limitless ways-the 45 phonemes of English can be combined and recombined to form hundreds of thousands of words! just as the 13 phonemes of Hawaiian can.

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