Languages are an important aspect of Human consciousness. Languages affect the conceptual models we build in our brains, which in turn affects how we perceive the world and reality.

Consequently language structures are a valid topic for this site, and there’s quite a bit in The Blog and The Oracle about them.

To keep this post short I’ll just make a couple of observations about this topic today.

The first common aspect of grammar that all languages seem to share is that they do actually have grammar. They may not all have any common structure beyond the fact that they have structure, but that’s important to note in itself. As far as a I know there is no completely chaotic free form language where words just get thrown together any old how.

Secondly - remember the wise rule:

• There is an exception to every rule and this is the exception to this one.

So there are aspects of grammar that are common to pretty much every language except …

And finding the odd exception simply proves that there are some pretty much universally accepted rules / structures / principles / parameters or call them what you will.

The strangest language is possibly Pirahã. It is a language that seems to be at variance with pretty much all other languages - the exception that proves the rule.

Here’s another. All languages treat the future as being ahead of us and the past as being behind us. Thus “I am looking forward to an exciting future.”

I know of just two exceptions -Aymara and Quechua, two languages spoken in Peru and Chile, which share some common concepts.

So that again seems to be some sort of universal grammatical / structural rule where the very odd exception(s) prove the rule. In this case it is a conceptual metaphor that’s built into the structure of most languages.

Just a couple of thoughts as to different ways of thinking about the issue of grammar.

Hope they help.