Linguistics is the science of languages.  This is about systematically describing and comparing different languages.  These can vary much more than most know about.  People who only know their mother tongue are often unaware that variation even exists.  In contrast one should not exoticise languages.  Humans with all mother tongues can learn all languages.  It is just easier if the languages are similar.

A very misunderstood concept is grammar.  “Bad grammar” is used as a label for everything in other people’s writing one does not like.  Similarly, a variant of a language is claimed to have “no grammar”.  What the person actually means is it does not mach any writing standard.  What linguists mean by grammar is the structures used to create sentences.  (Spoken or written does not matter.)  It mostly consists of inflictions and word order.  All languages have a pattern for this which can be described.

The word grammar originally meant writing.  (I think the similar word in Greek still means that.)  In Medieval Western Europe learning to write was the same as learning Latin.  In practice this meant an imitation of the Roman Empire’s official language.  It belonged to a group of languages which has become simpler over time.  In addition Latin has no specific word order.  To compensate for this it had loads of inflictions.  As time passed the word grammar came to refer to these inflictions.  The system describing them was then applied to other languages.  In modern times it has turned out certain languages mostly use word order.  Subtle differences in vowels may function as infliction too.  So the word grammar was extended to also include such.

Grammar in this meaning matters for understanding languages.  There are two artificial languages named Occidental (Western) and Interlingua (Between-Language).  These have largely the same lexicon.  However, the grammar of Occiental is considerably more like the languages I am familiar with.  The result is I understand nearly all of Occiental.  Out of Interlingua I understood about half.  This is not much more than I understand of German.

In particular, lexicon is something many hang up over.  When one learn a foreign language one has to learn many words.  Otherwise one has no use of grammar in the above meaning.  Unfortunately, this fools some to believe they only consist of their words.  Similarities in lexicon are then mistaken for general similarity in language.  In reality the languages’ structure can show clear differences.  This makes the languages more different than how they first appear.

In addition the phonotactics of languages can vary enormously.  This is about which language sounds a language has and how they can be combined.  How many sounds a language has is something varying considerably.  Hawaiian has 33 language sounds, 76% of which are vowels.  It belongs to a group of languages having the world’s simplest phonotactics.  These only allow one consonant before and no-one after each vowel.

At the other end are some languages spoken by the Khoisan of southern Africa.  They may have more than 100 language sounds.  I think the majority of them are consonants.  They have very special language sounds not considered as such by nearly everyone else.  Only some of them have been loaned by other peoples.  They have immigrated to areas previously inhabited by the Khoisan.

Another extreme are languages where words may entirely lack vowels.  In some cases this is language sounds functioning as words in themselves.  Otherwise, there could be words only consisting of several consonants.  However, I think this is less common.  Anyway, this characteristic is found in languages without a traceable relationship.  So this characteristic must have arisen at several different occasions independently of each other.

Finally it is rarely true that languages are more complicated than others.  There is an inverse correlation between the number of language sounds and grammar.  The more sounds a language has the simpler is the grammar.  The languages with the lowest number of sounds have the most complex grammar too.  The only exceptions among natural languages consist of Creole languages.  Such have arisen in a single generation.  Children have got insufficient contact with any single language.  If enough of such grow up as neighbours they can develop a new language.  Then it only has characteristics the speakers have felt the need for.  Which is considerably fewer than what has been inherited by other languages.

Uploaded on the 4th of October 2024.