I've heard of Universal Grammar, but I have to say, I've never thought it sounded probable. Or, maybe it sounded too probable; something we wanted to be true. "Hey, look! There are reasons we speak this way. It's right." And I'm not a prescriptivist, so I bristled a bit at the thought of One True Way to speak. Most people who love language love the variety of it.
But then I read the research and yeah, it doesn't look entirely like BS. There are four basic principles.
Monsieur Jordain's Principle: Like things should be together. The thing that does the action should be somewhere near the action. The words describing a thing should probably be in the same clause as the thing. There are languages that don't follow this as strictly, but they're the exception.
Caesar's Principle: The action usually follows our perception of time. The famous example is Caesar's "Veni, Vidi, Vici" - I came, I saw, I conquered. It would make a completely different sentence in any other order.
Don't be a bore: You don't need to say things... that you don't need to say. If I went to a rave and I took some LSD and I saw the devil and I passed out in a warehouse and I missed work and I lost my job... I will drive everyone crazy with my story. I don't need to repeat obvious words.
"Me first" and "Actor first": Spend some time around kids and you'll notice this one. Me and grandpa blah blah blah. Getting them to follow the English rule of politeness and put yourself last is a chore. It's one of their most persistent errors. Because, let's be honest: we're the most important thing. We naturally want to put ourselves first. And in 90% of languages, the actor in the sentence comes before the action, e.g. Karen regrets her life choices, as opposed to the 10% who place the action first, e.g. Regrets Karen her life choices.
If you read these and noticed I hedged a lot, saying "should" and "usually", you're right. I guess like the Pirate's Code, they're more of guidelines than rules. There are probably exceptions to each. But there's enough data to show that language skews greatly in their direction of these four rules. And that's enough for me.
Comments
Post a Comment