[PLUG-TALK] A universal language?

[Mel Andres]

Thanks John,

  You explain it much better and comprehensively than the article. I 
don't consider the source as an authority on any of the topics they 
publish. Some are more interesting than others of course. But most have 
spelling and grammar errors which are a bit of a red flag in my opinion.

Mel

On 11/18/15 1:25 PM, John Jason Jordan wrote:
> On Wed, 18 Nov 2015 12:21:05 -0800
> Mel Andres <mel97215 at comcast.net> dijo:
>
>>   I am posting this primarily for John Jason Jordan.
>>
>> http://www.ancient-code.com/mit-researcher-find-a-universal-language-that-binds-together-all-languages-on-our-planet/
> First, the field of linguistics that you want to look at for this kind
> of work is typology. Typologists seek language universals and have
> discovered a great many of them, some as absolute universals and many,
> many more as universal tendencies.
>
> Second, Chomsky (also at MIT) never postulated a universal language as
> such, although I doubt he would argue against it. His real claim is that
> that there is a universal _grammar_ framework that all humans are born
> with, and which infants populate with the rules of the language(s) that
> they are exposed to. With the exception of a really bad work on
> phonology that he co-authored with Hallé, Chomsky pays no attention to
> phonetics/phonology, morphology, historical linguistics,
> psycho-/neurolinguistics, or more applied fields such as
> sociolinguistics, discourse/conversation analysis, bilingualism, or
> corpus linguistics, among others. He doesn't discredit those fields; he
> just says they're not his thing. Yet, these are all part of language.
> If you are going to postulate a universal language you're going to have
> to include a great deal more than just a universal grammar.
>
> It appears that the authors have a pretty good argument for the
> existence of another universal tendency. It might have been better had
> they published it in a journal dedicated to linguistics. I don't know
> of any linguists who read PNAS.
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