Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

It is hard to find an existing grammatical category that is common to all forms of human speech. Many languages do without determiners such as a and the (Russian and Chinese, for example). Many languages do without gender (in Finnish there is no distinction among “he,” “she,” and “it”). Numerous major and minor languages in the world do not mark number (Chinese, again, has no special form for dual or plural). It’s fairly obvious that you don’t really need adjectives—even in English, you can use “tomato” or “beetroot” if you want to call something red; prefixes allow you to distinguish between big and small versions of the same thing (English minibus, French hypermarché), just as suffixes do in Italian (uomaccio, “big man”), Latin (homunculus, little man) and Russian (левчик, “little lion”). The Argentinean wit Jorge Luis Borges thought up a language without nouns—where verbs and adverbs sufficed for all expressions. “It moons bluely” is all you would need to refer to the presence of a blue-tinted moon in the sky. Aspect is only properly grammaticalized in some languages (Russian, for example), and tense is clearly redundant even in languages that have it. “I go to Paris tomorrow” is perfectly good English, just as Napoléon entre dans Moscou en août 1812 is normal French, with the explicit expressions of time (“tomorrow,” “1812”) making the grammatical marking of time unnecessary. Only some languages have evidentials; vast numbers of them have no prepositions and many others have no agglutinations. The concept of case is virtually absent from English (it subsists in the distinction we still make between he and him, she and her—and that’s about it) and totally alien to Chinese.

And so it goes on. Mood is not part of English grammar (we use separate words, such as may, should, ought, and so forth), but it provides Albanian with an elaborate set of resources for expressing all sorts of affective qualities, including admiration. Vowel harmony is a basic feature of Hungarian: you say a moz-iba if you went to the movies, but az étterembe if you went to the restaurant, because the “o” and “i” sounds of the first require the suffix -ba to match them, and the “é” and “e” sounds of the second call for the suffix to be -be. Nothing like that happens in the vast majority of the world’s languages.

The hunt for what all grammars share—“Universal Grammar”—has been going on for a long while, and has got about as far as the search for the Holy Grail.[182] However, at one level, the answer is obvious, because it is definitional: all grammars regulate the ways in which free items may be combined to make an acceptable sentence.

The trouble with that is obvious: “sentence” is a grammatical concept to begin with. Sentencehood is not an observable quality of acts of natural speech. It’s not just in the poetry of Mallarmé that we have difficulty in knowing where to put the period. Just listen to your children! They never finish their sentences properly.

It is true that we can make sentences in any human language. But it is just as true that most of our actual uses of speech do not involve anything that looks much like a grammatical sentence. When we write, of course, we usually try to write in sentences. But not always.

The second major problem with the axiom of grammaticality—with the idea that what makes a language a language is its having a grammar—is that no living language has yet been given a grammar that accounts for absolutely all of the expressions (including sentences) that are uttered by speakers of that language. The “grammar of English”—or any other language—has not yet been completed, and it’s a fair guess that it will always remain a work in progress.

Flaws of this magnitude in aerodynamics or the theory of probability would not have allowed the Wright brothers to get off the ground, or Las Vegas resorts to turn a profit.

The Achilles’ heel of a linguistic theory that places grammar at its core could be put like this: since universal grammar remains elusive and no exhaustive grammar of any single form of speech has yet been devised, every speaking subject on this planet knows something that grammar does not.

So let us put the Bible story and school-learned wisdom aside. Let us also suppose that there is something about every form of human behavior that we recognize as a language that all languages have in common. What is it? What is it that unambiguously identifies some set of sounds made by humans as a language?

It’s a huge question, and it’s hard to know where to begin. But let us try to do so without any presuppositions. One of the first things we can easily observe has to do with our hands.