Human languages are far more complex than any animal communication system we're aware of, and yet young children can easily learn to master more than one language in an astonishingly short period of time. This has led a number of linguists, most notably Noam Chomsky, to suggest that there might be language universals, common features of all languages that the human brain is attuned to, making learning easier. Now, a team of cognitive scientists has teamed up with an evolutionary biologist to perform a phylogenetic analysis of language families, and the results suggest that when it comes to languages, there are no rules.
The authors of the new paper point out just how hard it is to study languages. We're aware of over 7,000 of them, and they vary significantly in complexity. There are a number of large language families that are likely derived from a single root, but a large number of languages don't slot easily into one of the major groups. Against that backdrop, even a set of simple structural decisions—does the noun or verb come first? where does the preposition go?—become dizzyingly complex, with different patterns apparent even within a single language tree.
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