MOTION MOUNTAIN

258 8 thought and language
Challenge 255 e
Ref. 237
Ref. 236
erable effortin thedistillation ofphonological,grammatical andsemanticuniversals,as
theyarecalled, fromthe6000orsolanguagesthoughttoexisttoday.*
Theinvestigations into thephonological aspect, which showed for example that every
language has at least two consonants and two vowels, does not provide any material for
the discussion of translation.** Studying thegrammatical (orsyntactic) aspect, one finds
that all languages use smallest elements, called ‘words’, which they group into sentences.
They all have pronouns for the first and second person, ‘I’ and ‘you’, and always contain
nouns and verbs. All languages use subjects and predicates or, as one usually says, the
three entities subject, verb and object, though not always in this order. Just check the
languages you know.
On thesemantic aspect, the long list of lexical universals, i.e., words that appear in all
languages, such as ‘mother’ or ‘Sun’, has recently been given a structure. The linguist
Anna Wierzbicka performed a search for the building blocks from which all concepts
can be built. She looked for the definition of every concept with the help of simpler ones,
and continued doing so until a fundamental level was reached that cannot be further
reduced.The set of concepts that are left over are the primitives. By repeating this exercise
in many languages, Wierzbicka found that the list is the same in all cases. She thus had
discovereduniversalsemanticprimitives. In November 1992, the list contained the terms
given in Table 21.
Following the life-longresearchofAnnaWierzbickaandherresearchschool,allthese
conceptsexistinalllanguagesoftheworldstudiedsofar.***Theyhave defined the meaningofeachprimitive
in detail, performed consistency checks and eliminated alternative
approaches. They have checked this list in languages from all language groups, in languages
from all continents, thus showing that the result is valid everywhere. In every
language all other concepts can be defined with the help of the semantic primitives.
Simply stated, learning to speak means learning these basic terms, learning how to
combine them and learning the names of these composites. The definition of language
given above, namely as a means of communication that allows one to express everything
one wants to say, can thus be refined:
⊳ Only a set of concepts that includes the universal semantic primitives forms
* A professional database by the linguist Merritt Ruhlen with 5700 languages and many details on each
language can be found at ehl.santafe.edu/intro1.htm. A long but unprofessional list with 6900 languages
(andwith 39000language anddialect names)canbefoundonthewebsite www.ethnologue.com. Beware,
itisedited byafringe religious group thataims toincreasethenumber oflanguages asmuchaspossible.
Itisestimated that15000±5000languages haveexistedinthepast.
Nevertheless, in today’s world, and surely in the sciences,it is often sufficient to know one’s own language
plus English. Since English is the language with the largest number of words, learning it well is a
greater challenge than learning mostother languages.
** Phonological studies also explore topics such as the observation that in many languages the word for
‘little’ containsan ‘i’ (orhighpitched ‘e’)sound:petit,piccolo,klein,tiny,pequeño,chiisai;exceptionsare:
small,parvus.
*** It is easy to imagine that this research steps on the toes of many people. A list that maintains that we
onlyhaveaboutthirtybasicconceptsinourheadsistakentobeoffensivebymanysmallminds.Inaddition,
a list that maintains that ‘true’, ‘good’, ‘creation’, ‘life’, ‘mother’ or ‘god’ are composite will elicit violent
reactions,despitethecorrectnessofthestatements.Indeed,someofthesetermswereaddedinthe1996list,
whichissomewhatlonger.
Motion Mountain – The Adventure of Physics copyright © Christoph Schiller June 1990–November 2015 free pdf file available at www.motionmountain.net