Just your typical foreign language

Ever since I first encountred the concept of "Standard Average European", I've found it a useful and powerful descriptor. The thing is, I can't remember where that was, much less find a good summation of its features. I don't know if anyone's even tried to ennumerate them exhaustively, since the term is really convenient shorthand for "those grammatical features common to the major Western European languages" and most linguists feel they pretty much know what these are without having to get explicit.

Probably the purest example of Standard Average European grammar is (somewhat ironically) Esperanto. Despite its pretentions of being an international auxiliary language for the world, it can't escape its origins as a distillation and simplification of those features found in every or at least most of the predominate languages of the pre-expansion EU. That's the secret behind the purported Sixteen Rules of Esperanto Grammar: These are really only the explicit rules of morphology (i.e. what endings different words take). The other 10,001 rules of grammar you're just expected to port from your native language (or whatever SAE language(s) you've picked up) and apply.

The 16 Rules themselves sounds perfectly self-explanatory to a native speaker of English or Spanish or German. They conform with how they expect languages to work. If they haven't been exposed to anything more exotic than Welsh or Hungarian, they may even ask themselves, "Well, how else would you do that?" But every single one of them would be ignored by some language or other. (I couldn't name a language that ignores each and every one of them simultaneously, but that may have to do more with my own limited range of experience than anything else.)

Let me give some examples of what I mean.

Rule One concerns the use of definite articles (e.g. English the), something a great many languages don't have. If you live in Chicago, you've heard Poles and Korean making all kinds of errors with articles in English--leaving them out where we expect them ("I am champion!") and sticking them in where we wouldn't (à la The Manolo). Devilish little words to master if you aren't used to them. (And even if you are, given that the details aren't even identical from one SAE language to the other. I've never been clear on what The Manolo's native language is supposed to be, but it could be Italian as easily as Russian.)

This doesn't mean that other languages can't express definiteness, however. Some languages use particular particles or classifier constructions (e.g. Chinese 一個人, lit. "one piece man", which depending on where it appears in a sentence can correspond to "a man", "some man" in English) or word order or inflections on the verb--or some combination of these.

Rule Two concerns nouns and the means of forming their plurals. We take for granted that everyone needs to distinguish one thing from many things. True enough. What's not a universal, however, is the need to do that in every case, much less to do it by means of inflections. After all, if I've just told you there are many, why do I still have to specify that I don't mean just one thing? In fact, many languages don't. If the number is important, they'll use a quantifier. (All that changes in the Chinese example above to express "five men" is the numeral, i.e. 五個人.) We even follow this logic in English sometimes (How many head of cattle? Is it a five-day trip or a ten-day one?).

So who needs noun plurals? In fact, who needs nouns at all?

Huh? Surely they're the most universal of all word classes? After all, every language has to talk about persons, places, and things, right? That's true, but they don't actually need nouns to do that. The most basic part of speech is really the verb. I don't know of any languages which are analysed as lacking verbs, but I can name several--Mohawk, Nahuatl, Inuktitut--which are said not to have nouns. The equivalent of a noun--"person", say, or "house"--is best viewed as a verb when it takes the same inflections as one. In other words, there might be no grammatical means of differentiating "I-am-person" from "I-dwell" and "I-who-am-person-dwell-in-that-which-is-house" would be the equivalent of our "I live in a house."

Rule Three concerns adjectives and if we can get by without nouns, we can certainly get by without adjectives. In fact, adjectives aren't all that different from nouns anyone--not in SAE at any rate. (Historically--that is, back in Proto-Indo-European--they essentially formed a single category.) Esperanto might seem to gainsay that by giving them different endings, but note that this is one of the ways in which it is least like its SAE models. German, French, Italian, etc.--they all allow adjectives to take the same endings as nouns and, often, to function like them as well. Even English allows this in certain circumstances (e.g. "the sick", "the downtrodden", etc.).

So it should be no surprise that other languages dispense with this class entirely, either by treating them as nouns (if they have them) or as verbs (whether or not they treat nouns this way or not). Regardless of whether one talks about a "house of bigness", "a house which is big", or a "that which is bigly a house", it's clear that a big house is what is meant.

That's enough for now. Tomorrow we can pick up with Rule Four.