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;
others have looked for statistical correlations between
languages. 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 the way languages order key sentence components,
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 e