As promised, I am back to discuss the aspect of the concept that ‘All languages are different’. In order to do so, I must present to you the term ‘mental grammar’. Every individual has their own personal mental grammar, which is made up of the Universal Grammar (yes, it is important enough to be capitalized) and personal experiences.
All experience is mediated by cognitive processes, meaning it is the indirect absorption of information. In order for this absorbed information to be considered useful, it has to be made into mental models. These models encompass many things, from learning heuristics to instinct reactions. These are basically shortcuts that allow us to process the world at the rate we do.
Could you imagine seeing a dog and having to go through a long process just to understand what it was? Okay, it is smaller than me and has more hair, it walks on four legs but it’s not a cat… If we had to do that every time a stimulus presented itself, we wouldn’t have survived past the first stage of evolution. So, these experiences are translated into these models to make us smarter and help us survive. Every time we see a dog, we add it to our ‘dog’ model, so next time we see a dog we are even quicker at recognizing it. This concept is also applicable to language. Every time we hear a word, we compile it with what we have associated it with in the past (image, sound, noise, etc) in order to build a mental model for that word.
Now, Universal Grammar is the universally agreed upon system of input and outputs that makes language comprehensible to more than one person. It’s most important aspect is sentence structure, since if words are generally in the right order we can gather meaning. For example, in English, the noun is generally placed before the verb: ‘The dog ran’ rather than ‘The ran dog’. Of course, it is more complex than this, but it took me a whole quarter to scrape the surface of these topics.
In this sense, if personal experiences and universal grammar combine to make an individual’s mental grammar, no language could possibly the same. While there are agreed upon ‘rules’, the personal aspect skews the similarity completely. Plus, it is impossible to recreate a sound exactly (well, naturally). each time you say ‘dog’, it’s going to be different. So, no language can possibly be the same.
