Mark C. Baker.
The Atoms of Language.
Basic Books. 2001
Whether all human languages are fundamentally the same or different has been the subject of debate for ages.
This problem has deep philosophical implications: If languages are all the same,
it implies a fundamental commonality—and thus mutual intelligibility—of human thought.
We are now on the verge of solving this problem. In this lively and accessible book, Mark C. Baker shows how researchers have used the theory of one of the world’s greatest linguists, Noam Chomsky, to reveal that the similarities among languages are more profound than the differences. Languages whose grammars seem completely incompatible may in fact be structurally almost identical, except for a difference in one simple rule. The discovery of such rules and how they must vary promises to yield a linguistic equivalent of the Periodic Table of Elements: a single framework by which we can understand the fundamental structure of all human language.