How can it be that all the human languages form logical grammar structures without anyone defining them from the first place?

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It seems like grammar rules just form up on their own and no language is a “mess”, how can it be?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Well because the rules are so different from language to language. It seems humans need some sort of basic structure to how they speak, in order to best be understood. But there is no universal structure that languages are required to have. There is logic to each language, but the logic changes depending on the language.

Anonymous 0 Comments

If you really want your mind blown look up [Zipf’s Law](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4176592/)

Anonymous 0 Comments

I wouldn’t call grammar logical. It’s orderly to some degree, but it doesn’t have logic the same way math or philosophical proofs do.

The “rules” are just patterns that are more or less consistently observed. They change with time, unlike say, basic arithmetic.

A lot of the way languages are comes down to balancing time and energy cost with communicating adequately. Making up a new way of saying things is cool for poetic expression and super tedious for coordinating how you’re going to feed yourself and stay safe every day. Using existing conventions is more likely to lead to understanding and productive communication. So we might have individual style and preferences, but mostly we don’t stray too far from grammatical norms.

To not one understand people otherwise another. 🙂

Anonymous 0 Comments

English is absolutely a hot mess. In college we used to joke that English is the language that mugs other languages in a dark alley and steals any spare vocabulary XD

Jokes aside, Sentence structure and grammar are determined by the language. Anything sounds weird and foreign to you in your own native tongue. For example, I believe in russian the sentence “Throw dad’s hat down the stairs” is literally translated as “Throw it down the stairs, to Papa, his hat.” All the same content, different order.