> Benveniste said that the only thing ALL languages had in common were the deictic markers:
> here vs there, that vs this, us vs them, I vs you, now vs then, etc.
[....]
> Of course, this was forty years ago.
Indeed. There's been a lot of work done on language typology since Benveniste's day, and some things have been found out. There are some apparently odd languages out there -- I say "apparently" because the theoretical analysis of these languages is typically undertaken by people who are not native, or even very fluent, speakers of them -- but there are (or seemed to be, back when I was actively studying this stuff) some pretty general patterns that held good over a considerable portion of the space. For example, IIRC, whether or not a language consistently puts the direct object before the verb or not predicts with excellent reliability some other syntactic patterns.
Of course this may be outdated too, since I've been out of touch with the field for quite a while.
--
Michael Smith mjs at smithbowen.net http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org