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Worldwide
Recurs in unrelated families across every macroarea.
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How do languages say “there is”?
“The water is in the river” takes the water as given and tells you where it is. “There is water in the river” reverses that: the river is the setting and the water is the news. Saying that something exists therefore reuses the machinery for saying where it is, and languages differ in how much they change along the way — some leave the locational predicate untouched, some add a placeholder subject, some borrow the possessive verb, and some keep a predicate for existence alone. The choice often splits by animacy and by number.
How do languages say “I have X”?
Some languages use a transitive HAVE verb; others say “at me, X is”, “to me, X is”, or “I-with X”. The same language often switches strategy with what is possessed — inanimate, animate, kin, body-parts.
How do languages say “I don’t have X”?
To express absence of possession, languages either negate a HAVE-verb, add a negative determiner to the object, or reframe the situation as one of non-existence or absence — with the possessor as topic, location, or dative.
How do languages build the paradigm of someone, anyone, no one, and everyone?
Most often these words share one interrogative base (who?) plus a small particle — “also”, “every”, “some”, “any” — that sets the reading. A few languages, English among them, lexicalise the series instead.
In what order do languages arrange subject, object, and verb?
Two of the six logically possible orders dominate the world’s languages — SOV (Japanese, Hindi, Turkish) and SVO (English, Mandarin, Romance). The rest are rare, or set by information structure rather than a fixed template.
Do adpositions come before or after the noun phrase?
Adposition order tracks verb–object order as a strong tendency — after the noun in OV languages (Japanese tēburu no ue ni), before it in VO (English on the table). Exceptions recur across families: Persian and Tajik combine OV order with prepositions, while SVO-leaning Finnish keeps its Uralic postpositions.
Which verb makes a machine start working?
A lamp, an air conditioner, a tap, recorded music, an alarm clock, a vacuum cleaner and a washing machine each need a verb. Some languages reach for fire, some for opening or rotation, some for the plain act of putting a thing down. The choice also shifts from one thing to the next within a single language: Japanese attaches a light and hangs music, where Korean kindles the light and rotates the washing machine.
How does a word for “there is no” turn into plain “not”?
A dedicated negative existential (“there is no X”) arises beside the ordinary negator, then spreads from existential sentences into verbal negation until it becomes the standard negator itself. Croft distinguishes six synchronic types — A, A~B, B, B~C, C, C~A — and the languages below sit at different points along the drift.
How does “listen” come to mean “obey”?
Verbs of hearing and listening repeatedly grow a sense of obeying. The pattern recurs from Mandarin tīnghuà and Japanese iu koto o kiku to Latin oboedīre, built on audīre “to hear”, behind French obéir and English obey.