One of the liveliest debates in linguistics is over whether all

languages share fundamental properties. If so, perhaps language is a

universal feature of evolution. To find out, scholars have looked to

other universal features, and one in special: no society on Earth lacks 【M1】_________

music. The comparison illuminates that is special about both. 【M2】_________

Music and language seem intimately linked, but how? Did language

start with song, as Darwin believed? Or is music “auditory cheesecake”

that developed of language and other useful faculties, as Steven Pinker, 【M3】_________

a Harvard psychologist, has said? Is music it a language, as Stevie 【M4】_________

Wonder intoned? Might the two be fundamentally same? 【M5】_________

Some similarities are obvious. Both can utilise the unique human

vocal tract. Both have a kind of beat. Both can express emotion. Both

can be neither carefully composed or spontaneously improvised. And 【M6】_________

both are high social. Although the origin of music is unclear, it seems 【M7】_________

likely to have involved in celebration, communal worship or martial 【M8】_________

inspiration and coordination.

At a structural level the parallels are striking, too. With a finite set

of notes or words, and a finite set of rules, an inexhaustible variety of

novel melodies or sentences can be created. This “discrete infinity” is

often said to be a hallmark of human language. Animal communication, 【M9】_________

by contrast, is only able to convey a limited number of thought (the 【M10】________

location of a source of food, for example, or the presence of a

predator).

People appear to be born to compute. The digital skills of children 【M1】_________

develop so early and so inexorably that it is easy to imagine an internal

clock of mathematical maturity guiding its growth. Not long after 【M2】_________

learning to walk and talk, they can make the table with impressive 【M3】_________

accuracy—one plate, one knife, one spoon, one fork, for each of the

five chairs. Soon they are capable of noting that they have placed five

knives, spoons, and forks on the table and, a bit later, that this adds to 【M4】_________

fifteen pieces of silverware. Having thus mastered addition, they move

on to subtraction. It seems almost reasonable to expect that if a child

was secluded on a desert island at birth and retrieved seven years later, 【M5】_________

he or she could enter a second-grade mathematics class without any

serious problems of intellectual adjustment.

Of course, the truth is not so simple. In this century, the work of

cognitive psychologists have illuminated the subtle forms of daily 【M6】_________

learning on which intellectual progress depends. Children observed as 【M7】_________

they slowly grasped—or, as the case might be, encountered—concepts

that adults take it for granted, and that they refused, for instance, to 【M8】_________

concede that quantity is unchanged as water pours from a short stout

glass into a tall thin one. Psychologists have since demonstrated that

young children, asking to count the pencils in a pile, readily report the 【M9】_________

number of blue or red pencils, but must be coaxed into finding a total. 【M10】________

Such studies have suggested that the basics of mathematics are mastered

gradually, and with effort.

We know that it is impossible to set up a limited number of types

that would do full justice to the peculiarities of thousands of languages 【M1】________

and dialects spoken on the surface of the earth. Like all human

institutions, speech is too variable and too elusive to be quite safely

ticketed. Even if we operate with a minutely subdivided scale of types,

we may be quite certain that many of our languages will need trim before 【M2】________

they fit. To get them into the scheme at all it will be necessary to

underestimate the significance of this or that feature or to ignore, for 【M3】________

the time being, certain contradictions in their mechanism. It would be

too easy to relieve ourselves from the burden of constructional thinking 【M4】________

and to take the standpoint that each language has its unique history,

therefore its unique structure. Such a standpoint expresses only a half

truth. Just as similar social, economic, and religious institutions have

grown up in different parts of the world from distinct historical

antecedents, so also languages, travel along different roads, have tended 【M5】_________

to converge toward similar forms. Moreover, the historical study of

language has proven to us beyond all doubt that a language changes not

only gradually but consistently, that it moves unconsciously from one

type towards others, and that analogous trends are observable in remote 【M6】_________

quarters of the globe. From this it follows that broadly similar study

must not have been reached by unrelated languages, independently and 【M7】_________

frequently. In assuming the existence of comparable types, however, we 【M8】_________

are not denying the individuality of all historical processes; we are

merely affirming that back off the face of history is powerful drifts that 【M9】_________

move language, like other social products, to balance patterns. 【M10】_________