The formal features of natural languages (and their power) are irrelevant, because using language in idiosyncratic ways is almost always bad. If everyone else w

The formal features of natural languages (and their power) are irrelevant, because using language in idiosyncratic ways is almost always bad. If everyone else wrote Java-style code in Common Lisp, you could still write Lisp in Common Lisp. Not so with natural languages--if you care about being understood. It would be more useful to speak of literary/conversational cultures associated with different languages, and those can differ quite a lot. For example, many English-speakers accuse Dostoyevskiy of being unrealistic because his characters routinely give long, elaborate monologues to each other. But this is how Russians actually talk. P.S.: Which isn't to say that natural languages are "mere conventions", as PG once wrote. In practice, natural languages vary a lot in their power to communicate different kinds of thoughts. But this is not due to any easily identifiable features, e.g. in syntax. Going back to the programming language metaphor: different cultures write different libraries for their language. And only a culture as a whole can write the libraries, which makes them even more important to the individual than libraries in a programming language.