> It's true that alphabets are easy to learn. But, in my opinion, all of this opining about language differences is navel gazing. Human languages are all funda

> It's true that alphabets are easy to learn. But, in my opinion, all of this opining about language differences is navel gazing. Human languages are all fundamentally the same. The differences are cosmetic. That's the Chomskyan hypothesis and it seems true to me. That's not "the Chomskyan hypothesis", it's a statement that can't be proved or falsified, since what "fundamentally the same" and "cosmetic differences" mean is really anyone's guess. Viewed from far enough, of course languages are essentially all the same, same as all living beings are essentially the same. Nevertheless, I think that looking at any textbook in linguistic typology or just browsing WALS gives you quite an impression of how diverse languages can be, much more than you'd assume if you only speak a number of European languages. > Or all the evidence is baseless speculation that relies on assuming Sapir-Worf. Maybe you should look at the data about colour perception or, even more strikingly, spatial reasoning, which uses actual experiments conducted on speakers of different languages (e.g. Dutch vs. Guugu Yimithirr). The results can be interpreted differently, but to say that this is just "baseless speculation" is fundamentally wrong and doesn't agree with empirical data. There's a very strong version of Sapir-Whorf ("language constrains how you think") that probably no linguist takes seriously anymore, but there's still substantial debate about the weak form ("language influences how you think").