Are all languages made up of the same kind of words: nouns, verbs, adjectives etc and subdirectories?

Sorry I only just came across this question and there are only a few minutes left to answer. This is a rather complex question.

"Linguistic Universals" may be worth a search on Google.

As would "Universal Grammar" - Chomsky proposes that this is innate in the mind of every human being just waiting to be activated to suit a particular language.

there's a course handout which discusses this kind of thing - http://www.unm.edu/~devalenz/handouts/univers.html

Check this link

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_universals

Good luck. Sorry I didn't have more time to discuss with you.

Yes, this is true. If there is a language which has no nouns, no verbs or no adjectives, I am unaware of it. They are just about the only things that all natural human languages have in common ... linguists call these things "universals".

Subdirectories ... not universals as far as I know! Perhaps you meant subcategories? Even then, probably no. Take nouns: grammatical gender, for example, is not a universal; neither are pronouns.

I don't think all languages do have the same categories of words. For instance, in Chinese, I get the impression that they don't distinguish between nouns, adjectives and verbs. What makes me say this is that I once tried to teach English to a Chinese refugee over a period of six months of one-on-one sessions. He constantly used the wrong parts of speech and had great difficulties with, say, understanding when to use 'die', 'dead' or 'death'.

In Hausa, the main language of northern Nigeria, there is no clear difference between nouns and adjectives. For instance, babba means 'big' or 'the big one'; ja means 'red' or 'the red one' and so on. This overlapping extends to the plural. Thus, manya, the plural of babba, means 'big' when qualifying a plural noun, or it means 'the big ones'.

For serious answers, see above. I would like just to add some food for thought.

A few years ago, I heard on Radio 4 that some linguist had studied a group of remote islanders who were thought to be the descendants of a shipwreck whose parents had died and they had to invent language from scratch, with no influence from any existing language. After several generations, the linguist who studied their language said it contained verbs and nouns just like our languages. Sorry I haven't got any more details.

Now for something more light-hearted. The Americans get their nouns mixed up with their verbs, and their adjectives mixed up with their adverbs. For example, any noun can be verbed. (Real example: a "computerized conferencing system" - is there such a verb as "to conference"?) As for adverbs, are they just too lazy to add the -ly suffix? I don't think so, since they deliberately answer "How are you?" with "I'm good" (adjective) instead of "I'm well."

Basically, yes - it's just that they don't use the "blocks" in the same way. For example, many Asian languages are "topic-prominent" languages - which means they indicate the topic separately from the subject. Many of them also drop pronouns if they are obvious.

If a language did not have nouns and verbs, how would it identify things or communicate any type of action or state of being?

Aw, Captain Planet! Its to early in the morning for these kinds of questions. At this time I only respond to questions about farts and underwear.

No. English, Spanish follow the same grammatical pattern but is different in German.

Irish has no indefinite article and no words that mean 'yes' or 'no'.

hein? subdirectories??? eh.... no.

Ever since Windows95 their called "subfolders," I think ^^