The Gods Must Be Crazy ( LM 10)

According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, grammar is ‘the set of rules that explain how words are used in a language.’ From this simple definition, we understand that language has rules and it would be impossible to discern a message when everything is scrambled. In the essay, ‘Some languages have no grammar’ by Winifred Bauer she emphasizes that all languages have grammar. I totally agree with this point because otherwise the recipient of a message would have to waste time decoding it. Then again on the other hand that decoding would involve following some rules which would thus represent it’s grammar. She also reiterates that the existence of grammar in a language does not depend on a grammar book. This means that grammar exists in all languages whether it is written or not and some might be complex than others depending on the language.

I remember watching the movie, ‘The gods must be crazy’ several years ago. At the time I found it funny the way the Kung (South African) language was portrayed. Kung is a South African language that is spoken by the bushmen, each sound is a click followed by an exclamation mark. I was pretty sure they had no grammar, all one had to do was produce a number of clicking sounds when speaking it. On the other hand, these clicking sounds had to have some sort of pattern (grammar) for one to be able to understand and distinguish the different messages.