The Basic Property of Language
Chomsky talks about the basic property of languages that he needs as a shorthand to refer to, I’m looking for something that is a basic property of language. With this, he, of course, stipulates that to be considered human languages, they must have this property (Chomsky, 2016).
I tend to agree. I have the same notion about programming languages.
At this moment, I’m going to venture that the basic property of language, as opposed to languages, is simply that it is the only thing that sates our thirst for grammar. Anything that doesn’t really do this isn’t really a language. Where the grammar doesn’t exist, we impose it, as best we can, as a schema for encoding and decoding meaning (sort of a psycho-codec) and call it a language, although Chomsky would not. Where it does exist, we soak it up and use it. So, my shorthand is that language is that which compels us to seek and ascribe meaning through subjective and structural schemata - grammars - a circumstance which might help explain a lot of what humans do.