This post is inspired by reading the latest Tom Wolfe diatribe, “The Kingdom of Speech”. While the book sets off to discuss the issues of what were the origins and evolution of speech in early man, the largest part of this book is devoted to a juicy recounting of the feud between Noam Chomsky and Daniel Everett over whether recursion and other grammatical structures must be present in all languages. Chomsky famously holds that some mutation endowed early man with a “language organ” that forces all languages to share some form of its built-in “universal grammar”. Everett, on the other hand, was the first to thoroughly learn the vastly simplified language spoken by the Amazonian Piraha (pronounced peedahan) that possesses very little of Chomsky’s grammar and, in particular, appears to lack any recursive constructions (aka embedded clauses). What I want to claim in this blog is that both are wrong and that grammar in language is merely a recent extension of much older grammars that are built into the brains of all intelligent animals to analyze sensory input, to structure their actions and even formulate their thoughts. All of these abilities, beyond the simplest level, are structured in hierarchical patterns built up from interchangeable units but obeying constraints, just as speech is.