IANAL (as in I Am Not a Linguist), but my problem with the theory, as I understand it, is that it is predicated on the notion of constant rate of change in language, analogous to a rate of nuclear decay or something. Even if you ignore borrowings from other languages, which one would expect to change sporadically as a result of sudden migrations, conquests, and similar reasons for humans to mingle, I would expect language change to reflect changing human conditions, and that is not a linear thing. Maybe one of the card-carrying linguists can speak to this point (so to speak).
Here's a quasi universal from me:
If a language has declension, it has nouns. This is from Wikipedia
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declension ):
Declension has been analyzed extensively in
Sanskrit, where it is known as
karaka. Six varieties are defined by
Pāṇini, largely in terms of their semantic
roles, but with detailed rules specifying the corresponding morphosyntactic derivations:
- agent (kartri, often in the subject position, performing independently)
- patient (karman, often in object position)
- means (karaṇa, instrument)
- recipient (sampradāna, similar to dative)
- source (apādāna, similar, but not the same, as ablative)
- locus (adhikaraṇa, location or goal)
For example, consider the following sentence:
vrikśh[at]parṇ[am]bhūm[au]patati[from] the treea leaf[to] the groundfalls"a leaf falls from the tree to the ground"
Here
leaf is the agent,
tree is the source, and
ground is the locus, the corresponding declensions are reflected in the morphemes
-am -at and
-au respectively.
Languages with rich nominal inflection typically have a number of identifiable
declension classes, or groups of nouns that share a similar pattern of declension. While Sanskrit has six classes, Latin is traditionally said to have 5 declension classes (see article on
Latin declension). Such languages often exhibit
free word order, since thematic roles are not dependent on position
