ABSTRACT
If structuralism is right in assuming that every individual language is asystem of its own, we should expect that languages can be very different, that they have terms for different things or different ways of naming the same things and that similar situations are expressed in different ways and from different perspectives. But how big are the differences between languages? Are all languages essentially alike, allowing the expression of the same thoughts, the communication of the same things, only differing in their respective ways of formulation? Or are languages different to an extent that it may be altogether impossible to express in one language what can be expressed in another? Are the semantic systems completely arbitrary, or are they constrained by universal principles?
