[bradrn]

> I believe that every language does have something that you can describe as a noun, but that's more or less the only "universal" part of speech (there are some languages that essentially don't have verbs--you "do a look" rather than "see", e.g.).

R.M.W. Dixon argues convincingly that every language has at least nouns and verbs; less convincingly (IMO), he also argues for adjectives as a universal category. Some languages have only a very small set of verbs — Kalam has ~200, and Wutung has only 32 [0] — but they still have an identifiable category of verbs nonetheless. (Jingulu has been said to have 3 verbs, but only if you disqualify the large set of non-inflecting verbs.)

[0] https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/handle/1885/10937... — a complete list of all 32 simple verbs may be found on page 293 (322 of the PDF)