In the early 2000s, Chomsky suggested that there's just one shared principle, called recursion, which means structures can be nested inside each other.
Even the lack of grammatical recursion in Pirah? , Mr Everett's key piece of evidence that it is culture that creates language, cannot tell the whole tale.
Combined with a taste for bizarrely complicated, recursive plots, and long sequences of wordy explicatory dialogue, this turns the games into a bit of a drag.