Most human languages share the same universal set of basic verb tenses

What exactly is Universal Grammar, and has anyone seen it? - PMC. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4477053/

sals Generative linguists have tended to downplay the differences between languages and emphasize their similarities. In Chomsky’s (2000a) words, “… in their essential properties and even down to fine detail, languages are cast to the same mold. The Martian scientist might reasonably conclude that there is a single human language, with differences only at the margins.” (p. 7) Elsewhere ( Chomsky, 2004 , p. 149) he describes human languages as “essentially identical.” Stromswold (1999) expresses virtually the same view: “In fact, linguists have discovered that, although some languages seem, superficially, to be radically different from other languages …, in essential ways all human languages are remarkably similar to one another.” (p. 357) This view, however, is not shared by most typologists (cf. Croft, 2001 ; Haspelmath, 2007 ; Evans and Levinson, 2009 ). Evans and Levinson (2009) , for example, give counterexamples to virtually all proposed universals, including major lexical categories, major phrasal categories, phrase structure rules, grammaticalized means of distinguishing between subjects and objects, use of verb affixes to signal tense and aspect, auxiliaries, anaphora, and WH movement, and conclude that “….languages differ so fundamentally from one another at every level of description (sound, grammar, lexicon, meaning) that it is very hard to find any single structural property they share. The claims of Universal Grammar … are either empirically false, unfalsifiable or misleading in that they refer to tendencies rather than strict universals.” (p. 429) Clearly, there is a fundamental disagreement between generative linguists like Chomsky and functionalists like Evans and Levinson (2009) . Thus, it is misleading to state that “linguists have discovered that … in essential ways all human languages are remarkably similar to one another”; it would have been more accurate to prefix such claims with a qualifier such as “some linguists think that….” One reason for