Thanks, jenet. There's a merry band of linguists stretching back to Humboldt who are concerned with the typology of language: dealing e.g. with default word order for subject, object, and verb, noun and quantifier, etc. Greenberg and his students did much of the modern-day work on it. Here's a picture of Illich-Svitych and a reconstructed poem in Nostratic:

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Ithaca/6623/nostraticist.htm