English and Latin aren't even anywhere near as different as two natural languages can be. Take a look at this for a quick example, and take a look at the Language Construction Kit (it's about constructed languages, but AFAICT most of the things exemplified aren't completely unheard-of among natural languages) for a lot more.

(There are quite a few linguistic universals, but I'm not entirely convinced that all of them exist because a language flouting one of them would be unlearnable by humans, rather than (say) because they were inherited from a common ancestor.)