I am referring to aspect in the sense that it's used in linguistics [1].

I'm honestly getting a lot of responses here from people who clearly don't have a good grasp of linguistics, but you take the cake by composing a long-form response without at least bothering to Google the terms I have used.

    I think most of the time  
    people talk about the  
    "rules" of a language, we're
    not really talking about  
    something that will help  
    acquire the language (or be  
    better understood): we're  
    really just yapping about  
    geography and time.

Language families are not just formed across geography and time. Genetically, Hindi is closer to French than it is to Tibetan. People move, you know.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_aspect