Unrelated to any other extant tongue, and based on just eight consonants and three vowels, Pirahã has one of the simplest sound systems known. Yet it possesses such a complex array of tones, stresses, and syllable lengths that its speakers can dispense with their vowels and consonants altogether and sing, hum, or whistle conversations. It is a language so confounding to non-natives that until Everett and his wife, Keren, arrived among the Pirahã, as Christian missionaries, in the nineteen-seventies, no outsider had succeeded in mastering it.
(…) The Pirahã, Everett wrote, have no numbers, no fixed color terms, no perfect tense, no deep memory, no tradition of art or drawing, and no words for “all,” “each,” “every,” “most,” or “few”—terms of quantification believed by some linguists to be among the common building blocks of human cognition. Everett’s most explosive claim, however, was that Pirahã displays no evidence of recursion, a linguistic operation that consists of inserting one phrase inside another of the same type, as when a speaker combines discrete thoughts (“the man is walking down the street,” “the man is wearing a top hat”) into a single sentence (“The man who is wearing a top hat is walking down the street”).
John Colapinto in “The Interpreter”, New Yorker (emphasis added)
ARTICLE [excerpt from "The Interpreter" (above)]
ARTICLE ["Living without Numbers or Time"]
ARTICLE [Pirahã people]
ARTICLE [Pirahã language]
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The Conversation {8 comments}
As fascinating as I find this concept, I cannot imagine them being all that interesting to speak to once you do learn the language.
No more interesting than any other humans I suppose. I don’t know I’d love to pick brains with them.
Just seems like there would be no discussions on art, culture, the past or the future!
Exactly. :)
I don’t know if the previous comments by Thomas and Ruckman are meant to be ironic, but…
I believe they are missing the whole point. Everett’s theory of the Piraha goes well beyond “picking brains” or talking with them. It has epistemological and ontological implications that have been explored by many philosophers, but only in theoretical realms, not in tangible “real-world” ones. Objections of the sort of “no discussions on art, culture,…” are, not only shortsighted but a bit banal, and yes, vapid. But well, that’s just my opinion. Then again, if they meant to be ironic, they didn’t do a very good job.
Mendoza (since we’re referring to people by their last names, apparently), of course the studies of the Piraha tribe have significant meaning for multiple areas of learning, especially linguistics. No one said otherwise. However, I think you’re reading too much into some of it.
But, well, that’s just my opinion. :P
Roberto: Dude, you must have misunderstood. Investigating the epistemological and ontological implications of cultural constraints on grammar and cognition from a geographically detached anthropological and ethnographic perspective is exactly what I meant when I said “picking brains”. I use the two phrases interchangeably.
In fact sometimes when I mean to say “picking brains” I say the other, it just rolls off the tongue so easily. And these days I’m so absent-minded.
I find the thirty years or more it took of research to finally get to us speaks more than the article.
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