{"id":1743,"date":"2010-12-07T06:30:35","date_gmt":"2010-12-07T06:30:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thetravellerslastjourney.com\/shai\/2018\/11\/28\/1010-revision-v1\/"},"modified":"2019-07-10T11:48:33","modified_gmt":"2019-07-10T11:48:33","slug":"piraha","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thetravellerslastjourney.com\/shai\/2010\/12\/07\/piraha\/","title":{"rendered":"Pirah\u00e3"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pirah\u00e3[I]<\/sup><\/a> is a\u00a0language<\/strong>\u00a0which will make you rethink everything about the role of language in forming\u00a0culture,\u00a0perception, and even\u00a0consciousness. If you\u2019ve ever thought about the link between language and\u00a0mind<\/a>, then the basis for the implications will\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0be extraordinarily new. What\u00a0will<\/em>\u00a0be new is how far those implications are stretched, and how possibly\u00a0alien\u00a0a human language could be.<\/p>\n

This story begins with a priest leaving his\u00a0world<\/a>\u00a0to find some people who live in\u00a0darkness. He has found the\u00a0light<\/a>\u00a0and he knows that it is\u00a0beautiful\u00a0and he knows that\u00a0people<\/a>\u00a0need it.\u00a0Fate<\/a>\u00a0brings him to the banks of the Maici river in the lowland\u00a0Amazonia\u00a0region of\u00a0Brazil: he meets the Pirah\u00e3 people. I wonder what he was expecting, and I wonder why he stayed when he saw that they were so different. I expect that it was his faith in\u00a0love<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Pirah\u00e3 live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and although they conduct limited trading with the Portuguese speaking Brazilians around them, they resist assimilation and remain entirely\u00a0monolinguistic[1]<\/sup><\/a>. It is the corollary of all that will follow that the Pirah\u00e3 did not convert or take any religious lessons from the priest \u2013 his name is\u00a0Daniel Everett\u00a0\u2013 and perhaps it is a corollary of his love that he lost his faith but stayed with these people anyway. He had believed that he had found\u00a0something<\/a>\u00a0that was necessary for humanity; he had underestimated humanity.<\/p>\n

A summary of the\u00a0surprising facts will include at least the following<\/strong>: Pirah\u00e3 is the only language known\u00a0without number<\/strong>, numerals, or a concept of counting. It also\u00a0lacks terms for quantification<\/strong>\u00a0such as \u201call,\u201d \u201ceach,\u201d \u201cevery,\u201d \u201cmost,\u201d and \u201csome.\u201d It is the only language known\u00a0without color terms<\/strong>. It is the only language known\u00a0without embedding<\/strong>\u00a0(putting one phrase inside another of the same type or lower level, e.g., noun phrases in noun phrases, sentences in sentences, etc.). It has the\u00a0simplest pronoun inventory known<\/strong>, and evidence suggests that its entire pronominal inventory may have been borrowed. It has\u00a0no perfect tense<\/strong>. It has perhaps the\u00a0simplest kinship system<\/strong>\u00a0ever documented. It has\u00a0no creation myths<\/strong>\u00a0\u2014 its texts are almost always descriptions of immediate experience or interpretations of experience; it has some stories about the past, but only of one or two generations back. Pirah\u00e3 in general express\u00a0no individual or collective memory of more than two generations past<\/strong>. They\u00a0do not draw<\/strong>, except for extremely crude stick figures representing the spirit world that they (claim to) have directly experienced.<\/em>\u00a0(Everett 2005)<\/strong><\/small><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If you\u2019ll be patient I\u2019ll get to these below, but let\u2019s first continue the story. Everett has spent over six years living with the Pirah\u00e3, and has visited them every year since 1977. In the mid-1990\u2019s he was joined by\u00a0Peter Gordon\u00a0who had heard some of Everett\u2019s claims about the Pirah\u00e3\u2019s lack of numbers \u2013 I expect that the first time he flew down he was expecting to\u00a0disprove<\/a>, or at least limit, Everett\u2019s\u00a0thesis<\/a>. In 2004 Gordon was ready to publish his results in the prestigious journal\u00a0Science<\/em>; his results largely agreed with what Everett had said. The next year Everett decided to publish some of his own observations, in an article entitled\u00a0Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirah\u00e3<\/em>. It seems unlikely that he was expecting such a strong response: he has since been told that he is\u00a0wrong,\u00a0right,\u00a0impossible,\u00a0contradicting\u00a0himself, challenging the roots of\u00a0contemporary linguistics<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0misunderstanding\u00a0them completely.<\/p>\n

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\nContent:<\/strong><\/p>\n

What to read: Everything, please, if you are inclined. But otherwise, if you’re in a rush or not convinced it’s worth the effort, then I’d recommend reading the next section on language, then skipping down to where it says “Final rehash”. I’d ask that you please read the Coda – it’s important to me. And finally I have a newspaper article and a podcast I’d recommend for everyone, they’re linked just below the Appendix.<\/em><\/p>\n