Imagine no religion - and no subordinate clauses
May 6th, 2007 by Vicki BakerI’ve been reading intriguing reports over at the Language Log about an Amazonian group called the Pirahã whose language is challenging some central tenets of modern linguistics. Recently there have also been articles in the New Yorker and on National Public Radio.
Daniel Everett, claims in his 2005 article Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Coginition in Pirahã that Pirahã lacks numbers or any terms for quantification, has no relative tenses, no color terms, the simplest pronoun inventory known, and no creation myths or fiction. Most importantly, Everett claims that Pirahã lacks embedding or recursion - the language feature that lets us embed phrases in other phrases. For example, embedding the phrase “that Jack built” in the sentence “This is the house that Jack built.”
This totally flies in the face of the Chomskyan view of language that has dominated linguistics for the past 40 years. According to Chomsky, recursion is an essential feature of human language. Recursion allows for productivity, the ability of human language to produce novel structures and express an unlimited number of concepts.
The Chomskyan view also holds that grammar is innate or hard-wired, and that culture can have no influence on syntax. But Everett holds that the unique characteristics of Pirahã are due to a central, unique aspect of their culture, namely that it constrains communication to things that the speakers have directly experienced:
Pirahã culture constrains communication to nonabstract subjects which fall within the immediate experience of interlocutors.
This aspect of Pirahã also had a huge influence on Everett. He came the group as a young missionary, out to learn the language in order to convert the Indians. It worked out a little differently, according to the National Public Radio report.
Everett describes the Pirahã’s reaction to his telling of the Gospel story:
A guy died and he came back from the dead! That’s amazing! What did he tell you when came back ?
Everett was of course forced to admit that he had never actually met the guy who had come back from the dead. The Pirahã completely lost interest at that point:
Why are you telling us about if you didn’t see it, and you don’t know anybody who saw it?
Eventually, after enough conversations like this, the Pirahã converted Everett to a scientific world view.
Everett writes on the absence of creation myths in Pirahã:
When pressed about creation, for example, Piraha ̃ say simply, “Everything is the same,” meaning that nothing changes, nothing was created. Their talking about the stories of other cultures can be best understood, it seems to me, as “mentioning” texts that they have experienced qua texts rather than “using” them to discuss or explain anything in the world around them or the ancient world. They are like oral-literary theorists in their telling and discus-sion of the texts of others.
The Pirahã do believe in the existence of evil spirits, however, they all claim to have had direct personal experience of “the ones without blood.”
Everett defends the Pirahã language from charges that it is “primitive” or somehow less rich than other languages because it lacks certain features:
No one should draw the conclusion from this paper that the Pirahã language is in any way “primitive.” It has the most complex verbal morphology I am aware of and a strikingly complex prosodic system. The Piraha ̃ are some of the brightest, pleasantest, most fun-loving people that I know. The absence of formal fiction, myths, etc., does not mean that they do not or cannot joke or lie, both of which they particularly enjoy doing at my expense, always good-naturedly. Questioning Pirahã’s implications for the design features of human language is not at all equivalent to questioning their intelligence or the richness of their cultural experience and knowledge.
Everett describes the Pirahã as acutely aware of their language as essential to their culture. He writes that they do not envy nearby tribes who have become what they see as “second-rate Brazilians.” His description of a literacy class, which Everett and his wife undertook at the Pirahã’s urging, is interesting:
The end of the literacy classes, begun at the Pirahã’s request (and separate from the math classes already described), was as follows. After many classes, the Pirahã (most of the village we were living in, about 30 people) read together, out loud, the word bigı ́ ‘ground/ sky’. They immediately all laughed. I asked what was so funny. They answered that what they had just said sounded like their word for ‘sky’. I said that indeed it did because it was their word. They reacted by saying that if that is what we were trying to teach them, they wanted us to stop: “We don’t write our language.” The decision was based on a rejection of foreign knowledge; their motivation for attending the literacy classes turned out to be, according to them, that it was fun to be together and I made popcorn.
Given the huge interest Everett’s articles have generated, and that there are only 300 of them, there is soon likely to be a more than 1 to 1 one ratio of linguists to indigenous in their villages. Whether the interest will ensure their cultural survival is another question. Everett writes:
Their language is endangered because they themselves are endangered by the ever more intrusive presence of settlers, Western diseases, alcohol, and the inexorably changing world that we live in. This beautiful language and culture, fundamentally different from anything the Western world has produced, have much to teach us about linguistic theory, about culture, about human nature, about living for each day and letting the future take care of itself, about personal fortitude, toughness, love, and many other values too numerous to mention here. And this is but one example of many other endangered languages and cultures in the Amazon and elsewhere with “riches” of a similar nature that we may never know about because of our own shortsightedness.
May 7th, 2007 at 11:12 am
Vicki: great post, very interesting stuff. I really enjoyed looking over other posts on the Language Log website, too, and I’d suggest everyone else check it out as well. Thanks for sharing this with us!
I don’t even know where to begin in analyzing these people and their surprisingly unique language. Not having a tradition of telling stories, how would these people understand our kinds of media storytelling, like movies and television? Would they find it uninteresting just like the story of Jesus, because they have no direct connection to the people involved? Or would they still like it for the sake of (again) getting to hang around together and eat popcorn?
But perhaps the question that matters most: to what extent do we have the right to pry into these people’s lives, and what level of responsibility do we have to them, as well? With a 1:1 ratio or linguists to locals, our culture will quickly pollute and influence theirs. At the same time, does it seem right to try to “preserve” them as a linguistic and cultural phenomenon, either? Now that they’ve had access to our culture’s gadgets and way of life, some young people from the area just might desire to branch out and see our way of living, or even pursue our culture’s ideas of language and education, for novelty, or even for life. What do we do? Do we try to keep these people in a bubble, and leave them alone so we can’t pollute their way of life any more, or do we give them access to a world of different ideas and lifestyles? Actually, come to think of it, I suppose the people themselves should have the choice, but will linguists heed their decision?
May 7th, 2007 at 11:51 am
Slight modification: I just read Daniel Everett’s full article on the tribe. Their cultural expectations shun outside influence very strongly- hence their near-refusal to accept other languages’ concepts such as colors, numbers, and written word. With this in mind, my last musing about the cross-pollenation of their culture and ours seems invalid. No one in the tribe wanted to learn about Everett’s language or culture, except for the sake of making fun of it. But I still think the question has some validity: with a linguistics researcher for every person in the tribe, do we unfairly drive a wedge into their way of life? Does anyone deserve to have a full fleet of researchers follow them and their loved ones throughout their life? It seems like an ethical transgression to have so many people in one village conducting research.
May 7th, 2007 at 6:05 pm
Hi Erika: My comment about the one-to-one ratio of researchers to indigenous was sort of a joke to highlight the interest they have aroused in linguists and anthropologists. With video and audio recording, maybe not that many researchers will have to visit in person. But your comment does raise the more general question about indigenous knowledge and intellectual property.
Everett does mention in another article that he helped to map out the Piraha’s territory for a land reserve. Hopefully the Brazilian government will continue to respect their right to self-determination.
The research raises a lot of questions for me beyond the linguistic questions. For example, what kinds of practices or traditions do they have around death and dying? Fear of death is often cited as the genesis of religious belief.
May 8th, 2007 at 9:16 pm
Vicki, I’m glad that the linguists have traveled to the Amazon to check out Everett’s claims about the Piraha, because these claims sound suspicious. They contradict much of what many people have thought about human cognition and language. If what Everett writes is true, these are people who not only wouldn’t have much to say, but couldn’t. It’s hard to imagine a culture lacking abstract discussion of some sort, except for a primitive culture, but Everett rules that one out. I could imagine a primitive culture lacking abstract thought. But mythology?? Your post is making my brain ache.
And then Everett says that the Piraha converted him to a “scientific world view,” as though scientists don’t immerse themselves in abstract thinking. Like I said, my brain hurts. It will be interesting to see if Everett missed some important cues. I’ll wait to hear the full report from all those linguists.