
Brazil's Pirahã Tribe: Living Without Numbers or Time (2006) - vytis
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/brazil-s-piraha-tribe-living-without-numbers-or-time-a-414291.html
======
ubernostrum
I keep seeing these types of articles.

Then I keep seeing comments and links debunking them (example:
[http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/...](http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/language/v085/85.2.nevins.html))
and saying that the claims about the Piraha tend to be wildly exaggerated
based on whose agenda (read: radically pro- or anti-relativism) the claims
would end up supporting.

At this point I don't believe anything I read about the Piraha.

~~~
aomurphy
Not knowing what to believe is probably the best thing right now. Everett (the
linguist who made the claims) is quite insistent that this is the case, many
other linguists are not. It's definitely a big controversy right now,
particularly Everett's claim that Piraha does not allow recursion (many
linguistic theories, notably Chomsky's, seem to make recursion a pretty
fundamental feature of human language). A lot of the arguments are pretty
technical, and they're all ham strung by the fact that the Piraha are so
remote there isn't a whole lot of research on them besides Everett's, and even
he has trouble going back now.

This blog post has a nice set of links about the controversy, and Everett and
one of his major critics both appear in the comments to argue, so definitely
read those if you are interested:

[http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3857](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3857)

~~~
WaxProlix
When you have one data source and only a handful of data points and that data
is not reproducible, you're not doing science. Everett might have some
interesting hypotheses, but what he's doing isn't what you could call peer-
reviewable. Linguists who have aspirations towards hard science will, for that
reason alone (not to mention the theoretically tenuous/unpopular nature of his
claims) dismiss him pretty quickly.

~~~
zorked
While it is far more likely that Everett is wrong, science has to start
somewhere, and Pirahã people exist on this planet and other people could go
check the story. You can absolutely prove him wrong.

Coming up with crazy ideas based on some strange observations is a part of
science too.

~~~
WaxProlix
And questioning that, pointing out flaws and questioning methodology, is all
science, too.

It's just convenient that Everett had the only 'in' with the community and so
is the de facto expert. Once the data source is available, we'll know more.

------
state
I love this story.

This talk (by Everett) is a lot of fun:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNajfMZGnuo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNajfMZGnuo)

~~~
cheeseprocedure
His book "Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes" is worth a read too (though a more
ruthless editor may have helped even it out).

~~~
vsviridov
I straight up skipped all the explanations about the actual dialog, but, then
again, I'm not a linguist.

------
kylebgorman
The absence of recursion would not actually "refute Chomsky" (whatever the
hell that means; it's not like Chomsky only has one angle). "Universal
grammar" just means "whatever linguists think all human languages have in
common", it would just mean that clausal recursion is not one of these things.

~~~
WaxProlix
That's sort of the problem with UG, though - it's either so strong a claim as
to be almost mystical claims about "the mind-brain" or some such nonsense -
and therefore nigh-irrefutable - or so weak as to be basically a truism -
"whatever languages all have in common, that's UG!"

~~~
meepmorp
Am I correct in assuming you've not actually read any of Chomsky's syntatic
work?

~~~
WaxProlix
No, I've read quite a bit of it, though mostly pre-1990.

~~~
meepmorp
Ok, it just doesn't seem like you've got a good handle on what UG is.

~~~
WaxProlix
UG is different to different people, and has been different in different ages.
Someone into OT might conceive of universal constraints or rankings as being
'UG', whereas x bar era sybtacticians etc might have another view. Feel free
to engage in a discussion if you feel like it, but if not thanks anyway - your
criticism, such as it is, is noted. I'll try and make time to catch up on some
more reading.

------
ExpiredLink
> _Are we only capable of creating thoughts for which words exist?_

"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." Wittgenstein

~~~
NoMoreNicksLeft
Some (most? all?) people have the capacity to think highly complex thoughts
without using language. It's a common misconception that human thought "has a
language", and I see many people ask the bilingual "what language do you think
in".

They never seem to understand that you only "think in language" when you're
thinking about talking to someone else, rehearsing a conversation or whatever.
They're prone to a cognitive illusion... when they think about this, they try
to "listen" to their thoughts, which invokes that conversation-rehearsal
faculty. And lo and behold, they "hear" a language.

But they don't think in this manner. Not all the time, not even most.

So if you're not thinking in language, why would your thoughts be limited to
your vocabulary?

~~~
anigbrowl
_you only "think in language" when you're thinking about talking to someone
else_

Dealing with other people is probably the biggest part of most people's
cognitive burden, though. And it's likely that the ability to make complex
inferences when on one's own (solving a mathematical problem, writing a novel,
or whatever) derives from the experience of communicating complex ideas
through language.

I have a pretty close relationship with my dog and he has a fairly elaborate
mental world, but his capacity for abstraction is limited. I taught him to
find a ball that I had hidden or that he had dropped and forgotten about, and
he has particular toys (including particular balls) that he knows are 'his'
and which he doesn't like other dogs to play with, or that they are only
allowed to play with within certain strictures (eg not taking it out of my
dog's sight). I normally bring two identical balls for him to play with, and
it turned out to be a _lot_ harder to get him to go find the ball if he
already had one on the ground - he would keep trying to give me the ball he
had, and seemed unable to conceptualize that he could have a ball and not have
a ball at the same time. Eventually he got the hang of this, but I have doubts
about his ability to consider more than 2 states at a time, ie if I take him
out to play with 3 balls and I don't see him having a ternary model of their
location, but rather something along the lines of 'ball(s) I already have' and
'ball(s) I need to find'. Likewise he has a notion of pack hierarchy involving
myself, himself, and several neighbors' dogs who he plays with regularly, but
I think that's a fairly one-dimensional affair. Right now he knows it's
raining when I open the front door and doesn't feel like walking around in it,
but he'll still want to investigate the back door in the hope that the weather
there might be different. He knows the diference between inside and outside
(verbally as well as physically) but I'm not sure he has an abstract
representation of a unitary outside.

EDIT: turns out playing with balls >> getting wet for the third time in 3
hours. Bang goes that theory.

~~~
NoMoreNicksLeft
> Dealing with other people is probably the biggest part of most people's
> cognitive burden, though.

That's a scary thought. I haven't tried to measure my own cognition, but I
doubt that modeling other human's behavior amounts to even 10% of my waking,
thoughtful time.

When I read this part of your comment, it struck me that this might be very
different for a typical person. What if they're spending 99% of their time
doing this? How could they have any intelligent thought at all?

Perhaps they use this to _substitute_ for intelligent thought... it would
explain how pervasive groupthink is in all areas of life.

I will have to study this.

> nd it's likely that the ability to make complex inferences when on one's own
> (solving a mathematical problem, writing a novel, or whatever) derives from
> the experience of communicating complex ideas through language.

This isn't true for me. I will not dismiss that it's true for others. But it
also implies that they would have very limited minds... not only can they not
contemplate ideas for which there is no useful language yet, they'd also be
limited by whether they can imagine explaining it to others well enough that
those people could understand it too.

They'd be virtually as stupid as they imagine everyone else to be.

Thank you. You've given me much to think about, and few do that.

