

Recursion and human thought - gdee
http://edge.org/3rd_culture/everett07/everett07_index.html

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ordinaryman
That was a very long read and a had lot of interesting stuff too. The lack of
recursion in the Pirahã language may probably have a connection to lack of the
numeric system (yes, they don't count !!), though the author disagrees with
this angle.

Some things seem conflicting, though. The author says the language lacks
numeric system (which involves recursion) and quantifiers, but the people are
involved in trade (Brazil nuts for consumables) with other groups (river
traders) and believes that they have been doing so for a long time. Puzzling
how they could have done this without quantifying !

 _So I don't think that the fact that they lack numbers is attributable to the
linguistic determinism associated with Benjamin Lee Whorf, i.e. that language
determines our thought—I don't really think that goes very far. It also
doesn't explain their lack of color words, the simplest kinship system that's
ever been documented, the lack of recursion, and the lack of quantifiers, and
all of these other properties._

.....

 _The Brazilians the Pirahãs most often see have boats, and they just come up
the Pirahãs' river to buy Brazil nuts. In exchange, they bring machetes,
gunpowder, powdered milk, sugar, whiskey and so forth. The Pirahãs are usually
interested in acquiring these things....They don't accumulate Western goods,
but if you've got consumables, the Pirahã might buy, say, two pounds of sugar,
pour it in a bowl and eat it all at once. They're not going to put it on the
shelf and save it; they'll just eat it when they get it._

Also, I don't understand the "they were sent away" part, in the quote below..

 _The crucial thing is that the Pirahã have not borrowed any numbers—and they
want to learn to count. They asked me to give them classes in Brazilian
numbers, so for eight months I spent an hour every night trying to teach them
how to count. And it never got anywhere, except for a few of the children.
Some of the children learned to do reasonably well, but as soon as anybody
started to perform well, they were sent away from the classes. It was just a
fun time to eat popcorn and watch me write things on the board._

Who sent them away ? Why ?

~~~
13ren
You can quantify by saying "say when", by pointing at stuff, by physically
bunching items together.

It was children. I assume their parents sent them away; because they were
picking up bad habits (like counting). I don't think they really did "want to
learn to count", since they have resisted all other cultural imperialism, and
think themselves superior to all other cultures.

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13ren
Amazing. This reads like a contrived science fiction story, but it's true
(maybe it's just that the science fiction I've read is based on "alien"
cultures on Earth - like the gaits in "walking with dinosaurs" made me think
that birds walk like dinosaurs. But they based the gait on birds.).

 _> But what if a language didn't show recursion? ... First of all, it would
mean that the language is not infinite_

A regular language (like a* b) is infinite, but not recursive --- But he's
probably not using a mathematical regular expression, but a Chomsky Hierarchy
type-3 regular grammar (like A -> aA, A-> b), which _is_ recursive.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy#The_hierarchy>

_> Pirahã doesn't have expressions like "John's brother's house" ... you have
to say "John has a brother. This brother has a house"_

It seems very technical to say that this means the language isn't recursive,
because that's only true at the sentence level. It seems to have the quality
of recursion, but at the multi-sentence level.

 _> If you go back to the Pirahã language, and you look at the stories that
they tell, you do find recursion. You find that ideas are built inside of
other ideas, and one part of the story is subordinate to another part of the
story. That's not part of the grammar per se, that's part of the way that they
tell their stories._

So he agrees. It does seem very limiting to define a language in terms of the
sentence structure. There are typical and non-typical ways for sentences to
follow one another - surely that's part of the language. Of course, if your
discipline has a certain structure for analyzing things (like the Chomsky
Hierarchy), it's hard to think outside that structure (and harder to get it
published). BTW: I think Chomsky was (and is) brilliant.

 _> That's one of the strongest Pirahã values; no coercion; you don't tell
other people what to do._

 _> The Pirahã ... in some ways are the ultimate empiricists—they need
evidence for every claim you make_

I like them

~~~
gdee
> I like them

They took unfounded beliefs out of a missionary. I like them too :)

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jordyhoyt
Very interesting! It's important to note (as he said) "recursion" means
different things to Linguists, Mathematicians, and Computer Scientists. Still,
quite interesting to think about how our brains have developed these tools.

