Courtesy of Kottke, ran across this article in the New Yorker that recounts field linguistics work by Dan Everett that has tremendous implications for language study. The Pirahã tribe in the Amazon of northwestern Brazil reportedly exhibit a number of traits that not only undermine some of the tenets of Noam Chomsky’s universal grammar, but also resurrect the cultural acquisition theory of Edward Sapir and even aspects of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.

Some notable aspects of the Pirahã language and culture:

• No other (active) languages in common.
• Language based on only eight consonants and three vowels. Men use one more consonant than women, and some pronunciation of phonemes also varies by gender.
• Phonemes include nasal whines, lip flapping, and whistles and “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.”
• Capacity for extensive prosody in this singing form, dropping syllables in the process.
• No terms for numbers – only terms for comparative “a small amount” and “a greater amount,” which further exhibit in an inability to track groups of items greater than two or three (asked to watch as a number of nuts are taken from a can, they fail to ascertain whether the can is empty if it originally contained more than three nuts). While superficially similar to gully dwarves of Dragonlance lore in this respect (who have terms only for “one” and “more than one”), this deficiency is not attributed to retardation but cultural adaptation.
• No fixed terms for colors – appearance is conveyed by descriptive comparison (“this [red cup] looks like blood”).
• No terms for right and left – directions are given in direct terms rather than abstract.
• No perfect tense – excluding more complex sentence structures as well as some conditionals.
• No abstract class terms for “all,” “each,” “every,” “most,” or “few” which had been presumed as fundamental and even embedded in human cognition.
• No linguistic recursion, which Chomsky posits as the most fundamental operation in his universal grammar which is supposed to be innate in all humans. They speak only in direct assertions, like the extreme grammar suggested by Wittgenstein’s deconstruction in his Tractatus Logicus-Philosophicus, grouping statements together rather than engaging in the expected recursion.
• No traditional of art – while balsa sculptures are made to emulate objects like an arriving seaplane, they are used solely in the moment and then discarded. No objects are kept for later contemplation.
• No “deep memory”

The absence of “deep memory” or “immediacy-of-experience” is put forward by Everett to explain many aspects of the Pirahã culture as compared to other norms. Compared to other Amazonian tribes, they resist any attempt to introduce agriculture (in fact, any lifestyle changes at all), and do not even store food. He suggests that they resisted Christian conversion (Everett began as a missionary) because they could not meet Jesus directly; when told Biblical parables of his work, they would ask “Have you met this man?” and lose interest after learning of his death millennia ago. They have no creation myth. Describing a person going out of sight around a bend of the river, they use the same word as for a candle flame fluttering: xibipío or “gone out of experience.” This language/cognition intermingling evokes the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, where the use of a language affects how the speaker thinks about or behaves in the world.

The debate continues between Chomsky’s camp and Everett over whether the Pirahã represent a counterfactual example to the universal grammar, particularly whether they truly lack recursion, although the particulars suggest a certain amount of cultism and dogmaticism from the Chomsky side. In his most recent rebuttal, Everett makes the interesting observation about his own early work on the Pirahã, which was inspired by Chomskyian grammer:

‘Descriptive work’ apart from theory does not exist,” he told me. “We ask the questions that our theories tell us to ask.”

This is further set against the contention by Chomsky that “no coherent alternative” exists to his Universal Grammar, which almost seems an attempt at fallacious victory by definition. Everett’s doubts are echoed by Steven Pinker, who has evolved from his pro-Chomsky position in “The Language Instinct”:

“There’s a lot of strange stuff going on in the Chomskyan program. He’s a guru, he makes pronouncements that his disciples accept on faith and that he doesn’t feel compelled to defend in the conventional scientific manner. Some of them become accepted within his circle as God’s truth without really being properly evaluated, and, surprisingly for someone who talks about universal grammar, he hasn’t actually done the spadework of seeing how it works in some weird little language that they speak in New Guinea.”

The strict adherence to Chomsky’s innate language position also constrains work on exploring the evolutionary origins of language ability in humans; he is consistently dismissive of arguments for natural selection in language development. However, the Pirahã language possibly represents an earlier stage of development in linguistic ability. When all humans lived purely as hunter-gatherers, existing from moment to moment, they would have had no more need for recursion and numeric terms than the Pirahã do now.

Further resources:

• Another article by Everett on the lack of recursion and numbers in Pirahã
• Related debate between Everett, Pinker, and Robert Van Valin