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.

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