Brazil's Pirahã Tribe: Living Without Numbers or Time (2006)

http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/brazil-s-piraha-tribe-living-without-numbers-or-time-a-414291.html

by vytis • 12 years ago

45 30 12 years ago

ubernostrum3• 12 years ago

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/...) 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.

wittedhaddock• 12 years ago

Thank you for such an insightful comment! I will absolutely check this out!

aomurphy• 12 years ago

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

WaxProlix5• 12 years ago

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.

meepmorp3• 12 years ago

Off topic, but it's pretty funny to watch Everett give a talk to a room full of generative-trained syntacticians, just to see how angry everyone gets during the Q/A section.

proveanegative• 12 years ago

Why is Everett prohibited from going back?

joe_the_user• 12 years ago

It seems fairly simple.

Extraordinary claims are often made and publicized widely today just because they get attention, grab eye-balls and so-forth.

Most of these ordinary claims are at least unproven if not wholly fallacious for similar reasons.

This is why "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". Once a claim has made that rounds and gotten some pretty thorough debunking, it's reasonable to say that it's water under the bridge and move to the next claim.

NoMoreNicksLeft3• 12 years ago

I regularly speak to people who do not seem capable of understanding fine distinctions. It's not difficult for me to believe that a people/tribe that has little use for numbers might not have the concept of large numbers at all, other than as a catchall word with no exact quantity.

Just yesterday on reddit, I was arguing with someone who claimed to speak English as their first language who could not understand what I meant when I pointed out that the idea of "illegal content" was nonsense. I explained how it might be illegal to get content by certain methods, but that didn't make the content itself illegal and that the crime was in the action. He seemed to think that the computer file itself was illegal, even though he admitted that an identical file on another computer might not be illegal.

A tribe that's never needed a scout to be able to tell a leader that it was 5 Roman legions and not 6 that were on the march... why would they have a word for 5 or 6? It's not as if they care about whether one has 5 or 6 bananas, the distinction is pointless on that level.

Likewise, a person who has never needed to make a distinction between the exact circumstances that might get them in trouble with the authorities might never understand the difference between "illegal download" and "illegal file".

EC1• 12 years ago

Wasting time arguing with the lowest common denominator, not knowing anything about them, their age, their credibility, is so utter useless. I've given up reading any comments about anything whatsoever besides HN.

hawkice• 12 years ago

Sounds like that person was actually confused, but there is illegal content in America, in that possession and not transmission or receiving it is the crime (notably, child pornography), and substantially more content that is illegal in other countries (pornography and dissent leap to mind). Whether they can find the files is beside the point, in the same way that whether you can trace a download is beside the question of whether it is legal.

vorg• 12 years ago

the claims [...] tend to be wildly exaggerated based on whose agenda (read: radically pro- or anti-relativism) the claims would end up supporting

This sort of thinking seems to be particularly rife in the field of Linguistics. From about 2 years ago, it became apparent the linguistics subreddit was taken over by people who have some agenda which seems to be promoting some school of thought in Linguistics.

state• 12 years ago

I love this story.

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

cheeseprocedure• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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

kylebgorman• 12 years ago

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.

WaxProlix5• 12 years ago

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!"

meepmorp3• 12 years ago

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

ExpiredLink• 12 years ago

Are we only capable of creating thoughts for which words exist?

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

NoMoreNicksLeft3• 12 years ago

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?

anigbrowl2• 12 years ago

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.

moioci• 12 years ago

you only "think in language" when you're thinking about talking to someone else...

This is certainly not my experience. I generally feel that I haven't fully grasped a complex thought until I've articulat4ed it in words. How can you be so certain what's going on in my head?

anigbrowl2• 12 years ago

I think we can only articulate thoughts for which words exist. But we can invent new words, or look for roundabout ways to describe novel phenomena.

Sometimes we learn the necessity of doing this the hard way. One day when I was a kid (maybe 10 or 11) I was watching the Saturday morning kid's variety show on TV (I say 'the show' because there was only one TV channel in my country at that time), when I saw something new - the producers went into a new segment by doing a shaped wipe from one image to the other (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wipe_%28transition%29). I had never seen such a thing on TV before; the shape of the wipe reminded me of flames, which I think was meant to be evocative of the new subject matter, and I was deeply impressed by this novel aesthetic experience. So I ran into the kitchen and informed my parents that 'they were showing XYZ on the TV and they made flames come up from the bottom of the screen'; I had no language to express the abstract nature of the video effect so I just described it in terms of the idea it evoked.

Being the 1970s, my parents just head the bit about flames coming from the TV screen and ran into the other room thinking the TV had caught fire, and then gave me a hard time in proportion to their sudden anxiety. Now of course I was well aware of the difference between the real and the virtual by that age, but it was a striking example of how much anxiety can result when the boundary between the two is called into question. I think something similar is at the root of the common instruction to children of 'don't tell stories' and in the Christian aphorism warning people not to 'speak of the devil, and he shall appear' - an underlying anxiety that narrative is capable of bringing reality into being. Many cultures delegated the role of storyteller or oral historian to a particular individual, usually an elder - perhaps to limit the chaos that might result from multiple competing and incongruous narratives than because the delegate was necessarily the best or most interesting storyteller.

ubernostrum3• 12 years ago

Careful, his ghost might rise up from the grave and come read poetry at you.

ubernostrum3• 12 years ago

(not sure who downvoted this into oblivion, but Wittgenstein's preferred response to people misinterpreting his work was to loudly read poetry)

Brazil's Pirahã Tribe: Living Without Numbers or Time (2006)

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