New Scientist has an interesting article on the Pirahã people of the Amazon. The article is behind a paywall, but you can find other interesting articles here, here, and here.
The Pirahã language is a real minimalist language:
- They have no notion of time.
- Their words for colour are black and white.
- They have one word for mother and father, ‘baixi’. There are separate terms for ‘son’ and ‘daughter’, but no others.
- They have only ten or eleven sounds in their phonological inventory, compared to more than forty for English.
Also, they only have two words for numbers, which are glossed as ‘one’ and ‘two’, but which mean something like ‘some’ and ‘some more’. Most interestingly, they don’t seem to be able to grasp the concept of numbers or addition, even when taught. If you show a collection of five objects to a Pirahã man, and ask him to duplicate the collection, he has a terrible time putting down as many items as he sees.
Some are seeing a return to Whorfianism, where language is a straitjacket that constrains our ability to reason, but Dan Everett (who works with the Pirahã) says that the difference is cultural — they don’t like to challenge their culturally ingrained notions. And who does?
29 March 2007 at 7:38 am
Dan Everett, at LSA 2007, had some interesting stories about Pirahã culture. It seems that he first met with them as a missionary through SIL but, through their natural empiricism, they ended up actually converting him to atheism. That’s not to say that they don’t believe in gods or spirits, but that they see physical manifestations of those spirits often (in the form of jaguars, etc).