The story of the strange language of the Pirahã is just as much a story about the state of the field of linguistics. Professor
Dan Everett of Illinois State University, who lived for decades with the Pirahã, first as a missionary, then as a linguist, believes Pirahã casts serious doubt upon Chomsky's
theory of universal grammar. Chomskyites have started to fight back
with a reassessment of Everett's
famous paper on the Pirahã, where he claimed that the Pirahã "have no numbers, no fixed color terms, no perfect tense, no deep memory, no tradition of art or drawing, and no words for “all,” “each,” “every,” “most,” or “few”—terms of quantification believed by some linguists to be among the common building blocks of human cognition." He also claims that it doesn't have recursion, a feature of language Chomsky recently claimed was
the defining feature of human speech. Dan Everett has
rebutted the Chomskyite reassessment of his work.
Video interview with Professor Everett.
[Pirahã previously covered on MetaFilter in 2004 and 2006]
posted by Kattullus
on Jun 18, 2007 -
60 comments
