Language, grammar and culture: The Pirahã of the Amazon

In this short post from last year, which linked to the work of Lera Boroditsky, we saw that there might be a nontrivial link between the language and worldview. That is, the words we use are not mere words, they influence how we think. The corollary is that if we did not know certain words or phrases -- and this routinely happens as words in one language are often missing in another -- we might look at the world very differently. That is precisely what this essay in the New Yorker about the Pirahã, an isolated Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe, seems to suggest.

The tribe is different in that they are tremendously resistant to cultural change. Their complex language plays a role in this stubbornness. It is difficult to learn, and plenty of aspects we take for granted in the other languages are missing; it defies -- or may defy: it hasn't been proved fully yet -- some well accepted principles put forth by Noam Chomsky and his colleagues that were thought to apply universally. And the language of the Pirahã drives their culture, which the linguist Everett thinks is obsessively dedicated to empirical reality and has no place for abstraction. To understand, consider this extract:

Over the course of three weeks, Everett wrote what would become his Current Anthropology article, twenty-five thousand words in which he advanced a novel explanation for the many mysteries that had bedevilled him. Inspired by Sapir’s cultural approach to language, he hypothesized that the tribe embodies a living-in-the-present ethos so powerful that it has affected every aspect of the people’s lives. Committed to an existence in which only observable experience is real, the Pirahã do not think, or speak, in abstractions—and thus do not use color terms, quantifiers, numbers, or myths. Everett pointed to the word xibipío as a clue to how the Pirahã perceive reality solely according to what exists within the boundaries of their direct experience—which Everett defined as anything that they can see and hear, or that someone living has seen and heard. “When someone walks around a bend in the river, the Pirahã say that the person has not simply gone away but xibipío—‘gone out of experience,’ ” Everett said. “They use the same phrase when a candle flame flickers. The light ‘goes in and out of experience.’ ”

To Everett, the Pirahã’s unswerving dedication to empirical reality—he called it the “immediacy-of-experience principle”—explained their resistance to Christianity, since the Pirahã had always reacted to stories about Christ by asking, “Have you met this man?” Told that Christ died two thousand years ago, the Pirahã would react much as they did to my using bug repellent [with disdain]. It explained their failure to build up food stocks, since this required planning for a future that did not yet exist; it explained the failure of the boys’ model airplanes [some boys had built a model as soon as the author arrived] to foster a tradition of sculpture-making, since the models expressed only the momentary burst of excitement that accompanied the sight of an actual plane. It explained the Pirahã’s lack of original stories about how they came into being, since this was a conundrum buried in a past outside the experience of parents and grandparents.

Everett was convinced that the Pirahã’s immediacy-of-experience principle went further still, “extending its tentacles,” as he put it, “deep into their core grammar,” to that feature that Chomsky claimed was present in all languages: recursion. Chomsky and other experts use the term to describe how we construct even the simplest utterances. “The girl jumped on the bed” is composed of a noun phrase (“the girl”), a verb (“jumped”), and a prepositional phrase (“on the bed”). In theory, as Chomsky has stressed, one could continue to insert chunks of language inside other chunks ad infinitum, thereby creating a never-ending sentence (“The man who is wearing a top hat that is slightly crushed around the brim although still perfectly elegant is walking down the street that was recently resurfaced by a crew of construction workers who tended to take coffee breaks that were a little too long while eating a hot dog that was . . .”). Or one could create sentences of never-ending variety. The capacity to generate unlimited meaning by placing one thought inside another is the crux of Chomsky’s theory—what he calls, quoting the early-nineteenth-century German linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt, “the infinite use of finite means.”

According to Everett, however, the Pirahã do not use recursion to insert phrases one inside another. Instead, they state thoughts in discrete units. When I asked Everett if the Pirahã could say, in their language, “I saw the dog that was down by the river get bitten by a snake,” he said, “No. They would have to say, ‘I saw the dog. The dog was at the beach. A snake bit the dog.’ ” Everett explained that because the Pirahã accept as real only that which they observe, their speech consists only of direct assertions (“The dog was at the beach”), and he maintains that embedded clauses (“that was down by the river”) are not assertions but supporting, quantifying, or qualifying information—in other words, abstractions.

The full essay is here. This is one of the most fascinating things I've read in recent times -- though, of course, one should be skeptical of all of Everett's theories and put them to rigorous test.