Piraha, cont'd
May. 20th, 2009 07:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivendellroseContinuing from my rather random post yesterday dealing with the seemingly anomalous Pirahãs culture and language... I've got more links for people who are interested in slogging through with me. :)
So! Onward with the links and my own off-the-top commentary.
Straight off, continuing on my Google search of last night got me this run-down of Pirahãs at www.sil.org, which, from this page, appears to be a Christian linguistics program. According to their own information they are "a faith-based organization that studies, documents, and assists in developing the world’s lesser-known languages. SIL’s staff shares a Christian commitment to service, academic excellence, and professional engagement through literacy, linguistics, translation, and other academic disciplines. SIL makes its services available to all without regard to religious belief, political ideology, gender, race, or ethnic background." Okay, cool, whatever.
Pertinent information re: the Piraha according to this site - "A village is comprised of two to three families. A family is a father, mother, plus the children. A child may or may not stay living with his parents after the age of 3. Most (of) the larger villages have a subculture of children, generally ages 3-14, who live together and take care of each other. These children, in general, come from broken homes, that is, their parents have split up and remarried."
Given that in one of the other articles Pirahãs marriage practices were described as limited solely to cohabitation, I would hardly call that a "broken home" - a casual system like this hardly ever indicates a great deal of strife when couples separate. That doesn't really signify, I just think it could potentially indicate a bias on behalf of this site. In any case, all right, families = conjugal pair + children of that pair, a fairly common arrangement in human culture... although I do wonder how it is that we end up with a "subculture of children who live together" if their parents split up, including children as young as 3. That would seem to be unusual to me (most of the time we would see a subculture of youths living on their own, at best - very small children almost always stay with one parent or the other, or with other relatives, if their parents split up). Unfortunately, this site seems not to believe in citations, so I have no way of knowing exactly where they're pulling this information - they do have some reference links at the bottom, though, which may shed light on the issue.
"All members know everything about any given member of the group and each are considered to be close brothers and sisters." Given the last figure I saw for the total number of people in the culture was about 360, this is hardly shocking. :P "The close proximity of houses and the fact that there are no walls, makes each members life an open book. Nothing is hid from the other. The concept of a private life is foreign." Lacking evidence or citations, I can only say that this kind of situation is pretty damned common in small tribal societies (or, for that matter, in small towns in the U.S., from what I've heard...).
And now the really juicy stuff. They claim that "Pirahã culture constrains communication to non-abstract subjects which fall within the immediate experience of interlocutors," leading to the following:
* (i) the absence of creation myths and fiction;
* (ii) the simplest kinship system yet documented;
* (iii) the absence of numbers of any kind or a concept of counting;
* (iv) the absence of color terms;
* (v) the absence of embedding in the grammar;
* (vi) the absence of 'relative tenses';
* (vii) the borrowing of its entire pronoun inventory from Tupi;
* (vi) the fact that the Pirahã are monolingual after more than 200 years of regular contact with Brazilians and the Tupi-Guarani-speaking Kawahiva;
* (vii) the absence of any individual or collective memory of more than two generations past;
* (viii) the absence of drawing or other art and one of the simplest material cultures yet documented;
* (ix) the absence of any terms for quantification, e.g. 'all', 'each', 'every', 'most', 'some', etc.
....It's entire pronoun inventory is borrowed from another language. Ooookay. That does seem exceedingly bizarre to me, but I lack the linguistic authority to say anything else about it.
Re: the "absence of any individual or collective memory of more than two generations past" - some cultures have a documented taboo that prevents speaking about the dead. Might we be looking at something similar to that? That would account for at least some lack of history, I would think.
* * *
Next website. Ethnologue (owned by our friends SIL of the above link) has this to say about Piraha, including an extensive academic bibliography. Yay! ...Unfortunately, a good bit of it appears to be in Portuguese. Not yay, at least not for me. Additionally, what is there in English seems to be dominated a) by the writings of Everett, and b) to be extremely dense with linguistic terminology. I'm certainly not going to be able to make much, I suspect, of 'Clitic Doubling and M-Strings in Pirahã, I can tell you right now. Anybody able to help a sister out here, with translation from either the Portuguese or the Linguist?
* * *
Next! Spiegel Online (International, English version). Vital quotes:
"The small hunting and gathering tribe, with a population of only 310 to 350, has become the center of a raging debate between linguists, anthropologists and cognitive researchers. Even Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Steven Pinker of Harvard University, two of the most influential theorists on the subject, are still arguing over what it means for the study of human language that the Pirahãs don't use subordinate clauses."
If linguists are anything like anthropologists (and I've studied linguistics enough to have a good feeling they are), this is not a surprise. Feuds over less important details than this are the lifeblood of scientific discourse throughout most fields, and, anyway, Chomsky has not seemed in my limited knowledge of him to be a particularly circumspect and retiring sort of fellow when it comes to arguments. Nor, for that matter, is Pinker (toward whom I am, for the record, biased, particularly in any argument that pits him against a man so compellingly impossible to read that even the linguists I know prefer to read him in "translation." I've read a grand total of a few pages of Chomsky's prose, and it was enough to scare me well away from reading anything else by him ever again. But I digress. A lot.) Anyway, short story - no one should be surprised that these two are duking it out.
"The Pirahã use only three pronouns. They hardly use any words associated with time and past tense verb conjugations don't exist."
A much more rational-sounding description than the previous, IMHO. Notice that this article doesn't say anything about the borrowed pronouns.
"Pirahã is likely the only language in the world that doesn't use subordinate clauses. Instead of saying, "When I have finished eating, I would like to speak with you," the Pirahãs say, "I finish eating, I speak with you."" ...If I ran across that in fiction, I would think the writer guilty of horribly mangling and maligning technologically primitive cultures. Faced with it in a sensible article, I just plain don't know what to think.
And now the really crazy stuff.
"Peter Gordon, a psycholinguist at New York's Columbia University, visited the Pirahãs and tested their mathematical abilities. For example, they were asked to repeat patterns created with between one and 10 small batteries. Or they were to remember whether Gordon had placed three or eight nuts in a can.
The results, published in Science magazine, were astonishing. The Pirahãs simply don't get the concept of numbers. His study, Gordon says, shows that "a people without terms for numbers doesn't develop the ability to determine exact numbers."
Psycholinguist Peter Gorden: Are we only capable of creating thoughts for which words exist?
His findings have brought new life to a controversial theory by linguist Benjamin Whorf, who died in 1941. Under Whorf's theory, people are only capable of constructing thoughts for which they possess actual words. In other words: Because they have no words for numbers, they can't even begin to understand the concept of numbers and arithmetic."
I'm going to betray my academic bias, now - when I took anthropological linguistics at university, my professor hammered into us that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (ie, linguistic relativity - taken to its simplest components, that if you don't have a word for something, you can't think about it) was total bunk. And now this tribe might be proving it true after all? That definitely blows my mind just a bit.
Furthermore - "The Warlpiri -- a group of Australian aborigines whose language, like that of the Pirahã, only has a "one-two-many," system of counting -- had no difficulties counting farther than three in English." And yet after eight months of coaching from Everett, not one of the Pirahãs, apparently, could count to ten.
As an anthropologist, however, I find the following much more deeply unsettling: "[T]he Pirahã don't appear to have a creation myth explaining existence. When asked, they simply reply: "Everything is the same, things always are." The mothers also don't tell their children fairy tales -- actually nobody tells any kind of stories. No one paints and there is no art." The directly-following remark about names not being terribly creative (most children getting the name of a relative they resemble) has no real significance, as far as I'm concerned - a lot of cultures name in that way, and a lot of cultures have a pretty limited rubric of names available to people. The modern breadth of variety in naming is pretty highly unusual, honestly, from what I've seen. But a culture completely lacking in stories and art? Now that is so strange that I don't know what to even think of it. Every culture I've ever heard of - ever - tells stories. Every culture I've ever heard of has art of some kind, makes things, creates for symbolic reasons or purely for beauty's sake, decorates objects, and so on. I literally couldn't be more shocked by the idea of a human culture completely lacking in those traits.
"The logical way forward now would be to try to prove that the Pirahã can actually think in a recursive fashion. According to Everett, the only reason this isn't part of their language is because it is forbidden by their culture. The only problem is nobody can confirm or deny Everett's observations since no one can speak Pirahã as well as he does."
There's the rub. :P
The end of the article notes that some researchers, including some colleagues of Chomsky's, were going down "this year" (ie, in 2006) to try to check Everett's claims... but I haven't been able yet to find anything from those researchers. Maybe they're in the pile of other tabs I've got open from links in the previous pages, or maybe they're not. I'm hoping they are - otherwise it means they haven't been published yet, which would put this little investigation of mine at a standstill.
More later, or perhaps tomorrow.
So! Onward with the links and my own off-the-top commentary.
Straight off, continuing on my Google search of last night got me this run-down of Pirahãs at www.sil.org, which, from this page, appears to be a Christian linguistics program. According to their own information they are "a faith-based organization that studies, documents, and assists in developing the world’s lesser-known languages. SIL’s staff shares a Christian commitment to service, academic excellence, and professional engagement through literacy, linguistics, translation, and other academic disciplines. SIL makes its services available to all without regard to religious belief, political ideology, gender, race, or ethnic background." Okay, cool, whatever.
Pertinent information re: the Piraha according to this site - "A village is comprised of two to three families. A family is a father, mother, plus the children. A child may or may not stay living with his parents after the age of 3. Most (of) the larger villages have a subculture of children, generally ages 3-14, who live together and take care of each other. These children, in general, come from broken homes, that is, their parents have split up and remarried."
Given that in one of the other articles Pirahãs marriage practices were described as limited solely to cohabitation, I would hardly call that a "broken home" - a casual system like this hardly ever indicates a great deal of strife when couples separate. That doesn't really signify, I just think it could potentially indicate a bias on behalf of this site. In any case, all right, families = conjugal pair + children of that pair, a fairly common arrangement in human culture... although I do wonder how it is that we end up with a "subculture of children who live together" if their parents split up, including children as young as 3. That would seem to be unusual to me (most of the time we would see a subculture of youths living on their own, at best - very small children almost always stay with one parent or the other, or with other relatives, if their parents split up). Unfortunately, this site seems not to believe in citations, so I have no way of knowing exactly where they're pulling this information - they do have some reference links at the bottom, though, which may shed light on the issue.
"All members know everything about any given member of the group and each are considered to be close brothers and sisters." Given the last figure I saw for the total number of people in the culture was about 360, this is hardly shocking. :P "The close proximity of houses and the fact that there are no walls, makes each members life an open book. Nothing is hid from the other. The concept of a private life is foreign." Lacking evidence or citations, I can only say that this kind of situation is pretty damned common in small tribal societies (or, for that matter, in small towns in the U.S., from what I've heard...).
And now the really juicy stuff. They claim that "Pirahã culture constrains communication to non-abstract subjects which fall within the immediate experience of interlocutors," leading to the following:
* (i) the absence of creation myths and fiction;
* (ii) the simplest kinship system yet documented;
* (iii) the absence of numbers of any kind or a concept of counting;
* (iv) the absence of color terms;
* (v) the absence of embedding in the grammar;
* (vi) the absence of 'relative tenses';
* (vii) the borrowing of its entire pronoun inventory from Tupi;
* (vi) the fact that the Pirahã are monolingual after more than 200 years of regular contact with Brazilians and the Tupi-Guarani-speaking Kawahiva;
* (vii) the absence of any individual or collective memory of more than two generations past;
* (viii) the absence of drawing or other art and one of the simplest material cultures yet documented;
* (ix) the absence of any terms for quantification, e.g. 'all', 'each', 'every', 'most', 'some', etc.
....It's entire pronoun inventory is borrowed from another language. Ooookay. That does seem exceedingly bizarre to me, but I lack the linguistic authority to say anything else about it.
Re: the "absence of any individual or collective memory of more than two generations past" - some cultures have a documented taboo that prevents speaking about the dead. Might we be looking at something similar to that? That would account for at least some lack of history, I would think.
* * *
Next website. Ethnologue (owned by our friends SIL of the above link) has this to say about Piraha, including an extensive academic bibliography. Yay! ...Unfortunately, a good bit of it appears to be in Portuguese. Not yay, at least not for me. Additionally, what is there in English seems to be dominated a) by the writings of Everett, and b) to be extremely dense with linguistic terminology. I'm certainly not going to be able to make much, I suspect, of 'Clitic Doubling and M-Strings in Pirahã, I can tell you right now. Anybody able to help a sister out here, with translation from either the Portuguese or the Linguist?
* * *
Next! Spiegel Online (International, English version). Vital quotes:
"The small hunting and gathering tribe, with a population of only 310 to 350, has become the center of a raging debate between linguists, anthropologists and cognitive researchers. Even Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Steven Pinker of Harvard University, two of the most influential theorists on the subject, are still arguing over what it means for the study of human language that the Pirahãs don't use subordinate clauses."
If linguists are anything like anthropologists (and I've studied linguistics enough to have a good feeling they are), this is not a surprise. Feuds over less important details than this are the lifeblood of scientific discourse throughout most fields, and, anyway, Chomsky has not seemed in my limited knowledge of him to be a particularly circumspect and retiring sort of fellow when it comes to arguments. Nor, for that matter, is Pinker (toward whom I am, for the record, biased, particularly in any argument that pits him against a man so compellingly impossible to read that even the linguists I know prefer to read him in "translation." I've read a grand total of a few pages of Chomsky's prose, and it was enough to scare me well away from reading anything else by him ever again. But I digress. A lot.) Anyway, short story - no one should be surprised that these two are duking it out.
"The Pirahã use only three pronouns. They hardly use any words associated with time and past tense verb conjugations don't exist."
A much more rational-sounding description than the previous, IMHO. Notice that this article doesn't say anything about the borrowed pronouns.
"Pirahã is likely the only language in the world that doesn't use subordinate clauses. Instead of saying, "When I have finished eating, I would like to speak with you," the Pirahãs say, "I finish eating, I speak with you."" ...If I ran across that in fiction, I would think the writer guilty of horribly mangling and maligning technologically primitive cultures. Faced with it in a sensible article, I just plain don't know what to think.
And now the really crazy stuff.
"Peter Gordon, a psycholinguist at New York's Columbia University, visited the Pirahãs and tested their mathematical abilities. For example, they were asked to repeat patterns created with between one and 10 small batteries. Or they were to remember whether Gordon had placed three or eight nuts in a can.
The results, published in Science magazine, were astonishing. The Pirahãs simply don't get the concept of numbers. His study, Gordon says, shows that "a people without terms for numbers doesn't develop the ability to determine exact numbers."
Psycholinguist Peter Gorden: Are we only capable of creating thoughts for which words exist?
His findings have brought new life to a controversial theory by linguist Benjamin Whorf, who died in 1941. Under Whorf's theory, people are only capable of constructing thoughts for which they possess actual words. In other words: Because they have no words for numbers, they can't even begin to understand the concept of numbers and arithmetic."
I'm going to betray my academic bias, now - when I took anthropological linguistics at university, my professor hammered into us that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (ie, linguistic relativity - taken to its simplest components, that if you don't have a word for something, you can't think about it) was total bunk. And now this tribe might be proving it true after all? That definitely blows my mind just a bit.
Furthermore - "The Warlpiri -- a group of Australian aborigines whose language, like that of the Pirahã, only has a "one-two-many," system of counting -- had no difficulties counting farther than three in English." And yet after eight months of coaching from Everett, not one of the Pirahãs, apparently, could count to ten.
As an anthropologist, however, I find the following much more deeply unsettling: "[T]he Pirahã don't appear to have a creation myth explaining existence. When asked, they simply reply: "Everything is the same, things always are." The mothers also don't tell their children fairy tales -- actually nobody tells any kind of stories. No one paints and there is no art." The directly-following remark about names not being terribly creative (most children getting the name of a relative they resemble) has no real significance, as far as I'm concerned - a lot of cultures name in that way, and a lot of cultures have a pretty limited rubric of names available to people. The modern breadth of variety in naming is pretty highly unusual, honestly, from what I've seen. But a culture completely lacking in stories and art? Now that is so strange that I don't know what to even think of it. Every culture I've ever heard of - ever - tells stories. Every culture I've ever heard of has art of some kind, makes things, creates for symbolic reasons or purely for beauty's sake, decorates objects, and so on. I literally couldn't be more shocked by the idea of a human culture completely lacking in those traits.
"The logical way forward now would be to try to prove that the Pirahã can actually think in a recursive fashion. According to Everett, the only reason this isn't part of their language is because it is forbidden by their culture. The only problem is nobody can confirm or deny Everett's observations since no one can speak Pirahã as well as he does."
There's the rub. :P
The end of the article notes that some researchers, including some colleagues of Chomsky's, were going down "this year" (ie, in 2006) to try to check Everett's claims... but I haven't been able yet to find anything from those researchers. Maybe they're in the pile of other tabs I've got open from links in the previous pages, or maybe they're not. I'm hoping they are - otherwise it means they haven't been published yet, which would put this little investigation of mine at a standstill.
More later, or perhaps tomorrow.
