Piraha

[Geoffrey S. Nathan]

Folks, it may well be that 'we' know that there are no languages without
numbers, but Dan Everett has been saying for a while that Piraha doesn't
count beyond 'two', and doing a pretty good job of it.  Also saying that
the language has no recursion.  He even has a conference coming up next
month dealing with some of these issues.  Conference site here:

http://www.llc.ilstu.edu/rechul/

This goes beyond the old folklore and seems to be a serious claim--Dan's
a good linguist, and he really knows 'his' language.  There's a hot
debate about it that you can read about on his website:

http://www.llc.ilstu.edu/dlevere/

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