Unlocking the secret sounds of language (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Unlocking the secret sounds of language:
Life without time or numbers

No one knew what the tiny Piraha tribe were humming to each other until
one linguist really listened. What he heard is turning our
understanding of language on its head

By Elizabeth Davies
Published: 06 May 2006
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/article362380.ece

Deep in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, along the banks of the Mai
ci river and shaded from the scorching sunlight by a verdant canopy of
hanging branches, the linguist Dan Everett is going back to basics with
his new class. "Um, dois, tres," he repeats in clearly enunciated
Portuguese. "One, two, three." A row of blank faces greets his efforts.
This was going to be harder than he had thought.

More than 25 years ago, Professor Everett, then a missionary and now an
ethnologist at the University of Manchester, decided to try to teach
members of the obscure Pirahã tribe how to count. He would not succeed.
Instead, he found a world without numbers, without time, one where
people appeared to hum and whistle rather than speak.

This isolated tribe of some 350 people in tiny villages in the depths of
the Brazilian jungle could turn our understanding of language on its
head and disprove the main work of one of the world's most celebrated
intellectuals, Noam Chomsky.

>From Professor Everett's first steps on Pirahã land in 1977, he knew the
tribe was remarkable. Their language had no words capable of conveying
numbers or of counting to even the most basic of figures. It could, he
believed, be the world's only language without numbers. But he had to
wait months before he could say for sure what made the Pirahã special,
so indecipherable was their language, a kind of sing-song communication
which has more in common with whistling and humming than the spoken
word.

During one of his first visits, in the late 1970s, he began to
understand what the tribespeople were saying. It was a rude awakening.
Eavesdropping one night, desperately trying to piece together what
little he knew of their words, he realised with a shock that the
warriors, marching along the banks of the river, were planning nothing
less than to murder him by moonlight.

Professor Everett ran back to the hut and locked his wife and three
children inside. "I grabbed all their weapons, their bows and arrows,"
he says. It was an act of triumph; the outsider had caught them off
guard and proved his worth. The tribe was so amazed he had actually
worked out what they were saying to each other that they treated him
with a cautious kind of respect. From then on, neither he nor his
family had problems.

In 1980, after many entreaties, Profesor Everett set about trying to
teach the Pirahã. For eight months, he tried to explain rudimentary
arithmetic to the more eager men and women keen to learn the skills
needed to trade at fair prices with other indigenous tribes who arrived
looking for brazil nuts.

But after months of painstaking, often excruciatingly slow, evening
classes, barely any of the Pirahã had managed to count to 10. Even one
plus one had proved beyond them. "At first, they wanted to learn to
read and write and count," he says. "But by the end, only a few could
even manage to get from one to nine. I thought, 'This not working'."

Not only did the Pirahã use no numbers in their incredibly sparse
language, they also appeared unable to even conceive of them. During
the seven years Professor Everett spent with them, he never heard them
use words such as "all," "every" and "more". There is one word, "hoi,"
which comes close to the number one, but it can also mean "small," or a
small amount, such as two small fish as opposed to one large one.

Peter Gordon, a psycholinguist at New York's Columbia University who has
also made the journey deep into the rainforest to explore the Pirahã's
numerical skills, performed experiments with the tribespeople, with the
bare materials the Pirahã were used to dealing with. He asked them to
repeat patterns he created on the ground with batteries, or count how
many brazil nuts he had in his hand. The results seemed to show the
tribe simply did not understand the concept of numbers.

But the tribe's almost total lack of enumeration skills is just one of
the Pirahã's many traits which has so fascinated linguists for two
decades. The tribe has survived, culture intact, for centuries. "I
tried to transcribe everything I heard," says Professor Everett, now a
fluent Pirahã speaker. "I tried desperately to find structures I
thought every language had but I couldn't find them. I was sure it was
my inexperience in not being able to see them, but actually it was that
they just weren't there."

He believes the Pirahã is the world's only people to have no distinct
words for colours. They have no written language, and no collective
memory going back further than two generations, meaning few can
remember the names of all four grandparents. The members of the tribe,
in villages along a 300-km stretch of the Maici, frequently starve
themselves even when food is available.

The concept of decorative art is alien; even the simplest of drawings
provokes intense frustration. They are also believed to be the world's
only society to have no creation myth; asked how their ancestors came
into existence they say, "The world is created" or "All things are
made".

The Pirahã language is simple. For men, it can be pared down to just
eight consonants and three vowels. Pirahã women have the smallest
number of "speech sounds" in the world, with only seven consonants and
three vowels. There is no perfect tense, no means of saying, for
example, "I have eaten".

The Pirahã are a unique people living without time or numbers, without
colours or a shared past. And, until recently, that was more than
enough to unite anthropologists in shared fascination at this obscure
society which seemed to trump everything they thought they knew about
language, and humans in general.

Many, including Dr Gordon, interpreted the Pirahã's inability to learn
to count as evidence for the theory that language shapes the way we
think, that we are capable of creating thoughts only for which we
already have words. In this theory, espoused initially by the Yale
lecturer Benjamin Whorf in the 1930s, the Pirahã could not get to grips
with numbers in another language, Portuguese, because their own language
had no capacity for it.

"A people without terms for numbers doesn't develop the ability to
determine exact numbers," Dr Gordon said in Science magazine. "The
question is, is there any case where not having words for something
doesn't allow you to think about it? I think this is a case for just
that." But Professor Everett did not leave it there. "You could say
these features of the language, these absences, are all coincidences. I
tried to find a common thread to explain why the Pirahã were the way
they were."

That factor, he found, was all around and yet its significance had never
been noticed: the culture and unique way of life of the Pirahã. In a
paper published last year, Professor Everett says this, not their
language, prevents the Pirahã from counting.

Because of their culture's ingrained emphasis on referring only to
immediate, personal experiences, the tribesmen do not have words for
any abstract concept, from colour to memory and even to numbers. There
is no past tense, he says, because everything exists for them in the
present. When it can no longer be perceived, it ceases, to all intents,
to exist. "In many ways, the Pirahã are the ultimate empiricists,"
Professor Everett says. "They demand evidence for everything."

Life, for the Pirahã, is about seizing the moment and taking pleasure
here and now. "I suddenly noticed how excited they were whenever planes
crossed the sky then disappeared. They just love sitting around watching
people coming around the bend in the jungle. Whenever I came into the
village then left, they were amazed."

The linguistic limitations of this "carpe diem" culture explain why the
Pirahã have no desire to remember where they come from and why they
tell no stories.

Other aspects of the culture have also had had an undeniable impact on
the Pirahã language, Professor Everett says. They have a stubborn
belief in their way of doing things that has arguably prevented them
from doing things taken for granted in other countries. The Pirahã are
capable of, for example, drawing a straight line when they want to make
a stick figure to ward off evil spirits, but find writing the number one
almost impossible.

Actively resistant to Western knowledge, they dropped out of Professor
Everett's reading and writing classes when they realised he was trying
to write down their language, which had remained purely verbal. "We
don't write our language," they said. They told him the reason they had
come to the classes was simply that it was fun to all get together in
the evening, and Professor Everett made them popcorn.

It is easy to understand why the Pirahã have fascinated so many for so
long. But what makes Professor Everett's theories so particularly
stunning to the linguistic world is that they fundamentally contradict
the theories that have dominated the sphere since the mid-20th century.
The Pirahã language, Professor Everett claims, is the final nail in the
coffin of Noam Chomsky's linguistic legacy, whose hugely influential
theory of universal grammar dictates that the human mind has an innate
capacity for language and that all languages share certain basic rules
which enable children to understand the meaning of complicated syntax.

At its core is the concept of "recursion", defined as the ability to
build complex ideas by using some thoughts as subparts of others,
resulting in subordinate clauses. The Pirahã language has none of these
features; every sentence stands alone and refers to a single event.
Instead of saying "If it rains, I will not go", the tribe says:
"Raining I go not."

Professor Everett insists the example of the Pirahã, because of the
impact their peculiar culture has had upon their language and way of
thinking, strikes a devastating blow to Chomskian theory. "Hypotheses
such as universal grammar are inadequate to account for the Pirahã
facts because they assume that language evolution has ceased to be
shaped by the social life of the species." The Pirahã's grammar, he
argues, comes from their culture, not from any pre-existing mental
template.

Some anthropologists claim Professor Everett attributes too much
importance to a vague concept of "culture". Others suggest that,
through centuries of inbreeding, the Pirahã are simply intellectually
inferior, an argument ProfessorEverett says is baseless. "These people
know the names of every species in the jungle. They know the behaviour
of all the animals," he says. "They know their environment better than
any American knows his. They know so many things we don't, but because
we know a few they don't, they are somehow less intelligent. It's
ridiculous. As a matter of fact, they think I'm dumb because I have a
habit of getting lost in the jungle."

Professor Everett's work is likely to be hotly debated. He will head
back to Amazon this summer with a bevy of enthusiastic young PhD
students to try to introduce others to the Pirahã and to prove his
theories. A mark of how seriously the linguistic world takes his
studies is that accompanying him will be W Tecumseh Fitch, one of the
three architects of the original theory of universal grammar along with
Chomsky and Dr Marc Hauser. The expert is keen to see whether the tribe
does indeed refute their long-established theory.

Professor Everett took almost three decades to solve the riddle of the
mysterious Pirahã language, and it will be years before anyone else
knows them enough to properly challenge his findings. For now, it
seems, their secrets are safe in the heart of the rainforest.