Piraha

[Laurence Horn]

At 9:38 AM -0700 4/21/07, James A. Landau wrote:
>On Fri 04/20/07 12:01 AM Geoffrey S. Nathan <geoffnathan at WAYNE.EDU>
>wrote:
>
>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/
>***********************************************
>Without bothering to read Everett's claim, I will say it is a crock of shit...
>

Hmmm.  Somehow this doesn't strike me as ideal scientific methodology.

LH

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