Study of obscure Amazon tribe sheds new light on how language affects perception (fwd)

[Myra Shawaway]

The thoughts projected have only left me further in the dark.  I do not understand the definition of 'native technology speakers'. any more than I understand what is meant by 'native languages run away and hide'.  What I do know  is our people of this community understand the connectivity of language and ancestoral cultural as it was and how the changes that are brought on have to be adjusted to and move forward with the new.  We know that part of the difficulities of continuing our languages is the history of how we lost the languages.  So, I continually wonder if  words such as 'cognitive', 'kinesthetic', 'hypothesis', 'abstraction', 'tech-language', 'nouns', 'verbs' are parts of any tribal languages and if not, how do we create an understanding of those words and apply to teachings done by fluent speakers today.  This is great conversation.  
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: MiaKalish - LFP 
  To: ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU 
  Sent: Thursday, August 26, 2004 7:12 AM
  Subject: Re: Study of obscure Amazon tribe sheds new light on how language affects perception (fwd)


  I'm not sure that this is a true statement "As our oral traditions are diminishing, so is the ability to grasp the skills needed for passing on our languages." in that I don't believe that our "ability" is tied to "oral tradition". Instead, I believe that our failure is based on the refusal to understand the basic nature of words. First, they are references. They are not the referent. Secondly, on the primary or basic level, nouns and verbs are different from each other. They are processed in different parts of the brain, are accompanied by different cognitive processes and different kinesthetic responses. Thirdly, within a language, collections words are processed into different levels of abstraction. And abstractions are culture dependent. I believe that it is right here, at issues of abstraction, that language-anything, preservation, revitalization, and understanding, all fail. 

  People jumped all over the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, without thinking it through. The mere fact that the deficit view exists vis a vis language is a clear indication that people are still engaged in wrong-making. 

  I am going to hazard the hypothesis that the penalties for wrong-making are experienced and lived by its makers, for as time passes, native technology speakers emerge. These tech languages serve their function, and have their own meanings as do other human languages. But they do not run away and hide as do some of the native languages. Instead, they exist, and continue to thrive, and the penalties are exclusion. Wrong-making excludes those who do it from understanding the nature of the languages, and we are seeing all around us the failure of tech-language immigrants to be successful at understanding and applying the new technologies developed by the tech natives. 

  Daniel Wildcat said, in a presentation at New Mexico State, that "the problem with Indian education is the problem  with education". I believe that this same principle applies: The problem with Indian language learning and revitalization is the problem with language learning and revitalization (including the tech languages)." 

  Mia

    ----- Original Message ----- 
    From: Matthew Ward 
    To: ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU 
    Sent: Friday, August 20, 2004 5:31 PM
    Subject: Re: Study of obscure Amazon tribe sheds new light on how language affects perception (fwd)


    No doubt, languages reflects the world view of the cultures that use them.  However, all languages must also function as practical means of communication and survival--and all languages do in fact serve very well in this way, in the context of the culture that the language is found in.  As cultures change, languages change with them, and although some things are always lost, the fact remains that all languages represent a treasure trove of shared cultural history--of not only the present, but the past as well.  

    What a lot of people fail to grasp is the amazing adaptability of the human language.  As I said before, it's not difficult for me to believe that some cultures have little need to do extensive counting, and that their languages reflect this.  What I DON'T believe is that these people are imprisoned by their languages--that their languages, as the article states lack the "right" linguistic resources.  Those resources can and will be developed as needed, even if it involves linguistic borrowing, which is a perfectly natural and legitimate form of language evolution.  

    The deficit view, which depends partially on denying the adaptive quality of human language, and which is refuted by the vast majority of research on language, in my experience is one of the biggest enemies of language preservation.  "They are all right in the bush, but you can't possibly expect them to deal with the modern world."  Nonsense, I say.  If the Israelis can take Hebrew from being a nearly dead ceremonial language to the lingua franca of a fairly high-tech society, any language community can do the same.  There is no such thing as a "primitive" language, no matter how dearly some people seem determined to discover one.  

    Myra Shawaway wrote:

Interesting?  the idea of having an exacting concept to numbers and time in
a scientific sense, has created difficulties in preservation of our
languages.  As I work with our speakers of languages, I believe that the
concept of numbers is a seen thing, or sense of duty to cultural
environment,  as is the sense of time when spoken about in past events that
have occured.  As our oral traditions are diminishing, so is the ability to
grasp the skills needed for passing on our languages.  We are moving from a
natural way of understanding needs and environment, to enjoying the comforts
of science and the outcomes.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Matthew Ward" <mward at LUNA.CC.NM.US>
To: <ILAT at LISTSERV.ARIZONA.EDU>
Sent: Friday, August 20, 2004 7:02 AM
Subject: Re: Study of obscure Amazon tribe sheds new light on how language
affects perception (fwd)


  I particularly like this sentence:

"What these experiments show, according to Gordon, is how having the
right linguistic resources can carve out one's reality."

The "right" lingustic resources, eh?  I suppose that this study is seen as
    evidence that some people just don't have the right stuff--gotta get those
Portuguese-speakers in there to right the situation.
  I'm curious to see if, in 20 years, we are going to read an article
    showing that the claims made about this tribe are about as accurate as
Whorf's claim that Hopi had no words for time...
  phil cash cash wrote:

    Public release date: 19-Aug-2004
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-08/tccu-soo081804.php

Contact: Diane Dobry
dd173 at columbia.edu
212-678-3979
Teachers College, Columbia University

Study of obscure Amazon tribe sheds new light on how language affects
perception

Controversial linguistic hypothesis is supported by Teachers College
(Columbia University) professor's observation of tribe whose language
contains no words for numbers beyond 'one,' 'two' and 'many.'
During the late 1930s, amateur linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf posed the
theory that language can determine the nature and content of thought.
But are there concepts in one culture that people of another culture
simply cannot understand because their language has no words for it?

No one has ever definitively answered that question, but new findings by
Dr. Peter Gordon, a bio-behavioral scientist at Teachers College,
Columbia University, strongly support a "yes" answer. Gordon has spent
the past several years studying the Pirahã, an isolated Amazon tribe of
fewer than 200 people, whose language contains no words for numbers
beyond "one," "two" and "many." Even the Piraha word for "one" appears
to refer to "roughly one" or a small quantity, as opposed to the exact
connotation of singleness in other languages.

What these experiments show, according to Gordon, is how having the
right linguistic resources can carve out one's reality. "Whorf says
that language divides the world into different categories," Gordon
said. "Whether one language chooses to distinguish one thing versus
another affects how an individual perceives reality."

When given numerical tasks by Gordon in which they were asked to match
small sets of objects in varying configurations, adult members of the
tribe responded accurately with up to two or three items, but their
performance declined when challenged with eight to 10 items, and
dropped to zero with larger sets of objects. The only exception to this
performance was with tasks involving unevenly spaced objects. Here, the
performance of participants deteriorated as the number of items
increased to 6 items. Yet for sets of 7 to 10 objects, performance was
near perfect. Though these tasks were designed to be more difficult,
Gordon hypothesizes that the uneven spacing allowed subjects to
perceive the items as smaller "chunks" of 2 or 3 items that they could
then match to corresponding groups.

According to the study, performance by the Piraha was poor for set sizes
above 2 or 3, but it was not random. "Pirahã participants were actually
trying very hard to get the answers correct, and they clearly
understood the tasks," Gordon said. Participants showed evidence of
using methods of estimation and chunking to guess at quantities in
larger set sizes. On average, they performed about as well as college
students engaged in more complex numerical estimation tasks. Their
skill levels were similar to those in pre-linguistic infants, monkeys,
birds and rodents, and appeared to correlate to recent brain imaging
studies indicating a different sort of numerical competence that seems
to be immune to numerical language deprivation. Interestingly, Gordon
noted, while Pirahã adults had difficulty learning larger numbers,
Piraha children did not.

While the Pirahã words for "one" and "two" do not necessarily always
refer to those specific amounts, Gordon also found that members of the
tribe never used those words in combination to denote larger
quantities. In the study, they also used their fingers in addition to
their verbal statement of quantity, but this practice, too, was found
to be highly inaccurate even for small numbers less than five.

The Pirahã language has no word for "number," and pronouns do not
designate number--"he" and "they" are the same word. Most standard
quantifiers like "more," "several," "all," and "each" do not exist. In
general, while containing a very complex verb structure common to many
Native American languages, the Pirahã language does not allow for
certain kinds of comparative constructions. For example, it was not
possible to ask participants whether one group of objects "has more
nuts than the other" because of the lack of that construction in the
Pirahã grammar. Yet, the word they use for "many," which in that
language was derived from a form ob the verb meaning "to bring
together," is distinct from a word that means something like "much."

###


Details of the study will appear in the Thursday, August 19, issue of
the journal Science.

Teachers College is the largest graduate school of education in the
nation. Teachers College is affiliated with Columbia University, but it
is legally and financially independent. The editors of U.S. News and
World Report have ranked Teachers College as one of the leading
graduate schools of education in the country. For more information,
please visit the college's Web site at www.tc.columbia.edu.



      
  
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