[Linguistic Anthropology] Ev erett's Pirahã and Journalism

[Alexandre]

[http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004387.html]
Shouldn't we have a public discussion about this? It seems quite
controversial in linguistics and touches on many issues we typically
take up.Apparently, a recent NPR show on Everett's work has been making
the rounds among linguists. (That show is only available in Real
audio.)Language Log's Mark Liberman seems to enjoy a New Yorker piece
on the same topic.Haven't read the New Yorker piece yet but here's the
excerpt that Liberman quotes in his blog entry on the Everett
coverage.One morning last July, in the rain forest of northwestern
Brazil, Dan Everett, an American linguistics professor, and I stepped
from the pontoon of a Cessna floatplane onto the beach bordering the
Maici River, a narrow, sharply meandering tributary of the Amazon. On
the bank above us were some thirty people—short, dark-skinned men,
women, and children—some clutching bows and arrows, others with infants
on their hips. The people, members of a hunter-gatherer tribe called
the Pirahã, responded to the sight of Everett—a solidly built man of
fifty-five with a red beard and the booming voice of a former
evangelical minister—with a greeting that sounded like a profusion of
exotic songbirds, a melodic chattering scarcely discernible, to the
uninitiated, as human speech. Unrelated to any other extant tongue, and
based on just eight consonants and three vowels, Pirahã has one of the
simplest sound systems known. Yet it possesses such a complex array of
tones, stresses, and syllable lengths that its speakers can dispense
with their vowels and consonants altogether and sing, hum, or whistle
conversations.(To step on the soapbox for a moment... To be honest, the
tone of this excerpt reminds me of the type of pseudo-ethnographic
writing which gives ethnography a bad name. I personally hope that the
excerpt isn't representative of the article's content.)

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Posted By Alexandre to Linguistic Anthropology at 4/12/2007 11:18:00 AM
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