Brazillian Tribe defies linguistics theories

[Phaedrus]

Link to article.

It's pretty long, but the short version is: guy goes as missionary to convert Amazonian tribe to Christianity; tribe's attitude towards life and language convinces him that there is no God, and that Chomsky and his cronies are completely wrong about language and how it works.

Interesting both as a criticism of silly academics touting ridiculous theories, a cultural study of people who literally believe that only their experiences are real, and a real-life example of how language and culture are intertwined. Frank Herbert would have eaten this shit up.

I was particularly interested in the part where the Pirahã apparently have no way to express abstraction, because their entire way of looking at the world is concrete as anything. I loved the reference to the word for someone going away literally meaning, "going out of existence." They're xenophobic as hell, but I can't help but love their materialist and in-the-moment philosophy.

[inhuien]

Cheers for the link. I'll try and read it later.

[SandChigger]

Just read it.

Ugh.

Chomsky rejected Everett’s arguments that the Pirahã’s lack of recursion is a strong counterexample to his theory of universal grammar, writing, “UG is the true theory of the genetic component that underlies acquisition and use of language.”

True theory, M'ssah Chomsky?

Steven Pinker, the Harvard cognitive scientist, who wrote admiringly about some of Chomsky’s ideas in his 1994 best-seller, “The Language Instinct,” told me, “There’s a lot of strange stuff going on in the Chomskyan program. He’s a guru, he makes pronouncements that his disciples accept on faith and that he doesn’t feel compelled to defend in the conventional scientific manner. Some of them become accepted within his circle as God’s truth without really being properly evaluated, and, surprisingly for someone who talks about universal grammar, he hasn’t actually done the spadework of seeing how it works in some weird little language that they speak in New Guinea.”

As I've mentioned before, I've never even seen any claim, that I can recall, that Chomsky speaks anything besides English. (You'd assume, him being one of those "ethnic" Jews, that he might know a bit of Hebrew or Yiddish.) So much for the greatest living "linguist".

“No!” Fitch cried. “Given his status in science, Chomsky is the least arrogant man, the humblest great man, I’ve ever met.”
Everett was having none of it. “Noam Chomsky thinks of himself as Aristotle!” he declared. “He has dug a hole for linguistics that it will take decades for the discipline to climb out of!”

HA! I said, HA! I LIKE this Everett.

And he was smart enough to ditch the Keren bint, the prosodic loon.

[Finch's] experiment, using different stimuli, had been conducted with undergraduates and monkeys, all of whom passed the test.

Golly, dontcha just LOVE science? ...

“A lot of people’s view of Chomsky is of the person in the lead on the jungle path,” Everett had told me in the Pirahã village. “And if anybody’s likely to find the way home it’s him. So they want to stay as close behind him as possible. Other people say, ‘Fuck that, I’m going to get on the river and take my canoe.’”

Yeah, a deluded fool leading a bunch of other fools astray for decades. Kinda sounds like Moses, no?

Oh well, maybe some day Linguistics will be a real science. (I'm not holding my breath, though.)

Michael Tomasello is good value, too, btw.

[inhuien]

The monkeys were the control, I assume.

[Freakzilla]

You mean, you can BE a linguist and anly speak ONE language?

Wouldn't that make him and Englist?

[GamePlayer]

More of an Engrist

[Phaedrus]

“No!” Fitch cried. “Given his status in science, Chomsky is the least arrogant man, the humblest great man, I’ve ever met.”
Everett was having none of it. “Noam Chomsky thinks of himself as Aristotle!” he declared. “He has dug a hole for linguistics that it will take decades for the discipline to climb out of!”

HA! I said, HA! I LIKE this Everett.

I figured you'd get a kick out of that. I seem to recall you ranting about your hate of Chomsky for being a loon and ruining linguistics at some point or another.

[SandChigger]

He's even more highly overrated for less reason than KJA.

Seriously, he's not a scientist. Read him warbling on about his "Galilean style" and you'll soon understand that he does not understand the scientific method. Never has, really, if you consider his primary method of data collection for most of his reign. (To wit, "armchair linguistics": data creation and testing by self-introspection. )

Granted, Linguistics had its share of problems before the so-called "Chomskian Revolution" at the end of the 1950s. But spurious formalization in the guise of a wholesale incorporation of mathematical machinery did not a better science make. Gah!

There are some other points to pick with the article.... I believe Everett says there is nothing physically or mentally "wrong" with the people (no ill effects from inbreeding) and that a Pirahã child raised with another tribe or in more usual Brazilian society would normally acquire whatever language it was exposed to. I have no doubt that he is right about that, but just wondered if he had any actual evidence. (Data on a real child who grew up outside the tribe.) The article mentions that the Pirahã were an offshoot of another tribe that had since been acclimated to Brazilian society and lost their original language. Obviously the "original stock" had no trouble adapting to and adopting a more "normal" linguistic system.

But there's the problem: since there are no records of that other, lost language, it's impossible to say whether or to what extent the current state of the Pirahã dialect reflects the nature of the earlier language. Is it impossible that the Pirahã have devolved rather than simply preserving the past?

The Sapir-Whorf stuff looked a bit off, too, but that's par for the course so I just skimmed it....

[cmsahe]

This is the most interesting read I have had for months, thanks for posting. Culture and language make the reality, perhaps there are things, explanations to the Universe that we cannot see, think of because of our culture and our brain circuitry. (And when an intellectual wants to appear pompous he invariably quotes Chomsky...)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZJ53hn7m84