Life and Language with the Pirahã

In 1980, Daniel Everett, an American missionary and linguist, set off into the heart of the Amazon to track down some of the world's most elusive words: the language of the Pirahã, a small tribe of Amazonian Indians living on the banks of the Maici River in Brazil.

Intending to translate the Bible into Pirahã, Everett found himself lost in an alien tongue. For the next 20 years Everett, the son of a California cowboy, tried to hack his way through this impenetrable language, coming across verbs that grew into the most contorted shapes, sentences without subordinate clauses and forests of nouns that seemed to change without reason or pattern.

Pirahã, now spoken by fewer than 400 people, is not related to any other known living language, the people who speak it are monolingual, no outsider had ever mastered it before. The language has no simple colour words, no comparatives, no abstract concepts, no stories of the past, nor visions of the future. The Pirahã have no history, no fiction, no creation myth and no folklore. They have no concept of numbers, and no sense of right or left.

The language has three vowels and eight consonants for men, and the same number of vowels but only seven consonants for women. There is a supply of nouns, but each verb has up to 16 suffixes, which may be present or absent: thus, 2 to the power of 16, making 65,536 possible forms for each and any Pirahã verb.

To complicate matters further, there is hum speech, musical speech and whistle speech. Struggling through the linguistic undergrowth was only one challenge, alongside anacondas, tarantulas and river pirates. Everett's wife and daughter both caught malaria and almost died.

Everett's new book on the Pirahã is called 'Don't Sleep there are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle'; and is reviewed: Here

It's probably accurate to say that Pirahã is the most controversial language in the world owing to Daniel Everett arguing that the language doesn't have recursion, as Chomsky's 'universal' language theory predicts.

The New Scientist explains:

Edge also has an article by Everett that put his case forward, NPR had a radio show on the debate, and The New Yorker has some wonderfully in-depth coverage of the issue.

Learn More about the Pirahã: Here