Languages That Could Change the Way You See the World (2015)

You’d use the red parrot if I may say to describe an angry wordy person becoming red of anger.

And you’d use another object/animal to describe the exact same colour in another context. Say red frog for your shining new prince or whatever.

Some people have a pattern of speech that implies a level of authority that they don't actually feel.

It's obvious when some people need to 'police their tone', less obvious for others.

In Chinese, one may of course indicate the gender of a third party, but this isn't mandatory, where in Romance languages, it is.

If evidentiary particles are mandatory grammar, and that is the claim, then uttering a sentence without including those particles would just sound wrong, the way the Russian tendency to leave off the article of a noun when speaking English sounds wrong to us. Native speakers simply wouldn't do so.

I wonder about that (maybe internationalization for Latin America?). Portuguese, as far as I know, is very dominant in Brazil (spoken by 98% of the population). Spanish might be spoken as an L2 in the border states, but I don't know that there's any significant Spanish internationalization in Brazil. Most Brazilians I know say that whenever they have to communicate with Spanish speakers, they generally muddle through with Portuñol, a made-up pidgin of Portuguese with a few Spanish words thrown in to ease comprehension. Ironically, Spanish isn't a very popular language in Brazil (only 4% of the population speak it).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Brazil#Bilinguali...

Come to think of it, I've seen more signage in Spanish in the United States than I've ever seen in Brazil. That said, I've only ever been to Rio and São Paulo. Would be interesting to get thoughts from Brazilians.

So who/where are the disinterested supporters of Everett's work? What do they believe that the Chomskians are getting wrong about Everett's work?

The key word in my query here is disinterested, because almost all criticism of Chomsky is (implicitly or explicitly) based on his political views, rather than his linguistic scholarship.

An interesting thing to follow would be if there are other people who went into the field to work with the Pirahã; and if not, why not, given the extraordinary nature of the claims?

edit:

A bit more insight here: https://news.mit.edu/2016/data-amazonian-piraha-language-deb...

> In the other two cases, Everett’s translations of the sentences differ from those of Sheldon. Everett believes there is no conjunction in those sentences, although Sheldon’s original translations suggested there was.

For instance, a Pirahã sentence transliterated as “ti xaigia ao ogi gio ai hi ahapita” was interpreted by Sheldon to mean, “Well, then I and the big Brazilian woman disappeared.” The conjunction of “I and the big Brazilian woman” could be an example of recursion. But Everett believes a better translation is: “Well, [with respect to me], the very big foreigner went away again.” And that sentence has no recursion.

[...]

> a graduate student at the University of British Columbia, Raiane Salles, has conducted recent fieldwork among the Pirahã unearthing potential evidence of “possessor recursion” — which creates phrases that could expand infinitely, such as “the foreigner’s parent’s dog” and “Migixoi’s husband’s mother’s clothes.”

So it seems there are already some signs of possible recursion in the language. On top of this, there's always the possibility that the Pirahã can understand recursion, but they just don't use it in their language. In the end this would be the more important thing to establish - do these people have a different mental apparatus from the rest of mankind? or do they just make use of the same thing differently...

They probably didn't need much money then. Between being a barter society in general, and the affects of a small population relative to what the land could support there just wasn't as much to trade with each other. When someone did want to trade the Europeans had much better goods so even more of their old money wouldn't be used much anymore.

Or in different words it is a lot easier to give gifts when almost all your relatives just died each leaving you a large inheritance of things. We can guess that some amount of selfishness would have come [back] to the gift giving cultures if things would have been allowed to return to "normal". That isn't to say gifts wouldn't have been important to the culture, only that they would be relatively rarer as there wasn't as much excess anyone could afford to give.