Brazil's Pirahã Tribe: Living Without Numbers or Time (2006)

Thank you for such an insightful comment! I will absolutely check this out!

Not knowing what to believe is probably the best thing right now. Everett (the linguist who made the claims) is quite insistent that this is the case, many other linguists are not. It's definitely a big controversy right now, particularly Everett's claim that Piraha does not allow recursion (many linguistic theories, notably Chomsky's, seem to make recursion a pretty fundamental feature of human language). A lot of the arguments are pretty technical, and they're all ham strung by the fact that the Piraha are so remote there isn't a whole lot of research on them besides Everett's, and even he has trouble going back now.

This blog post has a nice set of links about the controversy, and Everett and one of his major critics both appear in the comments to argue, so definitely read those if you are interested:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3857

It seems fairly simple.

Extraordinary claims are often made and publicized widely today just because they get attention, grab eye-balls and so-forth.

Most of these ordinary claims are at least unproven if not wholly fallacious for similar reasons.

This is why "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". Once a claim has made that rounds and gotten some pretty thorough debunking, it's reasonable to say that it's water under the bridge and move to the next claim.

I regularly speak to people who do not seem capable of understanding fine distinctions. It's not difficult for me to believe that a people/tribe that has little use for numbers might not have the concept of large numbers at all, other than as a catchall word with no exact quantity.

Just yesterday on reddit, I was arguing with someone who claimed to speak English as their first language who could not understand what I meant when I pointed out that the idea of "illegal content" was nonsense. I explained how it might be illegal to get content by certain methods, but that didn't make the content itself illegal and that the crime was in the action. He seemed to think that the computer file itself was illegal, even though he admitted that an identical file on another computer might not be illegal.

A tribe that's never needed a scout to be able to tell a leader that it was 5 Roman legions and not 6 that were on the march... why would they have a word for 5 or 6? It's not as if they care about whether one has 5 or 6 bananas, the distinction is pointless on that level.

Likewise, a person who has never needed to make a distinction between the exact circumstances that might get them in trouble with the authorities might never understand the difference between "illegal download" and "illegal file".

> the claims [...] tend to be wildly exaggerated based on whose agenda (read: radically pro- or anti-relativism) the claims would end up supporting

This sort of thinking seems to be particularly rife in the field of Linguistics. From about 2 years ago, it became apparent the linguistics subreddit was taken over by people who have some agenda which seems to be promoting some school of thought in Linguistics.

His book "Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes" is worth a read too (though a more ruthless editor may have helped even it out).

That's sort of the problem with UG, though - it's either so strong a claim as to be almost mystical claims about "the mind-brain" or some such nonsense - and therefore nigh-irrefutable - or so weak as to be basically a truism - "whatever languages all have in common, that's UG!"

Some (most? all?) people have the capacity to think highly complex thoughts without using language. It's a common misconception that human thought "has a language", and I see many people ask the bilingual "what language do you think in".

They never seem to understand that you only "think in language" when you're thinking about talking to someone else, rehearsing a conversation or whatever. They're prone to a cognitive illusion... when they think about this, they try to "listen" to their thoughts, which invokes that conversation-rehearsal faculty. And lo and behold, they "hear" a language.

But they don't think in this manner. Not all the time, not even most.

So if you're not thinking in language, why would your thoughts be limited to your vocabulary?

I think we can only articulate thoughts for which words exist. But we can invent new words, or look for roundabout ways to describe novel phenomena.

Sometimes we learn the necessity of doing this the hard way. One day when I was a kid (maybe 10 or 11) I was watching the Saturday morning kid's variety show on TV (I say 'the show' because there was only one TV channel in my country at that time), when I saw something new - the producers went into a new segment by doing a shaped wipe from one image to the other (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wipe_%28transition%29). I had never seen such a thing on TV before; the shape of the wipe reminded me of flames, which I think was meant to be evocative of the new subject matter, and I was deeply impressed by this novel aesthetic experience. So I ran into the kitchen and informed my parents that 'they were showing XYZ on the TV and they made flames come up from the bottom of the screen'; I had no language to express the abstract nature of the video effect so I just described it in terms of the idea it evoked.

Being the 1970s, my parents just head the bit about flames coming from the TV screen and ran into the other room thinking the TV had caught fire, and then gave me a hard time in proportion to their sudden anxiety. Now of course I was well aware of the difference between the real and the virtual by that age, but it was a striking example of how much anxiety can result when the boundary between the two is called into question. I think something similar is at the root of the common instruction to children of 'don't tell stories' and in the Christian aphorism warning people not to 'speak of the devil, and he shall appear' - an underlying anxiety that narrative is capable of bringing reality into being. Many cultures delegated the role of storyteller or oral historian to a particular individual, usually an elder - perhaps to limit the chaos that might result from multiple competing and incongruous narratives than because the delegate was necessarily the best or most interesting storyteller.

Careful, his ghost might rise up from the grave and come read poetry at you.