Pirahã people

The Pirahã are an indigenous hunter-gatherer tribe of Amazon natives, who mainly live on the banks of the Maici River in Brazil. They currently number about 200, which is sharply reduced from the numbers recorded in previous decades, and the culture is in danger of extinction. The Pirahã people do not call themselves pirahãs but instead the Hi'aiti'ihi', roughly translated as 'the straight ones'[1].

The Pirahã speak the Pirahã language, which is very important to their culture and to their group identity. Members of the Pirahã actually can whistle their language, which is how its men communicate when hunting in the jungle. The culture and language each have several unique traits, which it has been argued are related. Among these:

• As far as the Pirahã have related to researchers, their culture is concerned solely with matters that fall within direct personal experience, and thus there is no history beyond living memory.
• The language is claimed to have no relative clauses or grammatical recursion, but this is not clear. Should the language truly feature a lack of recursion, then it would be a counterexample to the theory proposed by Chomsky, Hauser and Fitch (2002) that recursion is a crucial and uniquely human language property.
• Its seven consonant phonemes and three vowel phonemes are the fewest known of any language.
• The culture has the simplest known kinship system, not tracking relations any more distant than biological siblings.
• The people do not count and the language does not have words for precise numbers. Despite efforts to teach them, some researchers, such as Prof. Peter Gordon of Columbia University, claim that they are incapable of learning numeracy. His colleague, Prof. Daniel L. Everett, on the other hand, argues that the Pirahã are cognitively capable of counting; they simply choose not to do so.
• It is suspected that the language's entire pronoun set, which is the simplest of any known language, was recently borrowed from one of the Tupí-Guaraní languages, and that prior to that the language had no pronouns whatsoever. Many linguists, however, find this claim questionable, noting that there is no historical-comparative evidence indicating the non-existence of pronouns in a previous period of the history of Pirahã; also, the overall lack of Tupi-Guarani loanwords in areas of the lexicon more susceptible to borrowing (such as nouns referring to cultural items, for instance) makes this hypothesis even less plausible.
• There is a disputed theory that the language has no color terminology. There are no unanalyzable root words for color; the color words recorded are all compounds like bi³i¹sai, "blood-like", which is not that uncommon.
• They have very little artwork. The artwork that is present, mostly necklaces and drawn stick-figures, is used primarily to ward off evil spirits.

The Pirahã take short naps of 15 minutes to two hours through the day and night, and rarely sleep through the night. They often go hungry, not for want of food, but from a desire to be tigisái ("hard").

The Pirahã have not related to researchers any fiction or mythology.

Prof. Daniel Everett is the cognitive linguist who wrote the first Pirahã grammar.

References

• Gordon, Peter (2004). "Numerical cognition without words: Evidence from Amazonia". Science 306 (5695): 496-9.

• Everett, Daniel (2005). "Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirahã: Another look at the design features of human language". Current Anthropology 46 (4): 621-46.

• Hauser, M., Chomsky, N. & Fitch, W. T. (2002) The faculty of language: what is it, who has it, and how did it evolve? Science, 298, 1569-79

See also

• Munduruku language
• Indigenous people of Brazil
• Whistled language
• Sapir–Whorf hypothesis

External links

• Indigenous Peoples in Brazil - Pirahã
• Documenting Endangered Languages: The View from the Brazilian Amazon PDF print of Everett (2006).

Newspaper articles

• Rafaela von Bredow. "Brazil's Pirahã Tribe: Living without Numbers or Time", Spiegel Online, May 3, 2006.
• Article appearing in "The Globe and Mail"
• Guardian article: What happens when you can't count past four?
• The Pirahã people
• Language may shape human thought New Scientist article (19th August 2004)
• A people lost for words New Scientist article (18th March 2006)
• Life without numbers
• The Independent article (7 May 2006)
• The Piraha challenge: an Amazonian tribe takes grammar to a strange place Science News, December 10, 2005

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