Pirahã language

The Pirahã language is the subject of various controversial claims;[1] for example, that it provides evidence against linguistic relativity.

[2] The controversy is compounded by the sheer difficulty of learning the language; the number of linguists with field experience in Pirahã is very small.

There is a claim that Pirahã has as few as ten phonemes, one fewer than Rotokas, or even as few as nine for women, but this requires analyzing [k] as an underlying /hi/ and having /h/ invariably substituted for /s/ in female speech.

Although such a phenomenon is odd cross-linguistically, Ian Maddieson has found in researching Pirahã data that /k/ does indeed exhibit an unusual distribution in the language.

[6] A single word, baíxi (pronounced [màíʔì]), is used for both 'mother' and 'father' (like English "parent" although Pirahã has no gendered alternative), and they appear not to keep track of relationships any more distant than biological siblings.

A 2012 documentary aired on the Smithsonian Channel reported that a school had been opened for the Pirahã community where they learn Portuguese and mathematics.

As a consequence, observations involving concepts like the notion of quantity (which has a singular treatment in Pirahã language) became impossible, because of the influence of the new knowledge on the results.

One such suffix, -xáagahá, means that the speaker actually observed the event in question: hoagaxóaiHoaga'oaihis/hepáxaia species of fishkaopápi-sai-xáagahácatch-ing-(I_saw_it)hoagaxóai hi páxai kaopápi-sai-xáagaháHoaga'oai s/he {a species of fish} catch-ing-(I_saw_it)"Hoaga'oai caught a pa'ai fish (I know because I saw it)"(The suffix -sai turns a verb into a noun, like English '-ing'.)

There are also a large number of verbal aspects: perfective (completed) vs. imperfective (uncompleted), telic (reaching a goal) vs. atelic, continuing, repeated, and commencing.

"According to Sheldon (1988), the Pirahã verb has eight main suffix-slots, and a few sub-slots:[11] These suffixes undergo some phonetic changes depending on context.

Everett has also concluded that because Pirahã does not have number-words for counting, does not allow recursive adjective-lists like "the green wealthy hunchbacked able golfer", and does not allow recursive possessives like "The child's friend's mother's house", a Pirahã sentence must have a length limit.

This leads to the additional conclusion that the number of different possible sentences in Pirahã with any given vocabulary is finite.

[12] According to Everett the statement that Pirahã is a finite language without embedding and without recursion presents a challenge for proposals by Noam Chomsky and others concerning universal grammar—on the grounds that if these proposals are correct, all languages should show evidence of recursive (and similar) grammatical structures.

[14] More recently, the German linguist Uli Sauerland of the Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft at Humboldt University (Berlin) has performed a phonetic reanalysis of experimental data in which Pirahã speakers were asked to repeat utterances by Everett.

[clarification needed] Sauerland reports that these speakers make a tonal distinction in their use of "-sai" that "provides evidence for the existence of complex clauses in Pirahã".

This evidence argues against the strong Whorfian claim that language for number creates the concept of exact quantity.

[…] Instead, the case of Pirahã suggests that languages that can express large, exact cardinalities have a more modest effect on the cognition of their speakers: They allow the speakers to remember and compare information about cardinalities accurately across space, time, and changes in modality.

(emphasis added)[2] Being concerned that, because of this cultural gap, they were being cheated in trade, the Pirahã people asked Daniel Everett to teach them basic numeracy skills.

After eight months of enthusiastic but fruitless daily study with Everett, the Pirahã concluded that they were incapable of learning the material and discontinued the lessons.

The anthropologist Marco Antônio Gonçalves, who lived with the Pirahã for 18 months over several years, writes that most of the men understand Portuguese, though not all of them are able to express themselves in the language.

The men developed a contact 'language' or pidgin that allowed them to communicate with regional populations, mixing words from Pirahã, Portuguese and Nheengatu, an Amazonian General Language.

Future research on developing bilingualism (Pirahã-Portuguese) in the community, along the lines of Sakel and Gonçalves, will provide valuable data for the discussion on speakers' grammatical competence (e.g. regarding the effect of culture).