Brazil's Pirahã Tribe - Living without Numbers or Time

[Ahknaton]

This is both fascinating and bizarre. I'd love to hear how this debate gets resolved. It would certainly be stunning if Chomsky's Universal Grammar was refuted once and for all. Personally I wouldn't rule out the idea of some kind of genetic abnormality affecting a significant proportion of the tribe, although their interbreeding with their neighbours (who don't have the same deficits) argues against this.

Living without Numbers or Time

http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,414291,00.html

By Rafaela von Bredow

The Pirahã people have no history, no descriptive words and no subordinate clauses. That makes their language one of the strangest in the world -- and also one of the most hotly debated by linguists.

During one of his first visits to Brazil's Pirahãs, members of the tribe wanted to kill Daniel Everett. At that point, he wasn't even a "bagiai" (friend) yet and a travelling salesman -- who felt Everett had conned him -- had promised the natives a lot of whiskey for the murder. In the gloom of midnight, the Pirahã warriors huddled along the banks of the Maici and planned their attack.

What the tribesmen didn't realize, however, was that Everett, a linguist, was eavesdropping, and he could already understand enough of the Amazon people's cacophonic singsong to make out the decisive words.

"I locked my wife and our three children in the reasonably safe shed of our hut and immediately went to the men," Everett recalls. "In one move, I snatched up all of their bows and arrows, went back to the hut and locked them up." He had not only disarmed the Pirahãs -- he had also startled them -- and they let him live. The next day, the family left without any trouble.

But the language of the forest dwellers, which Everett describes as "tremendously difficult to learn," so fascinated the researcher and his wife that they soon returned. Since 1977, the British ethnologist at the University of Manchester spent a total of seven years living with the Pirahãs -- and he's committed his career to researching their puzzling language. Indeed, he was long so uncertain about what he was actually hearing while living among the Pirahãs that he waited nearly three decades before publishing his findings. "I simply didn't trust myself."

Everett sensed his findings would be controversial. Indeed they were: What he found was enough to topple even the most-respected theories about the Pirahãs' faculty of speech.

The reaction came exactly as the researcher had expected. The small hunting and gathering tribe, with a population of only 310 to 350, has become the center of a raging debate between linguists, anthropologists and cognitive researchers. Even Noam Chomsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Steven Pinker of Harvard University, two of the most influential theorists on the subject, are still arguing over what it means for the study of human language that the Pirahãs don't use subordinate clauses.

Indeed, the debate over the people of the Maici River goes straight to the core of the riddle of how homo sapiens managed to develop vocal communication. Although bees dance, birds sing and humpback whales even sing with syntax, human language is unique. If for no other reason than for the fact that it enables humans to piece together never before constructed thoughts with ceaseless creativity -- think of Shakespeare and his plays or Einstein and his theory of relativity.

Linguistics generally focuses on what idioms across the world have in common. But the Pirahã language -- and this is what makes it so significant -- departs from what were long thought to be essential features of all languages.

The language is incredibly spare. The Pirahã use only three pronouns. They hardly use any words associated with time and past tense verb conjugations don't exist. Apparently colors aren't very important to the Pirahãs, either -- they don't describe any of them in their language. But of all the curiosities, the one that bugs linguists the most is that Pirahã is likely the only language in the world that doesn't use subordinate clauses. Instead of saying, "When I have finished eating, I would like to speak with you," the Pirahãs say, "I finish eating, I speak with you."

Equally perplexing: In their everyday lives, the Pirahãs appear to have no need for numbers. During the time he spent with them, Everett never once heard words like "all," "every," and "more" from the Pirahãs. There is one word, "hói," which does come close to the numeral 1. But it can also mean "small" or describe a relatively small amount -- like two small fish as opposed to one big fish, for example. And they don't even appear to count without language, on their fingers for example, in order to determine how many pieces of meat they have to grill for the villagers, how many days of meat they have left from the anteaters they've hunted or how much they demand from Brazilian traders for their six baskets of Brazil nuts.

The debate amongst linguists about the absence of all numbers in the Pirahã language broke out after Peter Gordon, a psycholinguist at New York's Columbia University, visited the Pirahãs and tested their mathematical abilities. For example, they were asked to repeat patterns created with between one and 10 small batteries. Or they were to remember whether Gordon had placed three or eight nuts in a can.

The results, published in Science magazine, were astonishing. The Pirahãs simply don't get the concept of numbers. His study, Gordon says, shows that "a people without terms for numbers doesn't develop the ability to determine exact numbers."

His findings have brought new life to a controversial theory by linguist Benjamin Whorf, who died in 1914. Under Whorf's theory, people are only capable of constructing thoughts for which they possess actual words. In other words: Because they have no words for numbers, they can't even begin to understand the concept of numbers and arithmetic.

But then, coming to terms with something like Portuguese multiplication tables would require the forest-dwellers to acquire some basic arithmetic. The Warlpiri -- a group of Australian aborigines whose language, like that of the Pirahã, only has a "one-two-many," system of counting -- had no difficulties counting farther than three in English.

But the Pirahãs proved to be completely different. Years ago, Everett attempted to teach them to learn to count. Over a period of eight months, he tried in vain to teach them the Portuguese numbers used by the Brazilians -- um, dois, tres. "In the end, not a single person could count to ten," the researcher says.

It's certainly not that the jungle people are too dumb. "Their thinking isn't any slower than the average college freshman," Everett says. Besides, the Pirahãs don't exactly live in genetic isolation -- they also mix with people from the surrounding populations. In that sense, their intellectual capacities must be equal to those of their neighbors.

Eventually Everett came up with a surprising explanation for the peculiarities of the Pirahã idiom. "The language is created by the culture," says the linguist. He explains the core of Pirahã culture with a simple formula: "Live here and now." The only thing of importance that is worth communicating to others is what is being experienced at that very moment. "All experience is anchored in the presence," says Everett, who believes this carpe-diem culture doesn't allow for abstract thought or complicated connections to the past -- limiting the language accordingly.

Living in the now also fits with the fact that the Pirahã don't appear to have a creation myth explaining existence. When asked, they simply reply: "Everything is the same, things always are." The mothers also don't tell their children fairy tales -- actually nobody tells any kind of stories. No one paints and there is no art.

Even the names the villagers give to their children aren't particularly imaginative. Often they are named after other members of the tribe which whom they share similar traits. Whatever isn't important in the present is quickly forgotten by the Pirahã. "Very few can remember the names of all four grandparents," says Everett.

The scientist is convinced that linguists will find a similar cultural influence on language elsewhere if they look for it. But up till now many defend the widely accepted theories from Chomsky, according to which all human languages have a universal grammar that form a sort of basic rules enabling children to put meaning and syntax to a combination of words.

Whether phonetics, semantics or morphology -- what exactly makes up this universal grammar is controversial. At its core, however, is the concept of recursion, which is defined as replication of a structure within its single parts. Without it, there wouldn't be any mathematics, computers, philosophy or symphonies. Humans basically wouldn't be able to view separate thoughts as subordinate parts of a complex idea.

And there wouldn't be subordinate clauses. They are responsible for translating the concept of recursion into grammar. Renowned US psychologist Pinker believes that if the Piraha don't form subordinate clauses, then recursion cannot explain the uniqueness of human language -- just as it cannot be a central element of some universal grammar. Chomsky would be refuted.

The logical way forward now would be to try to prove that the Pirahã can actually think in a recursive fashion. According to Everett, the only reason this isn't part of their language is because it is forbidden by their culture. The only problem is nobody can confirm or deny Everett's observations since no one can speak Pirahã as well as he does.

Despite this, several researchers -- including two Chomsky colleagues -- will travel this year to Maici to try and check parts of his claims. But for some, it's already getting too crowded in the jungle. "I'm concerned the Pirahã will simply become one more scientific oddity, to be exploited and analyzed right down to their feces," complains Peter Gordon.

[Fade the Butcher]

This is both fascinating and bizarre. I'd love to hear how this debate gets resolved. It would certainly be stunning if Chomsky's Universal Grammar was refuted once and for all.

Probably not. Genes like FOXP2 (http://www.zoology.ubc.ca/edg/pdf/FoxP.pdf) have been associated with the acquisition of language. Watson talks about that gene in DNA: The Secret of Life. I just got finished reading it.

[Jonathan]

His findings have brought new life to a controversial theory by linguist Benjamin Whorf, who died in 1914. Under Whorf's theory, people are only capable of constructing thoughts for which they possess actual words. In other words: Because they have no words for numbers, they can't even begin to understand the concept of numbers and arithmetic.
That looks to me like a bit of a "chicken and egg" dilema.

On a related note, don't the Eskimo's have nearly 100 different words to describe snow?

Also, in Irish Gaelic, there are several different words for family, and several different words for the different ranges of family(descendants of a common great-grandfather, and descendants of a common great-great-grandfather are distinguished by different words), which would correspond to the tribal nature of Gaelic society. Also, "Táim ag dul go dtí [áit]" meaning "I'm going to [location]" translates literally as "I'm going, until [location] comes" which adds a kind of relativity to the language. Similarly, in general relativity, time is another co-ordinate which is indestinguishable from place, and in Irish we use the word "there"[as in place/location] for a place/location as well as for a certain time ("he died there[time] last night" for example). I'm sure there are plenty of other examples that are just so obvious that I'm over looking them.

[Ahknaton]

That looks to me like a bit of a "chicken and egg" dilema.Yeah, it could simply be that they don't have the words because they haven't needed the concepts, not vice versa. It's hard to imagine that numbers wouldn't come in useful one way or another even in a primitive tribal existence though. Also it's odd that Everett wasn't able to teach them to count, although perhaps that's something that has to be aquired before a certain age. Maybe he'd have better luck trying to teach counting to the children.
On a related note, don't the Eskimo's have nearly 100 different words to describe snow?I've heard that too. I suppose in English we have plenty of ways of expressing different kinds of snow if we want to and are inventive enough e.g. "hard-packed, soft-and-fluffy, icey etc". So we can obviously grasp the concepts behind different kinds of snow even if we don't have specific words, unlike this tribe that can't pick up counting even when it's explained to them.
Also, in Irish Gaelic, there are several different words for family, and several different words for the different ranges of family(descendants of a common great-grandfather, and descendants of a common great-great-grandfather are distinguished by different words), which would correspond to the tribal nature of Gaelic society. Also, "Táim ag dul go dtí [áit]" meaning "I'm going to [location]" translates literally as "I'm going, until [location] comes" which adds a kind of relativity to the language. Similarly, in general relativity, time is another co-ordinate which is indestinguishable from place, and in Irish we use the word "there"[as in place/location] for a place/location as well as for a certain time ("he died there[time] last night" for example). I'm sure there are plenty of other examples that are just so obvious that I'm over looking them.
I've always been kind of intrigued by that Irish expression "may the road rise up to meet you". Is that the same kind of thing?

[Jonathan]

I've always been kind of intrigued by that Irish expression "may the road rise up to meet you". Is that the same kind of thing?
In a word, yes.

[Helios Panoptes]

On a related note, don't the Eskimo's have nearly 100 different words to describe snow?

Did you know that the Inuits have over 100 words for snow?

Well, if you answered yes, you're wrong! In fact, the "Inuits" have almost the same amount of words for snow as we do. It is a common misconception that they have either dozens or hundreds of words for snow.

You should know that the people living in the Canadian and Greenland arctic regions are called Inuit, and Yupic in Siberia and western Alaska. They speak different yet similar languages with many different dialects.

The confusion all began almost a century ago in 1911 with the introduction of Franz Boas' "The handbook of North American Indians". In it, he claims Inuits have four distinct root words for snow: aput "snow on the ground", gana "falling snow" piqsirpoq "drifting snow" and qimuqsuq "a snow drift". Since the English language only has one root word for snow - 'snow' - this became a great find in the field of lexicography. Then in 1940, a man named Benjamin Lee Whorf wrote an article misinterpreting Boas' work, describing that an Inuit would not have an all-inclusive word like snow, rather each type of snow would have it's own unique word.

And so the myth began.

This article was then reprinted many times and used as a reference by the populous. From this idea, the myth grew claiming Inuits had dozens, hundreds, and even thousands of words for snow.

But how many snow words do the Inuits really have? Well this question has no quick answer because it all depends on how you define 'word'. For example, the English word snow can be used as a root word to compose compounding words like: snowball, snowbank, snowblower, snowcapped, snowdrift, snowfall, snowflake, snowlike, snowpants, snows, snowshoe, snowstorm, snowy, and so on. This is also true in "Inuit" languages. Many words for snow come from the same root.

But if Inuits have four roots like Boas gave, then wouldn't they have four words whereas English only has one? Of course, this is certainly not the case. Take for instance the following unique root words describing snow: slush, blizzard, skift, and flurry. By this procedure, it appears that English also has several words for snow. In fact, English and "Inuit" have around the same amount of words for snow. So next time somebody tells you there are 100 Inuit words for snow, you can set them straight and let them know the truth.



http://www.socc.ca/inuit.cfm

[Ahknaton]

Did you know that White Nationalists have over 50 words for Negro and nearly 100 words for Jew?

Helios: good find. Deserves rep, but I'm spent.

[Professor John Frink]

His findings have brought new life to a controversial theory by linguist Benjamin Whorf, who died in 1914.

1941.

Did you know that the Inuits have over 100 words for snow?

Well, if you answered yes, you're wrong!

True. Geoffrey Pullum elaborated on it in his essay The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax.

[Ahknaton]

True. Geoffrey Pullum elaborated on it in his essay The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax.I'm pretty sure it was mentioned by Steven Pinker in the Language Instinct too. I should have remembered this :o

[Professor John Frink]

I'm pretty sure it was mentioned by Steven Pinker in the Language Instinct too. I should have remembered this :o
I only read parts of "Language Instinct" and I don't remember that being mentioned, but the book was published a few years after Pullum's essay (not that it matters anyway).

[Ahknaton]

I only read parts of "Language Instinct" and I don't remember that being mentioned, but the book was published a few years after Pullum's essay (not that it matters anyway).
Right. I must have read it somewhere else. BTW, perhaps we should ask Sulla about his feeling for snow?

[antibuddha]

[Don't know if this has been discussed on here before, but regardless. . .]


Spiegel Online - May 10, 2006

The Piraha people have no history, no descriptive words and no subordinate clauses. That makes their language one of the strangest in the world - and also one of the most hotly debated by linguists.

The language of the forest dwellers, which Dan Everett describes as "tremendously difficult to learn," so fascinate the researcher who spent a total of seven years living with the Pirahãs - during which time he committed his career to researching their puzzling language.

Indeed, he was long so uncertain about what he was actually hearing while living among the Pirahãs that he waited nearly three decades before publishing his findings.

What he found was enough to topple even the most-respected theories about the Pirahãs' faculty of speech. The small hunting and gathering tribe, with a population of only 310 to 350, has become the center of a raging debate between linguists, anthropologists and cognitive researchers.

The debate over the people of the Maici River goes straight to the core of the riddle of how homo sapiens managed to develop vocal communication. Although bees dance, birds sing and humpback whales even sing with syntax, human language is unique. If for no other reason than for the fact that it enables humans to piece together never before constructed thoughts with ceaseless creativity -- think of Shakespeare and his plays or Einstein and his theory of relativity.

Linguistics generally focuses on what idioms across the world have in common. But the Pirahã language -- and this is what makes it so significant -- departs from what were long thought to be essential features of all languages.

The language is incredibly spare. The Pirahã use only three pronouns. They hardly use any words associated with time and past tense verb conjugations don't exist. Apparently colors aren't very important to the Pirahãs, either -- they don't describe any of them in their language. But of all the curiosities, the one that bugs linguists the most is that Pirahã is likely the only language in the world that doesn't use subordinate clauses. Instead of saying, "When I have finished eating, I would like to speak with you," the Pirahãs say, "I finish eating, I speak with you."

Equally perplexing: In their everyday lives, the Pirahãs appear to have no need for numbers. During the time he spent with them, Everett never once heard words like "all," "every," and "more" from the Pirahãs. There is one word, "hoi," which does come close to the numeral 1. But it can also mean "small" or describe a relatively small amount -- like two small fish as opposed to one big fish, for example. And they don't even appear to count without language, on their fingers for example, in order to determine how many pieces of meat they have to grill for the villagers, how many days of meat they have left from the anteaters they've hunted or how much they demand from Brazilian traders for their six baskets of Brazil nuts.

The debate amongst linguists about the absence of all numbers in the Pirahã language broke out after Peter Gordon, a psycholinguist at New York's Columbia University, visited the Pirahãs and tested their mathematical abilities. For example, they were asked to repeat patterns created with between one and 10 small batteries. Or they were to remember whether Gordon had placed three or eight nuts in a can.

The results, published in Science magazine, were astonishing. The Pirahãs simply don't get the concept of numbers. His study, Gordon says, shows that "a people without terms for numbers doesn't develop the ability to determine exact numbers."

Psycholinguist Peter Gorden: Are we only capable of creating thoughts for which words exist? His findings have brought new life to a controversial theory by linguist Benjamin Whorf, who died in 1914. Under Whorf's theory, people are only capable of constructing thoughts for which they possess actual words. In other words: Because they have no words for numbers, they can't even begin to understand the concept of numbers and arithmetic.

But then, coming to terms with something like Portuguese multiplication tables would require the forest-dwellers to acquire some basic arithmetic.

The Warlpiri -- a group of Australian aborigines whose language, like that of the Pirahã, only has a "one-two-many," system of counting -- had no difficulties counting farther than three in English.

But the Pirahãs proved to be completely different. Years ago, Everett attempted to teach them to learn to count. Over a period of eight months, he tried in vain to teach them the Portuguese numbers used by the Brazilians -- um, dois, tres. "In the end, not a single person could count to ten," the researcher says.

It's certainly not that the jungle people are too dumb. "Their thinking isn't any slower than the average college freshman," Everett says. Besides, the Pirahãs don't exactly live in genetic isolation -- they also mix with people from the surrounding populations. In that sense, their intellectual capacities must be equal to those of their neighbors.

Eventually Everett came up with a surprising explanation for the peculiarities of the Pirahã idiom. "The language is created by the culture," says the linguist. He explains the core of Pirahã culture with a simple formula: "Live here and now." The only thing of importance that is worth communicating to others is what is being experienced at that very moment. "All experience is anchored in the presence," says Everett, who believes this carpe-diem culture doesn't allow for abstract thought or complicated connections to the past -- limiting the language accordingly.

Living in the now also fits with the fact that the Pirahã don't appear to have a creation myth explaining existence. When asked, they simply reply: "Everything is the same, things always are." The mothers also don't tell their children fairy tales -- actually nobody tells any kind of stories. No one paints and there is no art.

Even the names the villagers give to their children aren't particularly imaginative. Often they are named after other members of the tribe which whom they share similar traits. Whatever isn't important in the present is quickly forgotten by the Pirahã. "Very few can remember the names of all four grandparents," says Everett.

The scientist is convinced that linguists will find a similar cultural influence on language elsewhere if they look for it. But up till now many defend the widely accepted theories from Chomsky, according to which all human languages have a universal grammar that form a sort of basic rules enabling children to put meaning and syntax to a combination of words.

Whether phonetics, semantics or morphology -- what exactly makes up this universal grammar is controversial. At its core, however, is the concept of recursion, which is defined as replication of a structure within its single parts. Without it, there wouldn't be any mathematics, computers, philosophy or symphonies. Humans basically wouldn't be able to view separate thoughts as subordinate parts of a complex idea.

And there wouldn't be subordinate clauses. They are responsible for translating the concept of recursion into grammar. Renowned US psychologist Pinker believes that if the Piraha don't form subordinate clauses, then recursion cannot explain the uniqueness of human language -- just as it cannot be a central element of some universal grammar. Chomsky would be refuted.

The logical way forward now would be to try to prove that the Pirahã can actually think in a recursive fashion. According to Everett, the only reason this isn't part of their language is because it is forbidden by their culture. The only problem is nobody can confirm or deny Everett's observations since no one can speak Pirahã as well as he does.

Despite this, several researchers -- including two Chomsky colleagues -- will travel this year to Maici to try and check parts of his claims. But for some, it's already getting too crowded in the jungle. "I'm concerned the Pirahã will simply become one more scientific oddity, to be exploited and analyzed right down to their feces," complains Peter Gordon.

http://www.crystalinks.com/piraha.html

[Mike]

I read about these people a while back. Their language is truly strange. IIRC the sound system only has about ten phonemes (three vowels and seven consonants), making it one of the smallest systems in the word. The language can be whistled apparently. There are no number words and no color words. Almost unbelievably, there are no specific kinship words for like "mother", "son", "sister", uncle", or "cousin". Instead there are only two words for relatives, one meaning "of this generation" and the other meaning "of the older generation". There is very little grammar and apparently no nesting of clauses. Apparently there are only three pronouns, and these appear to be recent borrowings from a neighboring tribe. This little tribe clearly dwells in a totally different universe than every other race, even Black Africans.

[Arminius]

It's a strange culture. I don't think living without a concept for time in the language is very good. Certainly this tribe hasn't made much progress at all. It may be a window into early communication systems.

http://www.socioambiental.org/pib/epienglish/piraha/piraha.shtm

[antibuddha]

Why do they need to make any "progress"? Are there some overwhelming cultural issues among the Piraha threatening to lead it to ecological or social breakdown I'm unaware of, or can man just not live without his tinker toys and inflated sense of self-worth? Also, if there were more surviving foragers who had remained relatively isolated, I'm pretty sure this would not be so uncommon. The concept of time is just that, and I can't see any advantage to them in their way of life in adopting it.

[antibuddha]

Originally Posted by Trig
I only read parts of "Language Instinct" and I don't remember that being mentioned, but the book was published a few years after Pullum's essay (not that it matters anyway).

Right. I must have read it somewhere else. BTW, perhaps we should ask Sulla about his feeling for snow?

I'm confused, what just happened? Was there already another thread on this that I missed?

[Arminius]

Why do they need to make any "progress"? Are there some overwhelming cultural issues among the Piraha threatening to lead it to ecological or social breakdown I'm unaware of, or can man just not live without his tinker toys and inflated sense of self-worth? Also, if there were more surviving foragers who had remained relatively isolated, I'm pretty sure this would not be so uncommon. The concept of time is just that, and I can't see any advantage to them in their way of life in adopting it.

I guess it is to do with intent. If they intend to stay in their current situation, then fine. My drive is to better myself and, by an extention, my society as a whole. If they don't have that desire, I don't care. Tribes that wish to live as their ancestors did, I can respect that. They don't want to change because it is their culture or tradition. However, I prefer change for the better rather than stagnation.

[Ahknaton]

I'm confused, what just happened? Was there already another thread on this that I missed?
Yes. I merged them together.

[antibuddha]

Oh, I'm sorry. I looked in the Psychology section and didn't see any, but didn't bother to check elsewhere as I just assumed that's where it would be.

[Byssus]

At a glance

Ethnonyms: Pirahã people, Hi'aiti'ihi (endonym: roughly, "the straight ones")
Classification: Neotropical Amerindian: Brasilid (Glowatzki)
Distribution: Banks of the Maici River, Brazil
Mode of life: hunter-gathering, nut exchange with Brazilian traders
Numbers: 360, sharply reduced from previous decades


Extraordinary Linguistic Features

As far as the Pirahã have related to researchers (to much dispute):


They do not count and the language does not have words for precise numbers.
Their language has no relative clauses or grammatical recursion.
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 may have had no pronouns whatsoever.
There is a disputed theory that the language has no color terminology apart from distinction between light and dark. There are no unanalyzable root words for color; the color words recorded are all compounds like bi³i¹sai, "blood-like", which is not that uncommon.
Pirahã can be whistled, hummed, or encoded in music.
Its seven consonant phonemes and three vowel phonemes may be the fewest known of any language. The pronunciation of several phonemes depends on the speaker's sex; male speakers have one more consonant at their disposal.

Cultural Peculiarities

As far as researchers can tell:

Their culture is concerned solely with matters that fall within direct personal experience, and thus there is no history beyond living memory.
The Pirahã have no fiction or mythology.
They have no concept of God or religion. They believe in spirits, though these are not the same kinds of spirits in other cultures. These "spirits" can be jaguars, trees, or other visible, tangible things.
The culture has the simplest known kinship system, not tracking relations any more distant than biological siblings. One term covers both "mother" and "father".
They have very little artwork. The artwork that is present, mostly necklaces and drawn stick-figures, is used primarily to ward off evil spirits.
They 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).

[Byssus]

Photographs by Martin Schoeller (The New Yorker) -- click to enlarge thumbnails:

http://img223.imageshack.us/img223/4051/piraha3mj6.th.png (http://img223.imageshack.us/my.php?image=piraha3mj6.png)
Kaaxáoi

http://img228.imageshack.us/img228/1746/piraha1lf8.th.png (http://img228.imageshack.us/my.php?image=piraha1lf8.png)
Kaaxáoi with a kill.

http://img229.imageshack.us/img229/8990/piraha2yg1.th.png (http://img229.imageshack.us/my.php?image=piraha2yg1.png)
A Pirahã woman in a shelter.

http://img228.imageshack.us/img228/5272/070416piraha05p465xs7.th.jpg (http://img228.imageshack.us/my.php?image=070416piraha05p465xs7.jpg)
Pirahã woman

http://img228.imageshack.us/img228/4811/070416piraha04p465ca2.th.jpg (http://img228.imageshack.us/my.php?image=070416piraha04p465ca2.jpg)
Pirahã man

http://img217.imageshack.us/img217/2183/070416piraha07p465kg4.th.jpg (http://img217.imageshack.us/my.php?image=070416piraha07p465kg4.jpg)
Child from the tribe

[Mike]

These people make the Bantu tribes look like a space-faring civilization. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language :

The Pirahã do not count with numerals. They use only approximate measures, and in tests were unable to consistently distinguish between a group of four objects and a similarly-arranged group of five objects. When asked to duplicate groups of objects, they duplicate the number correctly on average, but almost never get the number exactly in a single trial.

Being (correctly) concerned that, because of this cultural gap, they were being cheated in trade, the Pirahã people asked Daniel Everett, a linguist that was working with them, to teach them basic numeracy skills. After eight months of enthusiastic but fruitless daily study, the Pirahã concluded that they were incapable of learning the material, and discontinued the lessons. Not a single Pirahã had learned to count up to ten or even add 1 + 1.[5]

Everett argues that test subjects are unable to count for two cultural reasons and one formal linguistic reason. First, they are nomadic hunter/gatherers with nothing to count and hence no need to practice doing so. Second, they have a cultural constraint against generalizing beyond the present which eliminates number words. Third, since numerals and counting are based on recursion in the language according to some researchers, then the absence of recursion in their language predicts a lack of counting. That is, it is the lack of need which explains both the lack of counting ability and the lack of corresponding vocabulary. Everett does not claim that the Pirahãs are cognitively incapable of counting.

[harjit]

Shows how linguistic and culture-based intelligence is. One of these children being raised in a different environment would create a completely different person.

[Mike]

Other primitive tribes have lacked a complete number system in their language, but were able to adopt the rudiments by borrowing the needed words from a European language. These Pirahã people could not learn to consistently count groups of five objects despite having the desire and putting in months of effort. Thus I'd say it shows how intelligence-based the language and culture are.
Shows how linguistic and culture-based intelligence is. One of these children being raised in a different environment would create a completely different person.
These people would most likely flounder badly if raised in a different environment.

[harjit]

Other primitive tribes have lacked a complete number system in their language, but were able to adopt the rudiments by borrowing the needed words from a European language. These Pirahã people could not learn to consistently count groups of five objects despite having the desire and putting in months of effort. Thus I'd say it shows how intelligence-based the language and culture are.

These people would most likely flounder badly if raised in a different environment.
I wonder how old the test subjects were. Being immersed in an environment is very different from being taught by a teacher.

One (albeit obliquely) similar example I've noticed is how poor Japanese people are at learning English, even compared to somewhat poor people in other Asian countries. Since I've actually mastered the Japanese language and understand a fair bit of their cultural subtleties now, it is pretty clear to me why this is the case. It is not the least bit uncommon to meet someone who bemoans that he has been taking English classes for over 10 years but still can't make much progress (spend some time in a Tokyo bar chatting with other patrons... the odds are you will probably meet someone who says this :)). But those who go to live in the States on a homestay or study-abroad program, or for business, their English suddenly dramatically improves. Being immersed in that Japanese culture and mode is really detrimental learning English. There is a vast number of books here theorizing on "why we can't learn English" (I haven't read any). It is a national obsession. There is every variety of snake-oil company out there too, selling some "new innovative" technique for learning English.

Here is the cultural and linguistic explanation given for the Pirahã study.
Everett argues that test subjects are unable to count for two cultural reasons and one formal linguistic reason. First, they are nomadic hunter/gatherers with nothing to count and hence no need to practice doing so. Second, they have a cultural constraint against generalizing beyond the present which eliminates number words. Third, since numerals and counting are based on recursion in the language according to some researchers, then the absence of recursion in their language predicts a lack of counting. That is, it is the lack of need which explains both the lack of counting ability and the lack of corresponding vocabulary. Everett does not claim that the Pirahãs are cognitively incapable of counting.


(By the way, I do not believe that all ethnic groups have identical native intelligences or potentials, and have never made that claim).

[Mike]

I wonder how old the test subjects were. Being immersed in an environment is very different from being taught by a teacher.

One (albeit obliquely) similar example I've noticed is how poor Japanese people are at learning English, even compared to somewhat poor people in other Asian countries. Since I've actually mastered the Japanese language and understand a fair bit of their cultural subtleties now, it is pretty clear to me why this is the case. It is not the least bit uncommon to meet someone who bemoans that he has been taking English classes for over 10 years but still can't make much progress (spend some time in a Tokyo bar chatting with other patrons... the odds are you will probably meet someone who says this :)). But those who go to live in the States on a homestay or study-abroad program, or for business, their English suddenly dramatically improves. Being immersed in that Japanese culture and mode is really detrimental learning English. There is a vast number of books here theorizing on "why we can't learn English" (I haven't read any). It is a national obsession. There is every variety of snake-oil company out there too, selling some "new innovative" technique for learning English.This is very interesting, but we aren't talking about anything at the level of acquiring English language fluency or mastering the intricacies of the Japanese etiquette system. We are talking about counting to five. For some reason, the Pirahã, possibly uniquely among all human groups, cannot do it. This is stunning, even to a person who is comfortable with the idea of human racial differences, such as myself.

Here is the cultural and linguistic explanation given for the Pirahã study.
Everett does not claim that the Pirahãs are cognitively incapable of counting.
(By the way, I do not believe that all ethnic groups have identical native intelligences or potentials, and have never made that claim).Everett is a trained linguist who spent most of his time documenting the unique Pirahã language and culture. It is unsurprising that he would offer a liberal and humane explanation for the Pirahã inability to count and add. He may or not be right - in light of all the other Pirahã linguistic and cultural characteristics, I suspect that he is not. The only way to find out would be to adopt a Pirahã child in a mainstream brazilian home. As I understand it, the Pirahã themselves see no reason to abandon their way of life, and would not agree to such an experiment.

[Byssus]

Some of Everett's claims (e.g., that the Pirahã are "no less intelligent than the average college freshman"), although not without some basis in reality (able hunters, fishermen, and jokers, it’d be a stretch to deem them congenitally dysfunctional), are clearly intended to mitigate the "racist" implications of his findings.

From an excellent talk (http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/everett07/everett07_index.html) ("Recursion and Human Thought: Why the Pirahã Don't Have Numbers") with Daniel L. Everett:

Some people have suggested that since this a small society it's not unreasonable to hypothesize that there's a lot of inbreeding, and that this has made one particular gene much more prevalent in the society. Maybe Pirahã uniqueness is genetic in origin. People have asked me to do DNA tests, but my research has already been attacked for being borderline racist, because I say that the people are so different. So the last thing that I want to do is be associated with DNA testing. Somebody else can go there and do that. I don't think they have a closed gene pool, even though it's a small group of people. River traders come up frequently, and it's not uncommon for Pirahã to trade sex for different items off the boat that they want. So I don't think that genetics is relevant at all here.

At the same time, it would be inaccurate to deem this a racial deficit, in the general sense of the word: other Amerindians -- even other Amazonian Indians -- grasp numbers, and the Pirahã seem to have experienced not-insignificant genetic interchange with numerate outsiders. According to Everett, in the interview linked above: "So you see these foreign babies being raised among the Pirahã." (Of course, many of the Brazilians in that sector of the Amazon are themselves of predominantly Amerindian extraction.)

Save for a few loanwords, the Pirahã have remained essentially monolingual and non-Christian despite "over 200 years of regular contact with Brazilians and the Tupi-Guarani-speaking Kawahiv." Everett speculates on the causes of this surprising resilience to cultural change:

I think that if we look at other groups—maybe groups in New Guinea and Australia, and some groups in Africa—what we have to find are groups that have been isolated, for various reasons, from larger cultures. The Pirahã's isolation is due to their very strong sense of superiority, and disdain for other cultures. Far from thinking of themselves as inferior because they lack counting, they consider their way of life the best possible way of life, and so they're not interested in assimilating other values.

They have another interesting value, which is 'no coercion'. That's one of the strongest Pirahã values; no coercion; you don't tell other people what to do.

I originally went to the Amazon to convert the Pirahã, to see them all become Christians, to translate the New Testament into their language. My only degree was an undergraduate degree from Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, and I went down there with the knowledge of New Testament Greek and a little bit of anthropology and linguistics.

When I first started working with the Pirahã, I realized that I needed more linguistics if I was going to understand their language. When I began to tell them the stories from the Bible, they didn't have much of an impact. I wondered, was I telling the story incorrectly? Finally one Pirahã asked me one day, well, what color is Jesus? How tall is he? When did he tell you these things? And I said, well, you know, I've never seen him, I don't know what color he was, I don't know how tall he was. Well, if you have never seen him, why are you telling us this?

I started thinking about what I had been doing all along, which was, give myself a social environment in which I could say things that I really didn't have any evidence for—assertions about religion and beliefs that I had in the Bible. And because I had this social environment that supported my being able to say these things, I never really got around to asking whether I knew what I was talking about. Whether there was any real empirical evidence for these claims.

The Pirahã, who in some ways are the ultimate empiricists—they need evidence for every claim you make—helped me realize that I hadn't been thinking very scientifically about my own beliefs. At the same time, I had started a Ph.D. program in linguistics at the University of Campinas in southern Brazil, and I was now in the middle of a group of very intelligent Brazilian intellectuals, who were always astounded that someone at a university doing a Ph.D. in linguistics could believe in the things I claimed to believe in at the time. So it was a big mixture of things involving the Pirahã, and at some point I realized that not only do I not have any evidence for these beliefs, but they have absolutely no applicability to these people, and my explanation of the universe.

I sat with a Pirahã once and he said, what does your god do? What does he do? And I said, well, he made the stars, and he made the Earth. And I asked, what do you say? He said, well, you know, nobody made these things, they just always were here. They have no concept of God. They have individual spirits, but they believe that they have seen these spirits, and they believe they see them regularly. In fact, when you look into it, these aren't sort of half-invisible spirits that they're seeing, they just take on the shape of things in the environment. They'll call a jaguar a spirit, or a tree a spirit, depending on the kinds of properties that it has. "Spirit" doesn't really mean for them what it means for us, and everything they say they have to evaluate empirically. This is what I hadn't been doing, and this challenged the faith that I thought I had, to the extent that I realized that it wasn't honest for me to continue to claim to believe these things when I realized how little investigation I had done into the nature of the things I claimed to believe.

I went to Brazil in 1977 as a missionary. I started my graduate program in 1979. By 1982, I was pretty sure that I didn't believe in the tenets of Christianity or any other religion or creeds based on the supernatural. But there's a social structure when you're a missionary, one that includes the income for you and your entire family as well as all of the relationships you've built up over the years. All the people you know and like and depend on are extremely religious and fundamentalist in their religion. It's very difficult to come out and say, "I don't believe this stuff any more". When I did say that, which was probably 13 years later, it had severe consequences for me personally. It's a difficult decision for anyone. I have a couple of friends whom I've told that it must be something like what it's like to come out as gay, to finally admit to your family that your values are just very very different from theirs.

My wife is still a missionary in Brazil to the Pirahã, and we've been separated for three years, and my view is pretty much irreconcilable with hers. It's difficult—it means that I don't go to that village when she's there. I don't go there and tell the Pirahãs not to believe in Jesus or anything like that. Actually I don't need to tell them that, because there's no danger that they ever will. They just find the entire concept—our beliefs—useless for them.

They wouldn't find the Pope remotely impressive; they would find his clothes very impractical, and they would find it very funny. I took a Pirahã to Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, for health reasons once, to go to a hospital, and I took him to the Presidential Palace. As the president of Brazil was coming out, there was all this fanfare and I said, That's the chief of all Brazilians. Uh huh. Can we go eat now? He was totally uninterested; the whole concept just sounds silly to them.

The first time I took a Pirahã on an airplane, I got a similar reaction. I was flying a man out for health reasons; he had a niece who needed surgery and he was accompanying her. We're flying above the clouds, and I know that he's never seen clouds from the top before, so I point down and I say, those are clouds down there. Uh huh. He was completely uninterested; he acted like he flew in planes every day. The Pirahã are not that curious about what we have. They haven't shown interest in a number of things that other indigenous groups, even Amazonian groups, that have come out and had contact with in civilization for the first time are curious about. The Pirahã have been in regular contact for a couple of hundred years now, and they have assimilated almost nothing. It's very unusual.

The reason that I believe that the Pirahã are like this is because of the strong cultural values that they have—a series of cultural values. One principle is immediacy of experience; they aren't interested in things if they don't know the history behind them. If they haven't seen it done. But there's also just a strong conservative core to the culture; they don't change, and they don't change the environment around them much either. They don't make canoes. They live on the river, and they depend on canoes for their daily existence—someone's always fishing, someone's always crossing the river to hunt and gather—but they don't make canoes. If there are no Brazilian canoes, they'll take the bark off a tree and just sit in that and paddle across. And that's only good for one or two uses.

I brought in a Brazilian canoe master, and spent days with them and him in the jungle; we selected the wood, and made a dugout canoe. The Pirahã did all the labor—so they knew how to make a canoe, and I gave them the tools—but they came to me and they said, we need you to buy us another canoe. I said, well we have the tools now, and you guys can make canoes. But they said, Pirahã don't make canoes. And that was the end of it. They never made a canoe like the Brazilians, even though I know that some of them have the skills to do that.

In the 1700s, the first Catholic mission to the Amazon area made contact with the Pirahã and the related people, the Muras, and abandoned them after a few years as the most recalcitrant group they had ever encountered. Other missionaries have worked with the Pirahã since then. Protestant missionaries have worked with them since about 1958, and there's not a single convert, there's not a single bit of interest.

A lot of people say that I'm a failure as a missionary. A lot of missionaries say I'm a failure—my ex-wife thinks I'm a failure as a missionary—and the reason they give is, I don't have enough faith. If you have enough faith, the story goes, God will overcome all of these things. But if you say that you should know that god is up against some serious cultural barriers. The Pirahã have a cultural taboo against talking about the world in certain ways, and the Christian message violates these.

They have the other cultural value against coercion that I mentioned. Religion is all about coercion—telling people how they should live and giving them a list of rules to live by—and the Pirahã just don't have coercion in that form. If someone were really violent and disrupted the entire life of the community, they would be ostracized; they might even be killed. But that would be a very serious pathological case in the culture. By and large, they tolerate differences, and even children aren't told what they have to do that much. Life is hard enough; if children don't do what they have to do, they'll go hungry. There's just no place for the Western concept of religion in their culture at all.

I remember one time sitting in a hut with the Pirahã and they came and they said, we understand that you want to tell us about Jesus and that Jesus tells us that we should live certain ways. Since you love Jesus, this is an American thing—but we don't want to live like you. We want to live like Pirahã, and we do lots of other things that you don't do, and we don't want to be like you. They've noticed these characteristics, and they much prefer to have the values that they have.

[todd]

Shows how linguistic and culture-based intelligence is. One of these children being raised in a different environment would create a completely different person.Imagine not being able to brag about how many Japanese schoolgirls you've banged, Harjit.

[Niccolo and Donkey]

The Amazonian tribe that can only count to five (http://www.thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?goto=newpost&t=61001)

(thx to usernamen for linking me to this thread)

[Monty]

(By the way, I do not believe that all ethnic groups have identical native intelligences or potentials, and have never made that claim).

Congratulations! You're a racist! :D

[Dreadnought]

The culture has the simplest known kinship system, not tracking relations any more distant than biological siblings.

Might this have something to do with it? This surely cannot be good for the genepool - even if outsiders are brought in, this would hit them in a couple of generations.

[Roland]

Interesting exchange on the implications of Everett's claims: http://www.edge.org/discourse/recursion.html. The putative absence of recursion in the Pirahã language is supposed to impact Chomskyan linguistics.

my quarrel is not merely with Chomsky (by now the whole idea of a language instinct or universal grammar is so vacuous and untestable as to hardly warrant a criticism from me or anyone else in any case)

[harjit]

It must be nice not to have to worry about how well insulated your home is... nor worry about how much it's going to cost to heat it. I say this of course because I'm busy freezing my arse off because Winter has just hit here (57.2°F outside).
Wuss
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