Thread by @mattecapu

Introducing the Pirahã people:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%…
They are a small (800ish) culture leaving in the Amazon forest. Them alone suffice to challenge a lot of our assumptions about human nature. Follow me.

(1/n)

They have one of the most interesting culture: very self-sufficient (they call themselves 'the straight ones' and show no major interest in 'developing' themselves), incredibly adapted to their environment. This both reflects and is reflected in their unique language.

(2/n)

Pirahã is indeed unique, as it is the only remaining dialect of the now-defunct Mura lang. Pirahã has no more than 13 distinct phonemes (English has 25ish). This phonetical simplicity allows them to sing/whistle their language, very useful if you hunt in group in a forest!

(3/n)

The grammar is at the same time simple and rich. The language is agglutinative, yet they lack suffixes for gender and multiplicity. In fact, they do not even have words for numbers ('one' an 'two' are used interchangeably for 'few' and 'many').

(4/n)

Likewise, their words for colours are limited to 'light' and 'dark', and they use comparisons for the rest (e.g. 'blood-like', 'sky-like', etc.) Also, they probably borrowed all their pronouns from a neighbouring language, and so didn't natively have them.

(5/n)

OTOH, they have up to 15 different suffixes for verbs. Some of thess indicate evidenciality, meaning they explicitly acknowledge how they come to know about something---they distinguish hearsay, anedoctal evidence, stories, etc. directly in the sentence formation rules!

(6/n)

This is superinteresting from the pov of 'linguistic relativity' (i.e. the relationship between language features and thought categories). For example, Pirahã culture apparently lacks religion---they do believe in some spirits, but there's no 'supreme god'.

(7/n)

Funnily enough, when a missionary taught them about Christianity, they lost interest immediately after they were told she never met Jesus IRL.

(8/n)

However, the most interesting (and debated!) feature of the Pirahã language is its lack of recursivity. It means they can't form subordinates, i.e. put a sentence in place of a part of another sentence.

(9/n)

For instance: to say 'John's brother's house' they split it into two sentences: 'John has a brother. This brother has a house.'
This contradicts Chomsky's hypothesis about recursivity being a universal feature of languages (an essential part of its 'universal grammar')

(10/n)

A CS scientist would say something like 'they tail recurse' or 'they use iteration instead of recursion'. In fact, this property has a direct impact on the expressivity of the language. Technically, every sentence in Pirahã has a bound on its length!

(11/n)

Yet Pirahã people don't have limited cognitive abilities as a linguistic relativist would imply. They show the idea of recursivity in longer language productions (periods, stories, chants, etc.).

(12/n)

Similarly, their lack of numerals isn't paired with a lack of 'sense of quantity'. Even so, it is impaired in some way. They lack interest in learning about numbers, they do not stock large quantities of food or tools.

(13/n)

Although they can reason about quantities, they do not think with numbers. Children, OTOH, seem eager to learn about them!

(14/n)

But think about this in reverse: we do understand evidenciality, but how often do we trick ourselves into believing false facts because we don't natively reason with this category? Instead, Pirahã are wired to do so, since they speak in this way.

(15/n)

*living, obviously