In the Amazon jungle, there's a small tribe that speaks a language isolate that seems to expose some holes in modern linguistic theory. It is a tenet of linguistics that there are no "primitive languages" -- all languages are equally expressive, and while some languages may have specialzed vocabulary in some areas, overall you can explain pretty much anything in any language.
But it looks like the Pirahã language just can't handle some things. Like recursion. Or numbers. The Pirahã tribespeople even recognize the utilty of arithmetic and counting, but they just can't learn to do it. Does this validate the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that langauge shapes thought? Or is it evidence of what proto-languages were like? Are the Pirahã -- Homo sapiens without a doubt -- stuck with a Homo erectus language? There is no art in Pirahã culture, no literature, no notion of extended family; large chunks of the cognitive space that most humans take for granted seem simply not to be present for these people. Perhaps these cultural and cognitive constructs depend on a minimal level of linguistic sophistication that Pirahã lacks.
Is the failure of the Pirahã language to serve its speakers in a world dominated by other tongues evidence of the structure of language evolution?
4 comments:
I can see how lack of arithmetic impoverishes a language, but is not having recursion that big a deal?
I've always thought that recursion, while interesting, was/is accorded too much importance by linguists. It's not as if I've keenly felt the inability to generate infinitely long sentences. I get the feeling that linguists have spent too much time hanging around computer programmers...
I wanted to add, but was unable to articulate cleanly, the parallel with recursion support in computer programming languages -- per GEB, once you have recursion, you can prove that you don't need anything
else.
It's almost frightening how similar Pirahã sounds to something like TRS-80 BASIC -- limited support for strings (like, you could only have two of them, and they had to be A$ and B$), no way to pass parameters into subroutines, etc. So there are things you Just Can't Do in TRS-80 BASIC, eerily like the way Pirahã speakers Just Can't learn to do addition or counting.
In any case, recursion in language isn't a matter of infinitely long sentences; it's as simple as being able to (in English) treat an adjective+noun pair the same way you can treat a noun, including prepending another adjective (and so on).
Love the comparison of Pirahã's impoverishment to that of TRS-80 BASIC, which prompts the thought: what features of a computer language might usefully be used in a natural language?
I'd love to be able to pass someone a meme-gestalt as an object, rather than having to serialize it, so to speak, and have them reconstruct it at the their end.
... or the other way: in the spirit of LOLCODE, build a Pirahã programming language. No arguments for functions. Hell, no functions, because there's no code re-use. No iterative or recursive structures. No numbers over 2.
In BASIC:
10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
20 GOTO 10
Issues:
"WORLD" is too abstract
Iteration not allowed
"20" causes stack overflow
In PIRAHA:
[1] SAY "HELLO"
[2] SAY "HELLO"
[more] SAY "HELLO"
Post a Comment