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Pirahã language

Pirahã (also spelled Pirahá, Pirahán), or Múra-Pirahã, is the indigenous language of the isolated Pirahã people of Amazonas, Brazil. The Pirahã live along the Maici River, a tributary of the Amazon River.

Pirahã
Múra-Pirahã
xapaitíiso
Pronunciation[ʔàpài̯ˈtʃîːsò]
Native toBrazil
RegionMaici River
EthnicityPirahã
Native speakers
250–380 (2009)[1]
Mura
  • Pirahã
Language codes
ISO 639-3myp
Glottologpira1253
ELPPirahã
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.

Pirahã is the only surviving dialect of the Mura language, all others having died out in the last few centuries as most groups of the Mura people have shifted to Portuguese. Suspected relatives, such as Matanawi, are also extinct. It is estimated to have between 250 and 380 speakers.[1] It is not in immediate danger of extinction, as its use is vigorous and the Pirahã community is mostly monolingual.

The Pirahã language is most notable as the subject of various controversial claims;[1] for example, that it provides evidence for 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.

Phonology

The Pirahã language is one of the phonologically simplest languages known, comparable to Rotokas (New Guinea) and the Lakes Plain languages such as Obokuitai. 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.[citation needed]

The 'ten phoneme' claim also does not consider the tones of Pirahã, at least two of which are phonemic (marked by an acute accent and either unmarked or marked by a grave accent in Daniel Everett), bringing the number of phonemes to at least twelve. Sheldon (1988) claims three tones, high (¹), mid (²) and low (³).

Phoneme inventory

When languages have inventories as small and allophonic variation as great as in Pirahã and Rotokas, different linguists may have very different ideas as to the nature of their phonological systems.

Vowels

Consonants

The segmental phonemes are:

Bilabial Alveolar Velar Glottal
Stop voiceless p t (k) ʔ
voiced b ~ m ɡ ~ n
Fricative (s ~ h) h
  • /ʔ/ is written ⟨x⟩.
  • Everett posits that [k] is an allophone of the sequence /hi/.
  • Women sometimes substitute /h/ for /s/.[3][4]
Pirahã consonants with example words
Phoneme Phone Word
/p/ [p] pibaóí "otter"
/t/ [t] taahoasi "sand"
[tʃ] before /i/ tii "residue"
/k/ [k] kaaxai "macaw"
/ʔ/ [ʔ] kaaxai "macaw"
/b/ [b] xísoobái "down (noun)"
[m] initially boopai "throat, neck"
/ɡ/ [ɡ] xopóog "inga (fruit)"
[n] initially gáatahaí "can (noun)"
[ɺ͡ɺ̼] (see below) toogixi "hoe"
/s/ [s] sahaxai "should not"
[ʃ] before /i/ siisí "fat (noun)"
/h/ [h] xáapahai "bird arrow"

The number of phonemes is at most thirteen, matching Hawaiian, if [k] is counted as a phoneme and there are just two tones; if [k] is not phonemic, there are twelve phonemes, one more than the number found in Rotokas, or eleven among women who uniformly replace /s/ with /h/. (English, by comparison, has thirty to forty-five, depending on dialect.) However, many of the phonemes show a great deal of allophonic variation. For instance, vowels are nasalized after the glottal consonants /h/ and /ʔ/ (written h and x). Also,

  • /b/ [b, ʙ, m]: the nasal [m] after a pause, the trill [ʙ] before /o/.
  • /ɡ/ [ɡ, n, ɺ͡ɺ̼]: the nasal [n] (an apical alveolar nasal) after a pause; [ɺ͡ɺ̼] is a lateral alveolar–linguolabial double flap that has only been reported for this language, where the tongue strikes the upper gum ridge and then strikes the lower lip. However, it is only used in certain special types of speech performances and so might not be considered a normal speech sound.
  • /s/ [s, h]: in women's speech, /s/ occurs as [h] before [i], and "sometimes" elsewhere.
  • /k/ [k, p, h, ʔ]: in men's speech, word-initial [k] and [ʔ] are interchangeable. For many people, [k] and [p] may be exchanged in some words. The sequences [hoa] and [hia] are said to be in free variation with [kʷa] and [ka], at least in some words.

Because of its variation, Everett states that /k/ is not a stable phoneme. By analyzing it as /hi/, he is able to theoretically reduce the number of consonants to seven (or six for women with constant /h/-substitution).

Lexicon

Pirahã has a few loan words, mainly from Portuguese. Pirahã kóópo ("cup") is from the Portuguese word copo, and bikagogia ("business") comes from Portuguese mercadoria ("merchandise").

Kinship terms

Everett (2005) says that the Pirahã culture has the simplest known kinship system of any human culture. 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.

Numerals and grammatical number

According to Everett in 1986, Pirahã has words for 'one' (hói) and 'two' (hoí), distinguished only by tone. In his 2005 analysis, however, Everett said that Pirahã has no words for numerals at all, and that hói and hoí actually mean "small quantity" and "larger quantity". Frank et al. (2008) describes two experiments on four Pirahã speakers that were designed to test these two hypotheses. In one, ten spools of thread were placed on a table one at a time and the Pirahã were asked how many were there. All four speakers answered in accordance with the hypothesis that the language has words for 'one' and 'two' in this experiment, uniformly using hói for one spool, hoí for two spools, and a mixture of the second word and 'many' for more than two spools.

The second experiment, however, started with ten spools of thread on the table, and spools were subtracted one at a time. In this experiment, one speaker used hói (the word previously supposed to mean 'one') when there were six spools left, and all four speakers used that word consistently when there were as many as three spools left. Though Frank and his colleagues do not attempt to explain their subjects' difference in behavior in these two experiments, they conclude that the two words under investigation "are much more likely to be relative or comparative terms like 'few' or 'fewer' than absolute terms like 'one'".

There is no grammatical distinction between singular and plural, even in pronouns.

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.[5]

Color terms

There is also a claim that Pirahã lacks any unique color terminology, being one of the few cultures (mostly in the Amazon basin and New Guinea) that only have specific words for light and dark.[a][6] Although the Pirahã glossary in Daniel Everett's Ph.D. thesis includes a list of color words (p. 354), Everett (2006) now says that the items listed in this glossary are not in fact words but descriptive phrases (such as "(like) blood" for "red").[7]

Syntax

Pronouns

The basic Pirahã personal pronouns are ti "I, we", gi or gíxai [níʔàì] "you", hi "(s)he, they, this". These can be serially combined: ti gíxai or ti hi to mean "we" (inclusive and exclusive), and gíxai hi to mean "you (plural)", or combined with xogiáagaó 'all', as in "we (all) go".

There are several other pronouns reported, such as 'she', 'it' (animal), 'it' (aquatic animal), and 'it' (inanimate), but these may actually be nouns, and they cannot be used independently the way the three basic pronouns can. The fact that different linguists come up with different lists of such pronouns suggests that they are not basic to the grammar. In two recent papers, Everett cites Sheldon as agreeing with his (Everett's) analysis of the pronouns.

Sheldon (1988) gives the following list of pronouns:

Pirahã English
ti³ "I"
gi¹xai³ "you" (sing.)
hi³ "he" (human)
"she" (human)
i¹k "it", "they" (animate non-human non-aquatic)
si³ "it", "they" (animate non-human aquatic)
"it", "they" (inanimate)
ti³a¹ti³so³ "we"
gi¹xa³i¹ti³so³ "you" (pl.)
hi³ai¹ti³so³ "they" (human?)

Pronouns are prefixed to the verb, in the order SUBJECT-INDOBJECT-OBJECT where INDOBJECT includes a preposition "to", "for", etc. They may all be omitted, e.g., hi³-ti³-gi¹xai³-bi²i³b-i³ha³i¹ "he will send you to me".

For possession, a pronoun is used in apposition (zero-marking):

paitá

Paita

hi

he

xitóhoi

testicles

paitá hi xitóhoi

Paita he testicles

"Paita's testicles"

ti

I

kaiíi

house

ti kaiíi

I house

"my house"

Thomason & Everett (2001) note the pronouns are formally close to those of the Tupian languages Nheengatu and Tenharim, which the Mura had once used as contact languages:

Pronoun Nheengatu Tenharim Pirahã
1sg /xe/ [ʃɪ] [dʒi] /ti/ [tʃi]
2sg /ne/ [ne, nde] /ɡi, ɡixa/ [nɪ, nɪʔa]
3 /ahe/; clitic /i-/ [ɪ, e] [hea] (3fs), [ahe] (3.human) /hi/ [hɪ]

Both the Tupian and Pirahã third-person pronouns can be used as demonstratives, as in Pirahã hi xobaaxai ti "I am really smart" (lit. "This one sees well: me"). Given the restricted set of Pirahã phonemes, the Pirahã pronouns ti and gi are what one would expect if the Tupian pronouns were borrowed, and hi differs only in dropping the a.

Verbs

Pirahã is agglutinative, using a large number of affixes to communicate grammatical meaning. Even the 'to be' verbs of existence or equivalence are suffixes in Pirahã. For instance, the Pirahã sentence "there is a paca there" uses just two words; the copula is a suffix on "paca":

káixihíxao-xaagá

paca-exists

gáihí

there

káixihíxao-xaagá gáihí

paca-exists there

"There's a paca there"

Pirahã also uses suffixes that communicate evidentiality, a category lacking in English grammar. One such suffix, -xáagahá, means that the speaker actually observed the event in question:

hoagaxóai

Hoaga'oai

hi

s/he

páxai

a species of fish

kaopápi-sai-xáagahá

catch-ing-(I_saw_it)

hoagaxóai hi páxai kaopápi-sai-xáagahá

Hoaga'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'.)

Other verbal suffixes indicate that an action is deduced from circumstantial evidence, or based on hearsay. Unlike in English, in Pirahã speakers must state their source of information: they cannot be ambiguous. There are also verbal suffixes that indicate desire to perform an action, frustration in completing an action, or frustration in even starting an action.

There are also a large number of verbal aspects: perfective (completed) vs. imperfective (uncompleted), telic (reaching a goal) vs. atelic, continuing, repeated, and commencing. However, despite this complexity, there appears to be little distinction of transitivity. For example, the same verb, xobai, can mean either 'look' or 'see', and xoab can mean either 'die' or 'kill'.

The verbs are, however, zero-marked, with no grammatical agreement with the arguments of the verb.[8]

ti

I

xíbogi

milk

ti-baí

drink-INTENSIFIER

ti xíbogi ti-baí

I milk drink-INTENSIFIER

"I really drink milk."

ti

I

you

kapiigaxiítoii

pencil

hoa-í

give-PROX

ti gí kapiigaxiítoii hoa-í

I you pencil give-PROX

"I give the pencil to you."

According to Sheldon (1988), the Pirahã verb has eight main suffix-slots, and a few sub-slots:

Slot A:
intensive ba³i¹
Ø
Slot B:
causative/incompletive bo³i¹
causative/completive bo³ga¹
inchoative/incompletive ho³i¹
inchoative/completive hoa³ga¹
future/somewhere a²i³p.
future/elsewhere a²o³p
past a²o³b
Ø
Slot C:
negative/optative sa³i¹ + C1
Slot C1:
preventive ha³xa³
opinionated ha³
possible Ø
positive/optative a³a¹ti³
negative/indicative hia³b + C2
positive/indicative Ø + C2
Slot C2:
declarative
probabilistic/certain i³ha³i¹
probabilistic/uncertain/beginning a³ba³ga³i¹
probabilistic/uncertain/execution a³ba³i¹
probabilistic/uncertain/completion a³a¹
stative i²xi³
interrogative1/progressive i¹hi¹ai¹
interrogative2/progressive o¹xoi¹hi¹ai¹
interrogative1 i¹hi¹
interrogative2 o¹xoi¹hi¹
Ø
Slot D:
continuative xii³g
repetitive ta³
Ø
Slot E:
immediate a¹ha¹
intentive i³i¹
Ø
Slot F:
durative a³b
Ø
Slot G:
desiderative so³g
Ø
Slot H:
causal ta³i¹o³
conclusive si³bi³ga³
emphatic/reiterative koi + H1
emphatic ko³i¹ + H1
reiterative i³sa³ + H1
Ø + H1
Slot H1:
present i³hi¹ai³
past i³xa¹a³ga³
pastImmediate a³ga³ha¹

These suffixes undergo some phonetic changes depending on context. For instance, the continuative xii³g reduces to ii³g after a consonant, e.g., ai³t-a¹b-xii³g-a¹ai³ta¹bii³ga¹ "he is still sleeping".

Also an epenthetic vowel gets inserted between two suffixes if necessary to avoid a consonant-cluster; the vowel is either (before or after s, p, or t) or (other cases), e.g., o³ga³i¹ so³g-sa³i¹o³ga³i¹ so³gi³sa³i¹ "he possibly may not want a field".

Conversely, when the junction of two morphemes creates a double vowel (ignoring tones), the vowel with the lower tone is suppressed: si³-ba¹-bo³-ga³-a¹si³ba¹bo³ga¹ "he caused the arrow to wound it".

For further details, see Sheldon's 1988 paper.

Embedding

Everett originally claimed that in order to embed one clause within another, the embedded clause is turned into a noun with the -sai suffix seen above:

hi

(s)he

ob-áaxái

knows-really

kahaí

arrow

kai-sai

make-ing

hi ob-áaxái kahaí kai-sai

(s)he knows-really arrow make-ing

"(S)he really knows how to make arrows" (literally, '(S)he really knows arrow-making')

ti

I

xog-i-baí

want-this-very.much

gíxai

you

kahaí

arrow

kai-sai

make-ing

ti xog-i-baí gíxai kahaí kai-sai

I want-this-very.much you arrow make-ing

The examples of embedding were limited to one level of depth, so that to say "He really knows how to talk about making arrows", more than one sentence would be needed.

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 there is a finite number of different possible sentences in Pirahã with any given vocabulary.

Everett has also recently reinterpreted even the limited form of embedding in the example above as parataxis. He now states that Pirahã does not admit any embedding at all, not even one level deep. He says that words that appear to form a clause in the example are actually a separate unembedded sentence, which, in context, expresses the same thought that would be expressed by a clause in English. He gives evidence for this based on the lack of specialized words for clause-formation, the pattern of coreferring tokens in the purported clause-constructions, and examples where the purported clause is separated from the rest of the sentence by other complete sentences.

Everett stated that Pirahã cannot say "John's brother's house" but must say, "John has a brother. This brother has a house." in two separate sentences.[9]

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.

Chomsky has replied that he considers recursion to be an innate cognitive capacity that is available for use in language but that the capacity may or may not manifest itself in any one particular language.[10]

However, as Everett points out, the language can have recursion in ideas, with some ideas in a story being less important than others. He also mentions a paper from a recursion conference in 2005 describing recursive behaviors in deer as they forage for food. So to him, recursion can be a brain property that humans have developed more than other animals. He points out that the criticism of his conclusions uses his own doctoral thesis to refute his knowledge and conclusions drawn after a subsequent twenty-nine years of research.[9]

Everett's observation that the language does not allow recursion has also been vigorously disputed by other linguists,[1] who call attention to data and arguments from Everett's own previous publications, which interpreted the "-sai" construction as embedding. Everett has responded that his earlier understanding of the language was incomplete and slanted by theoretical bias. He now says that the morpheme -sai attached to the main verb of a clause merely marks the clause as 'old information', and is not a nominalizer at all (or a marker of embedding).[11] 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".[12]

Unusual features of the language

Daniel Everett, over the course of more than two dozen papers and one book about the language, has ascribed various surprising features to the language, including:

  • One of the smallest phoneme inventories of any known language and a correspondingly high degree of allophonic variation, including two very rare sounds, [ɺ͡ɺ̼] and [t͡ʙ̥]. Both are reported to be used as phonemes in only this language, but the latter is similar to the sound of blowing a raspberry, known among practically all cultures but not used as a linguistic phoneme. The Pirahã are by now apparently aware of the latter's meaning in other cultures and avoid using the phoneme with foreigners.[citation needed]
  • An extremely limited clause structure, not allowing for nested recursive sentences like "Mary said that John thought that Henry was fired".
  • No abstract color words other than terms for light and dark (though this is disputed in commentaries by Paul Kay and others on Everett (2005)).
  • The entire set of personal pronouns appears to have been borrowed from Nheengatu, a Tupi-based lingua franca. Although there is no documentation of a prior stage of Pirahã, the close resemblance of the Pirahã pronouns to those of Nheengatu makes this hypothesis plausible.
  • Pirahã can be whistled, hummed, or encoded in music. In fact, Keren Everett believes that current research on the language misses much of its meaning by paying little attention to the language's prosody. Consonants and vowels may be omitted altogether and the meaning conveyed solely through variations in pitch, stress, and rhythm. She says that mothers teach their children the language through constantly singing the same musical patterns.[13]

Daniel Everett claims that the absence of recursion in the language, if real, falsifies the basic assumption of modern Chomskyan linguistics. This claim is contested by many linguists, who claim that recursion has been observed in Pirahã by Daniel Everett himself, while Everett argues that those utterances that superficially seemed recursive to him at first were misinterpretations caused by his earlier lack of familiarity with the language. Furthermore, some linguists, including Chomsky himself, argue that even if Pirahã lacked recursion, that would have no implications for Chomskyan linguistics.[1][11][14]

Pirahã and linguistic relativity

The concept of linguistic relativity postulates a relationship between the language a person speaks and how that person understands the world. The conclusions about the significance of Pirahã numeracy and linguistic relativity in Frank et al. (2008) are quoted below. In short, in this study the Pirahã were – by and large – able to match exact quantities of objects set before them (even larger quantities), but had difficulty matching exact quantities when larger quantities were set before them and then hidden from view before they were asked to match them.

A total lack of exact quantity language did not prevent the Pirahã from accurately performing a task which relied on the exact numerical equivalence of large sets. 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. […] Thus, the Pirahã understand the concept of one (in spite of having no word for the concept). Additionally, they appear to understand that adding or subtracting one from a set will change the quantity of that set, though the generality of this knowledge is difficult to assess without the ability to label sets of arbitrary cardinality using number words. (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. Not a single Pirahã had learned to count up to ten or even to add 1 + 1.[15]

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, according to some researchers, numerals and counting are based on recursion in the language, the absence of recursion in their language entails a lack of counting.[16] That is, it is the lack of need that explains both the lack of counting-ability and the lack of corresponding vocabulary. However, Everett does not claim that the Pirahãs are cognitively incapable of counting.

Knowledge of other languages

Everett states that most of the remaining Pirahã speakers are monolingual, knowing only a few words of Portuguese. The anthropologist Marco Antônio Gonçalves, who lived with the Pirahã for 18 months over several years, writes that "Most men understand Portuguese, though not all of them are able to express themselves in the language. Women have little understanding of Portuguese and never use it as a form of expression. The men developed a contact 'language' allowing them to communicate with regional populations, mixing words from Pirahã, Portuguese and the Amazonian Língua Geral known as Nheengatu."[17]

Everett states that the Pirahã use a very rudimentary Portuguese lexicon with Pirahã grammar when speaking Portuguese and that their Portuguese is so limited to very specific topics that they are rightly called monolingual, without contradicting Gonçalves (since they can communicate on a very narrow range of topics using a very restricted lexicon). 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).[18] Although Gonçalves quotes whole stories told by the Pirahã, Everett (2009) claims that the Portuguese in these stories is not a literal transcription of what was said, but a free translation from the pidgin Portuguese of the Pirahã.

In a 2012 study, Jeanette Sakel studied the use of Portuguese by a group of Pirahã speakers and reported that, when speaking Portuguese, most Pirahã speakers employ simple syntactic constructions, but some more proficient speakers utilize constructions that could be analysed as complex constructions, such as subordinating conjunctions and complement clauses. [19]

Notes

  1. ^ Could also be analysed as white and black.

References

  1. ^ a b c d e Nevins, Andrew; Pesetsky, David; Rodrigues, Cilene (June 2009). "Pirahã Exceptionality: A Reassessment". Language. 85 (2): 355–404. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.404.9474. doi:10.1353/lan.0.0107. S2CID 15798043.
  2. ^ a b Michael C. Frank, Daniel L. Everett, Evelina Fedorenko and Edward Gibson (2008), Number as a cognitive technology: Evidence from Pirahã language and cognition. Cognition, Volume 108, Issue 3, September 2008, pp. 819–824.
  3. ^ Everett, Daniel L. (July 1, 1986). "Pirahã". Handbook of Amazonian Languages. Vol. 1. Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter Mouton. pp. 315–317. doi:10.1515/9783110850819.200. ISBN 9783110102574.
  4. ^ Everett, Daniel L. (2008). Don't Sleep, there are Snakes. Pantheon Books. pp. 178–179. ISBN 978-0-375-42502-8.
  5. ^ (Television documentary). Smithsonian Channel. 2012. Archived from the original on 2013-11-18.
  6. ^ (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2006-07-24.
  7. ^ Everett, Daniel (2007). "CULTURAL CONSTRAINTS ON GRAMMAR IN PIRAHÃ: A Reply to Nevins, Pesetsky, and Rodrigues" (PDF). LingBuzz. Retrieved 2018-03-07.
  8. ^ Piraha at WALS
  9. ^ a b Everett. "Recursion and Human Thought: Why the Pirahã Don't Have Numbers".
  10. ^ "Noam Chomsky". interview. The Independent. You ask the questions. 28 August 2006.
  11. ^ a b Everett, Daniel L. (June 2009). "Pirahã Culture and Grammar: A Response to Some Criticisms". Language. 85 (2): 405–442. doi:10.1353/lan.0.0104. S2CID 59069607.
  12. ^ Sauerland, Uli. "Experimental evidence for complex syntax in Pirahã".
  13. ^ John Colapinto (2007), "The Interpreter". The New Yorker, 2007-04-16
  14. ^ Nevins, Andrew; Pesetsky, David; Rodrigues, Cilene (September 2009). "Evidence and argumentation: A reply to Everett (2009)". Language. 85 (3): 671–681. doi:10.1353/lan.0.0140. S2CID 16915455.
  15. ^ Everett, Daniel L. (2005) "". Current Anthropology, vol. 46 issue 4. p. 11
  16. ^ Pica, Pierre; Lemer, Cathy; Izard, Véronique; Dehaene, Stanislas (2004). "Exact and Approximate Arithmetic in an Amazonian Indigene Group". Science. 306 (5695): 499–503. Bibcode:2004Sci...306..499P. doi:10.1126/science.1102085. JSTOR 3839329. PMID 15486303. S2CID 10653745 – via JSTOR.
  17. ^ . Archived from the original on 2008-03-03.
  18. ^ Francis, N. (2017). Review of Daniel Everett: How language began. Journal of Linguistics, 53 (4): 900—905.
  19. ^ Sakel, Jeanette (2012-01-01). "Acquiring complexity: The Portuguese of some Pirahã men". Linguistic Discovery. 10 (1). doi:10.1349/PS1.1537-0852.A.409. ISSN 1537-0852. S2CID 62659224.

Bibliography

  • Dixon, R. M. W. and Alexandra Aikhenvald, eds., (1999) The Amazonian Languages. Cambridge University Press.
  • Everett, D. L. (1992) A Língua Pirahã e a Teoria da Sintaxe: Descrição, Perspectivas e Teoria (The Pirahã Language and Syntactic Theory: Description, Perspectives and Theory). Ph.D. thesis. (in Portuguese). Editora Unicamp, 400 pages; ISBN 85-268-0082-5.
  • Everett, Daniel, (1986) "Piraha". In the Handbook of Amazonian Languages, vol I. Desmond C. Derbyshire and Geoffrey K. Pullum (eds). Mouton de Gruyter.
  • Everett, Daniel (1988) On Metrical Constituent Structure in Piraha Phonology. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 6: 207–246
  • Everett, Daniel and Keren Everett (1984) On the Relevance of Syllable Onsets to Stress Placement. Linguistic Inquiry 15: 705–711
  • Everett, Daniel 2005. Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã: Another Look at the Design Features of Human Language. Current Anthropology 46:621–646
  • Keren Everett (1998) Acoustic Correlates of Stress in Pirahã. The Journal of Amazonian Languages: 104–162. (Published version of University of Pittsburgh M.A. thesis.)
  • Sauerland, Uli. (2010). "Experimental Evidence for Complex Syntax in Pirahã".
  • Sheldon, Steven N. (1974) Some Morphophonemic and Tone Perturbation Rules in Mura-Pirahã. International Journal of American Linguistics, v. 40 279–282.
  • Sheldon, Steven N. (1988) Os sufixos verbais Mura-Pirahã (= Mura-Pirahã verbal suffixes). SIL International, Série Lingüística Nº 9, Vol. 2: 147–175 PDF.
  • Thomason, Sarah G. and Daniel L. Everett (2001) Pronoun Borrowing. Proceedings of the Berkeley Linguistic Society 27. PDF.
  • Michael Frank (2008) "Number as a Cognitive Technology: Evidence from Pirahã Language and Cognition". PDF.

External links

  • Piraha Alphabet (at Omniglot)
  • Everett, Daniel. Home page (Archived February 6, 2012, at archive.today)
  • Pirahã language - by Professor Marco Antonio Gonçalves (UFRJ) in Encyclopedia of Indigenous People in Brazil
  • Pirahã Dictionary/ Dicionário Mura-Pirahã ( February 2, 2011, at the Wayback Machine)
  • Mura-Pirahã Dictionary
  • Etnolinguistica.Org: discussion list on native South American languages
  • NPR: Tribe Helps Linguist Argue with Prevailing Theory
  • — article in The Independent
  • Brazil's Pirahã Tribe: Living without Numbers or Time[dead link]Spiegel
  • New Yorker article 'The Interpreter' (abstract)
  • BBC Radio 4, The Material World: The Language of the Piraha — Prof. Daniel Everett discusses the linguistic significance of the language with Prof. Ian Roberts.
  • (video), presentation for the Rosetta Project
  • Sample1 and Sample2 of Pirahã, spoken by native speakers.
  • Audio recordings of words lists in Pirahã, spoken by native speakers (UCLA Phonetics Lab Archive).

pirahã, language, pirahã, also, spelled, pirahá, pirahán, múra, pirahã, indigenous, language, isolated, pirahã, people, amazonas, brazil, pirahã, live, along, maici, river, tributary, amazon, river, pirahãmúra, pirahãxapaitíisopronunciation, ʔàpài, ˈtʃîːsò, na. Piraha also spelled Piraha Pirahan or Mura Piraha is the indigenous language of the isolated Piraha people of Amazonas Brazil The Piraha live along the Maici River a tributary of the Amazon River PirahaMura PirahaxapaitiisoPronunciation ʔapai ˈtʃiːso Native toBrazilRegionMaici RiverEthnicityPirahaNative speakers250 380 2009 1 Language familyMura PirahaLanguage codesISO 639 3 a href https iso639 3 sil org code myp class extiw title iso639 3 myp myp a Glottologpira1253ELPPirahaThis article contains IPA phonetic symbols Without proper rendering support you may see question marks boxes or other symbols instead of Unicode characters For an introductory guide on IPA symbols see Help IPA Piraha is the only surviving dialect of the Mura language all others having died out in the last few centuries as most groups of the Mura people have shifted to Portuguese Suspected relatives such as Matanawi are also extinct It is estimated to have between 250 and 380 speakers 1 It is not in immediate danger of extinction as its use is vigorous and the Piraha community is mostly monolingual The Piraha language is most notable as the subject of various controversial claims 1 for example that it provides evidence for linguistic relativity 2 The controversy is compounded by the sheer difficulty of learning the language the number of linguists with field experience in Piraha is very small Contents 1 Phonology 1 1 Phoneme inventory 1 1 1 Vowels 1 1 2 Consonants 2 Lexicon 2 1 Kinship terms 2 2 Numerals and grammatical number 2 3 Color terms 3 Syntax 3 1 Pronouns 3 2 Verbs 3 3 Embedding 4 Unusual features of the language 5 Piraha and linguistic relativity 6 Knowledge of other languages 7 Notes 8 References 9 Bibliography 10 External linksPhonology EditThis section is missing information about how the tone notations map to each other Please expand the section to include this information Further details may exist on the talk page April 2021 The Piraha language is one of the phonologically simplest languages known comparable to Rotokas New Guinea and the Lakes Plain languages such as Obokuitai There is a claim that Piraha 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 Piraha data that k does indeed exhibit an unusual distribution in the language citation needed The ten phoneme claim also does not consider the tones of Piraha at least two of which are phonemic marked by an acute accent and either unmarked or marked by a grave accent in Daniel Everett bringing the number of phonemes to at least twelve Sheldon 1988 claims three tones high mid and low Phoneme inventory Edit When languages have inventories as small and allophonic variation as great as in Piraha and Rotokas different linguists may have very different ideas as to the nature of their phonological systems Vowels Edit Front BackClose i oOpen aConsonants Edit The segmental phonemes are Bilabial Alveolar Velar GlottalStop voiceless p t k ʔvoiced b m ɡ nFricative s h h ʔ is written x Everett posits that k is an allophone of the sequence hi Women sometimes substitute h for s 3 4 Piraha consonants with example words Phoneme Phone Word p p pibaoi otter t t taahoasi sand tʃ before i tii residue k k kaaxai macaw ʔ ʔ kaaxai macaw b b xisoobai down noun m initially boopai throat neck ɡ ɡ xopoogii inga fruit n initially gaatahai can noun ɺ ɺ see below toogixi hoe s s sahaxai should not ʃ before i xisiisi fat noun h h xaapahai bird arrow The number of phonemes is at most thirteen matching Hawaiian if k is counted as a phoneme and there are just two tones if k is not phonemic there are twelve phonemes one more than the number found in Rotokas or eleven among women who uniformly replace s with h English by comparison has thirty to forty five depending on dialect However many of the phonemes show a great deal of allophonic variation For instance vowels are nasalized after the glottal consonants h and ʔ written h and x Also b b ʙ m the nasal m after a pause the trill ʙ before o ɡ ɡ n ɺ ɺ the nasal n an apical alveolar nasal after a pause ɺ ɺ is a lateral alveolar linguolabial double flap that has only been reported for this language where the tongue strikes the upper gum ridge and then strikes the lower lip However it is only used in certain special types of speech performances and so might not be considered a normal speech sound s s h in women s speech s occurs as h before i and sometimes elsewhere k k p h ʔ in men s speech word initial k and ʔ are interchangeable For many people k and p may be exchanged in some words The sequences hoa and hia are said to be in free variation with kʷa and ka at least in some words Because of its variation Everett states that k is not a stable phoneme By analyzing it as hi he is able to theoretically reduce the number of consonants to seven or six for women with constant h substitution Lexicon EditPiraha has a few loan words mainly from Portuguese Piraha koopo cup is from the Portuguese word copo and bikagogia business comes from Portuguese mercadoria merchandise Kinship terms Edit Everett 2005 says that the Piraha culture has the simplest known kinship system of any human culture A single word baixi pronounced maiʔi is used for both mother and father like English parent although Piraha has no gendered alternative and they appear not to keep track of relationships any more distant than biological siblings Numerals and grammatical number Edit According to Everett in 1986 Piraha has words for one hoi and two hoi distinguished only by tone In his 2005 analysis however Everett said that Piraha has no words for numerals at all and that hoi and hoi actually mean small quantity and larger quantity Frank et al 2008 describes two experiments on four Piraha speakers that were designed to test these two hypotheses In one ten spools of thread were placed on a table one at a time and the Piraha were asked how many were there All four speakers answered in accordance with the hypothesis that the language has words for one and two in this experiment uniformly using hoi for one spool hoi for two spools and a mixture of the second word and many for more than two spools The second experiment however started with ten spools of thread on the table and spools were subtracted one at a time In this experiment one speaker used hoi the word previously supposed to mean one when there were six spools left and all four speakers used that word consistently when there were as many as three spools left Though Frank and his colleagues do not attempt to explain their subjects difference in behavior in these two experiments they conclude that the two words under investigation are much more likely to be relative or comparative terms like few or fewer than absolute terms like one There is no grammatical distinction between singular and plural even in pronouns A 2012 documentary aired on the Smithsonian Channel reported that a school had been opened for the Piraha community where they learn Portuguese and mathematics As a consequence observations involving concepts like the notion of quantity which has a singular treatment in Piraha language became impossible because of the influence of the new knowledge on the results 5 Color terms Edit There is also a claim that Piraha lacks any unique color terminology being one of the few cultures mostly in the Amazon basin and New Guinea that only have specific words for light and dark a 6 Although the Piraha glossary in Daniel Everett s Ph D thesis includes a list of color words p 354 Everett 2006 now says that the items listed in this glossary are not in fact words but descriptive phrases such as like blood for red 7 Syntax EditPronouns Edit The basic Piraha personal pronouns are ti I we gi or gixai niʔai you hi s he they this These can be serially combined ti gixai or ti hi to mean we inclusive and exclusive and gixai hi to mean you plural or combined with xogiaagao all as in we all go There are several other pronouns reported such as she it animal it aquatic animal and it inanimate but these may actually be nouns and they cannot be used independently the way the three basic pronouns can The fact that different linguists come up with different lists of such pronouns suggests that they are not basic to the grammar In two recent papers Everett cites Sheldon as agreeing with his Everett s analysis of the pronouns Sheldon 1988 gives the following list of pronouns Piraha Englishti I gi xai you sing hi he human i she human i k it they animate non human non aquatic si it they animate non human aquatic a it they inanimate ti a ti so we gi xa i ti so you pl hi ai ti so they human Pronouns are prefixed to the verb in the order SUBJECT INDOBJECT OBJECT where INDOBJECT includes a preposition to for etc They may all be omitted e g hi ti gi xai bi i b i ha i he will send you to me For possession a pronoun is used in apposition zero marking paitaPaitahihexitohoitesticlespaita hi xitohoiPaita he testicles Paita s testicles tiIkaiiihouseti kaiiiI house my house Thomason amp Everett 2001 note the pronouns are formally close to those of the Tupian languages Nheengatu and Tenharim which the Mura had once used as contact languages Pronoun Nheengatu Tenharim Piraha1sg xe ʃɪ dʒi ti tʃi 2sg ne ne nde ɡi ɡixa nɪ nɪʔa 3 ahe clitic i ɪ e hea 3fs ahe 3 human hi hɪ Both the Tupian and Piraha third person pronouns can be used as demonstratives as in Piraha hi xobaaxai ti I am really smart lit This one sees well me Given the restricted set of Piraha phonemes the Piraha pronouns ti and gi are what one would expect if the Tupian pronouns were borrowed and hi differs only in dropping the a Verbs Edit Piraha is agglutinative using a large number of affixes to communicate grammatical meaning Even the to be verbs of existence or equivalence are suffixes in Piraha For instance the Piraha sentence there is a paca there uses just two words the copula is a suffix on paca kaixihixao xaagapaca existsgaihitherekaixihixao xaaga gaihipaca exists there There s a paca there Piraha also uses suffixes that communicate evidentiality a category lacking in English grammar One such suffix xaagaha means that the speaker actually observed the event in question hoagaxoaiHoaga oaihis hepaxaia species of fishkaopapi sai xaagahacatch ing I saw it hoagaxoai hi paxai kaopapi sai xaagahaHoaga 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 Other verbal suffixes indicate that an action is deduced from circumstantial evidence or based on hearsay Unlike in English in Piraha speakers must state their source of information they cannot be ambiguous There are also verbal suffixes that indicate desire to perform an action frustration in completing an action or frustration in even starting an action There are also a large number of verbal aspects perfective completed vs imperfective uncompleted telic reaching a goal vs atelic continuing repeated and commencing However despite this complexity there appears to be little distinction of transitivity For example the same verb xobai can mean either look or see and xoab can mean either die or kill The verbs are however zero marked with no grammatical agreement with the arguments of the verb 8 tiIxibogimilkti baidrink INTENSIFIERti xibogi ti baiI milk drink INTENSIFIER I really drink milk tiIgiyoukapiigaxiitoiipencilhoa igive PROXti gi kapiigaxiitoii hoa iI you pencil give PROX I give the pencil to you According to Sheldon 1988 the Piraha verb has eight main suffix slots and a few sub slots Slot A intensive ba i O dd Slot B causative incompletive bo i causative completive bo ga inchoative incompletive ho i inchoative completive hoa ga future somewhere a i p future elsewhere a o p past a o b O dd Slot C negative optative sa i C1Slot C1 preventive ha xa opinionated ha possible O dd dd positive optative a a ti negative indicative hia b C2 positive indicative O C2Slot C2 declarative a probabilistic certain i ha i probabilistic uncertain beginning a ba ga i probabilistic uncertain execution a ba i probabilistic uncertain completion a a stative i xi interrogative1 progressive i hi ai interrogative2 progressive o xoi hi ai interrogative1 i hi interrogative2 o xoi hi O dd dd dd Slot D continuative xii g repetitive ta O dd Slot E immediate a ha intentive i i O dd Slot F durative a b O dd Slot G desiderative so g O dd Slot H causal ta i o conclusive si bi ga emphatic reiterative koi H1 emphatic ko i H1 reiterative i sa H1 O H1Slot H1 present i hi ai past i xa a ga pastImmediate a ga ha dd dd dd These suffixes undergo some phonetic changes depending on context For instance the continuative xii g reduces to ii g after a consonant e g ai t a b xii g a ai ta bii ga he is still sleeping Also an epenthetic vowel gets inserted between two suffixes if necessary to avoid a consonant cluster the vowel is either i before or after s p or t or a other cases e g o ga i so g sa i o ga i so gi sa i he possibly may not want a field Conversely when the junction of two morphemes creates a double vowel ignoring tones the vowel with the lower tone is suppressed si ba bo ga a si ba bo ga he caused the arrow to wound it For further details see Sheldon s 1988 paper Embedding Edit Everett originally claimed that in order to embed one clause within another the embedded clause is turned into a noun with the sai suffix seen above hi s heob aaxaiknows reallykahaiarrowkai saimake inghi ob aaxai kahai kai sai s he knows really arrow make ing S he really knows how to make arrows literally S he really knows arrow making tiIxog i baiwant this very muchgixaiyoukahaiarrowkai saimake ingti xog i bai gixai kahai kai saiI want this very much you arrow make ing The examples of embedding were limited to one level of depth so that to say He really knows how to talk about making arrows more than one sentence would be needed Everett has also concluded that because Piraha 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 Piraha sentence must have a length limit This leads to the additional conclusion that there is a finite number of different possible sentences in Piraha with any given vocabulary Everett has also recently reinterpreted even the limited form of embedding in the example above as parataxis He now states that Piraha does not admit any embedding at all not even one level deep He says that words that appear to form a clause in the example are actually a separate unembedded sentence which in context expresses the same thought that would be expressed by a clause in English He gives evidence for this based on the lack of specialized words for clause formation the pattern of coreferring tokens in the purported clause constructions and examples where the purported clause is separated from the rest of the sentence by other complete sentences Everett stated that Piraha cannot say John s brother s house but must say John has a brother This brother has a house in two separate sentences 9 According to Everett the statement that Piraha 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 Chomsky has replied that he considers recursion to be an innate cognitive capacity that is available for use in language but that the capacity may or may not manifest itself in any one particular language 10 However as Everett points out the language can have recursion in ideas with some ideas in a story being less important than others He also mentions a paper from a recursion conference in 2005 describing recursive behaviors in deer as they forage for food So to him recursion can be a brain property that humans have developed more than other animals He points out that the criticism of his conclusions uses his own doctoral thesis to refute his knowledge and conclusions drawn after a subsequent twenty nine years of research 9 Everett s observation that the language does not allow recursion has also been vigorously disputed by other linguists 1 who call attention to data and arguments from Everett s own previous publications which interpreted the sai construction as embedding Everett has responded that his earlier understanding of the language was incomplete and slanted by theoretical bias He now says that the morpheme sai attached to the main verb of a clause merely marks the clause as old information and is not a nominalizer at all or a marker of embedding 11 More recently the German linguist Uli Sauerland of the Zentrum fur Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft at Humboldt University Berlin has performed a phonetic reanalysis of experimental data in which Piraha 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 Piraha 12 Unusual features of the language EditDaniel Everett over the course of more than two dozen papers and one book about the language has ascribed various surprising features to the language including One of the smallest phoneme inventories of any known language and a correspondingly high degree of allophonic variation including two very rare sounds ɺ ɺ and t ʙ Both are reported to be used as phonemes in only this language but the latter is similar to the sound of blowing a raspberry known among practically all cultures but not used as a linguistic phoneme The Piraha are by now apparently aware of the latter s meaning in other cultures and avoid using the phoneme with foreigners citation needed An extremely limited clause structure not allowing for nested recursive sentences like Mary said that John thought that Henry was fired No abstract color words other than terms for light and dark though this is disputed in commentaries by Paul Kay and others on Everett 2005 The entire set of personal pronouns appears to have been borrowed from Nheengatu a Tupi based lingua franca Although there is no documentation of a prior stage of Piraha the close resemblance of the Piraha pronouns to those of Nheengatu makes this hypothesis plausible Piraha can be whistled hummed or encoded in music In fact Keren Everett believes that current research on the language misses much of its meaning by paying little attention to the language s prosody Consonants and vowels may be omitted altogether and the meaning conveyed solely through variations in pitch stress and rhythm She says that mothers teach their children the language through constantly singing the same musical patterns 13 Daniel Everett claims that the absence of recursion in the language if real falsifies the basic assumption of modern Chomskyan linguistics This claim is contested by many linguists who claim that recursion has been observed in Piraha by Daniel Everett himself while Everett argues that those utterances that superficially seemed recursive to him at first were misinterpretations caused by his earlier lack of familiarity with the language Furthermore some linguists including Chomsky himself argue that even if Piraha lacked recursion that would have no implications for Chomskyan linguistics 1 11 14 Piraha and linguistic relativity EditThe concept of linguistic relativity postulates a relationship between the language a person speaks and how that person understands the world The conclusions about the significance of Piraha numeracy and linguistic relativity in Frank et al 2008 are quoted below In short in this study the Piraha were by and large able to match exact quantities of objects set before them even larger quantities but had difficulty matching exact quantities when larger quantities were set before them and then hidden from view before they were asked to match them A total lack of exact quantity language did not prevent the Piraha from accurately performing a task which relied on the exact numerical equivalence of large sets This evidence argues against the strong Whorfian claim that language for number creates the concept of exact quantity Instead the case of Piraha 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 Thus the Piraha understand the concept of one in spite of having no word for the concept Additionally they appear to understand that adding or subtracting one from a set will change the quantity of that set though the generality of this knowledge is difficult to assess without the ability to label sets of arbitrary cardinality using number words emphasis added 2 Being concerned that because of this cultural gap they were being cheated in trade the Piraha people asked Daniel Everett to teach them basic numeracy skills After eight months of enthusiastic but fruitless daily study with Everett the Piraha concluded that they were incapable of learning the material and discontinued the lessons Not a single Piraha had learned to count up to ten or even to add 1 1 15 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 according to some researchers numerals and counting are based on recursion in the language the absence of recursion in their language entails a lack of counting 16 That is it is the lack of need that explains both the lack of counting ability and the lack of corresponding vocabulary However Everett does not claim that the Pirahas are cognitively incapable of counting Knowledge of other languages EditEverett states that most of the remaining Piraha speakers are monolingual knowing only a few words of Portuguese The anthropologist Marco Antonio Goncalves who lived with the Piraha for 18 months over several years writes that Most men understand Portuguese though not all of them are able to express themselves in the language Women have little understanding of Portuguese and never use it as a form of expression The men developed a contact language allowing them to communicate with regional populations mixing words from Piraha Portuguese and the Amazonian Lingua Geral known as Nheengatu 17 Everett states that the Piraha use a very rudimentary Portuguese lexicon with Piraha grammar when speaking Portuguese and that their Portuguese is so limited to very specific topics that they are rightly called monolingual without contradicting Goncalves since they can communicate on a very narrow range of topics using a very restricted lexicon Future research on developing bilingualism Piraha Portuguese in the community along the lines of Sakel and Goncalves will provide valuable data for the discussion on speakers grammatical competence e g regarding the effect of culture 18 Although Goncalves quotes whole stories told by the Piraha Everett 2009 claims that the Portuguese in these stories is not a literal transcription of what was said but a free translation from the pidgin Portuguese of the Piraha In a 2012 study Jeanette Sakel studied the use of Portuguese by a group of Piraha speakers and reported that when speaking Portuguese most Piraha speakers employ simple syntactic constructions but some more proficient speakers utilize constructions that could be analysed as complex constructions such as subordinating conjunctions and complement clauses 19 Notes Edit Could also be analysed as white and black References Edit a b c d e Nevins Andrew Pesetsky David Rodrigues Cilene June 2009 Piraha Exceptionality A Reassessment Language 85 2 355 404 CiteSeerX 10 1 1 404 9474 doi 10 1353 lan 0 0107 S2CID 15798043 a b Michael C Frank Daniel L Everett Evelina Fedorenko and Edward Gibson 2008 Number as a cognitive technology Evidence from Piraha language and cognition Cognition Volume 108 Issue 3 September 2008 pp 819 824 Everett Daniel L July 1 1986 Piraha Handbook of Amazonian Languages Vol 1 Berlin Germany De Gruyter Mouton pp 315 317 doi 10 1515 9783110850819 200 ISBN 9783110102574 Everett Daniel L 2008 Don t Sleep there are Snakes Pantheon Books pp 178 179 ISBN 978 0 375 42502 8 The Grammar of Happiness Television documentary Smithsonian Channel 2012 Archived from the original on 2013 11 18 Linguistics and English Language PDF Archived from the original PDF on 2006 07 24 Everett Daniel 2007 CULTURAL CONSTRAINTS ON GRAMMAR IN PIRAHA A Reply to Nevins Pesetsky and Rodrigues PDF LingBuzz Retrieved 2018 03 07 Piraha at WALS a b Everett Recursion and Human Thought Why the Piraha Don t Have Numbers Noam Chomsky interview The Independent You ask the questions 28 August 2006 a b Everett Daniel L June 2009 Piraha Culture and Grammar A Response to Some Criticisms Language 85 2 405 442 doi 10 1353 lan 0 0104 S2CID 59069607 Sauerland Uli Experimental evidence for complex syntax in Piraha John Colapinto 2007 The Interpreter The New Yorker 2007 04 16 Nevins Andrew Pesetsky David Rodrigues Cilene September 2009 Evidence and argumentation A reply to Everett 2009 Language 85 3 671 681 doi 10 1353 lan 0 0140 S2CID 16915455 Everett Daniel L 2005 Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Piraha Current Anthropology vol 46 issue 4 p 11 Pica Pierre Lemer Cathy Izard Veronique Dehaene Stanislas 2004 Exact and Approximate Arithmetic in an Amazonian Indigene Group Science 306 5695 499 503 Bibcode 2004Sci 306 499P doi 10 1126 science 1102085 JSTOR 3839329 PMID 15486303 S2CID 10653745 via JSTOR Encyclopedia Indigenous Peoples of Brazil Archived from the original on 2008 03 03 Francis N 2017 Review of Daniel Everett How language began Journal of Linguistics 53 4 900 905 Sakel Jeanette 2012 01 01 Acquiring complexity The Portuguese of some Piraha men Linguistic Discovery 10 1 doi 10 1349 PS1 1537 0852 A 409 ISSN 1537 0852 S2CID 62659224 Bibliography EditDixon R M W and Alexandra Aikhenvald eds 1999 The Amazonian Languages Cambridge University Press Everett D L 1992 A Lingua Piraha e a Teoria da Sintaxe Descricao Perspectivas e Teoria The Piraha Language and Syntactic Theory Description Perspectives and Theory Ph D thesis in Portuguese Editora Unicamp 400 pages ISBN 85 268 0082 5 Everett Daniel 1986 Piraha In the Handbook of Amazonian Languages vol I Desmond C Derbyshire and Geoffrey K Pullum eds Mouton de Gruyter Everett Daniel 1988 On Metrical Constituent Structure in Piraha Phonology Natural Language amp Linguistic Theory 6 207 246 Everett Daniel and Keren Everett 1984 On the Relevance of Syllable Onsets to Stress Placement Linguistic Inquiry 15 705 711 Everett Daniel 2005 Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Piraha Another Look at the Design Features of Human Language Current Anthropology 46 621 646 Keren Everett 1998 Acoustic Correlates of Stress in Piraha The Journal of Amazonian Languages 104 162 Published version of University of Pittsburgh M A thesis Sauerland Uli 2010 Experimental Evidence for Complex Syntax in Piraha Sheldon Steven N 1974 Some Morphophonemic and Tone Perturbation Rules in Mura Piraha International Journal of American Linguistics v 40 279 282 Sheldon Steven N 1988 Os sufixos verbais Mura Piraha Mura Piraha verbal suffixes SIL International Serie Linguistica Nº 9 Vol 2 147 175 PDF Thomason Sarah G and Daniel L Everett 2001 Pronoun Borrowing Proceedings of the Berkeley Linguistic Society 27 PDF Michael Frank 2008 Number as a Cognitive Technology Evidence from Piraha Language and Cognition PDF External links Edit Wiktionary has a word list at Appendix Piraha word list Piraha Alphabet at Omniglot Everett Daniel Home page Archived February 6 2012 at archive today Piraha language by Professor Marco Antonio Goncalves UFRJ in Encyclopedia of Indigenous People in Brazil Piraha Dictionary Dicionario Mura Piraha Archived February 2 2011 at the Wayback Machine Mura Piraha Dictionary Etnolinguistica Org discussion list on native South American languages NPR Tribe Helps Linguist Argue with Prevailing Theory Unlocking the Secret Sounds of Language Life Without Time or Numbers article in The Independent Brazil s Piraha Tribe Living without Numbers or Time dead link Spiegel New Yorker article The Interpreter abstract Audio sample of sung Piraha two boys singing about a day s events BBC Radio 4 The Material World The Language of the Piraha Prof Daniel Everett discusses the linguistic significance of the language with Prof Ian Roberts Daniel Everett Endangered Languages and Lost Knowledge video presentation for the Rosetta Project Sample1 and Sample2 of Piraha spoken by native speakers Audio recordings of words lists in Piraha spoken by native speakers UCLA Phonetics Lab Archive Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Piraha language amp oldid 1128751907, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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