Pirahã language
Encyclopedia
Pirahã is a language
spoken by the Pirahã
. The Pirahã are an indigenous people of Amazonas, Brazil
, living along the Maici River
, a tributary of the Amazon
.
Pirahã is believed to be the only surviving member of the Mura
language family, all other members having become extinct in the last few centuries. It is therefore a language isolate
, without any known connection to other living languages. It is estimated to have between 250 and 380 speakers. 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; for example, that it provides evidence for the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis
. The controversy is compounded by the sheer difficulty of learning the language; the number of linguists with field experience in Pirahã is very small.
, over the course of more than two dozen papers and one book about the language, has ascribed various surprising features to the language, including:
Everett claims that the absence of recursion, if real, falsifies the basic assumption of modern Chomskian
linguistics
. This claim is contested by many linguists, who claim that recursion has been observed in Pirahã by 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 Noam Chomsky
himself, argue that even if Pirahã lacked recursion, that would have no implications for Chomskian linguistics.
simplest languages known, comparable to Rotokas
(New Guinea
) and Hawaiian
. There is a claim that Pirahã has as few as ten phonemes, one fewer than Rotokas, but this requires analysing [k] as an underlying
/hi/. 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.
The 'ten phoneme' claim also does not consider the tone
s of Pirahã, at least two of which are phonemic (marked by an acute accent
and either unmarked or marked by a grave accent
in Everett), bringing the number of phonemes to at least twelve. Sheldon (1988) claims three tones, high (¹), mid (²) and low (³).
[k] has been claimed to be an allophone
of the sequence /hi/. Women sometimes substitute /h/ for /s/.
The number of phonemes is 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. (English
, by comparison, has thirty to forty-five
, depending on dialect.) However, many of these sounds 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, ʙ, m]: the nasal [m] after a pause, the trill [ʙ] before /o/.
[ɡ, n, ɺ͡ɺ̼]: the nasal [n] after a pause (an apical alveolar nasal
); [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, h]: in women's speech, /s/ occurs as [h] before [i], and "sometimes" elsewhere.
[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 analysing it as /hi/, he is able to theoretically reduce the number of consonants to seven.
Pirahã is sometimes said to be one of the few languages without nasal
s. However, an alternate analysis is possible. By analysing the [ɡ] as /n/ and the [k] as /hi/, it could also be claimed to be one of the very few languages without velar
s:
Oro Win
and Wari’
, spoken some 500 km west of the Pirahã area. Oro Win too is a nearly extinct language (surviving only as the second language of a dozen or so members of the Wari’ tribe) which was discovered by Everett in 1994.
. Pirahã "kóópo" ("cup") is from the Portuguese word "copo", and "bikagogia" ("business") comes from Portuguese "mercadoria" ("merchandise").
system of any human culture. A single word, baíxi , is used for both mother and father (like English
"parent" although Pirahã has no alternative), and they appear not to keep track of relationships any more distant than biological sibling
s.
There is no grammatical distinction between singular
and plural
, even in pronouns.
terminology, being one of the few cultures (mostly in the Amazon basin and New Guinea) that only have specific words for light and dark. Although the Pirahã glossary in D. L. Everett's Ph.D. thesis includes a list of color words (page 346), Everett (2006) now claims that the items listed in this glossary are not in fact words but descriptive phrases, based on his subsequent additional twenty years of field research.
s are ti "I", gíxai [níʔàì] "you (singular)", hi "(s)he, they". These can be serially combined: ti gíxai or ti hi to mean "we" (inclusive and exclusive
), and gíxai hi to mean "you (plural)". There are several other pronouns reported, such as 'she', 'it' (animal), 'it' (aquatic animal), and 'it' (inanimate), but these may actually be nouns. 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:
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:
there" uses just two words; the copula is a suffix on "paca":
Pirahã also uses suffixes which communicate evidentiality
, a category which English grammar lacks. One such suffix, -xáagahá, means that the speaker actually observed the event in question:
(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 aspect
s: 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'.
According to Sheldon (1988), the Pirahã verb has eight main suffix-slots, and a few sub-slots:
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-a¹ → ai³ta¹bii³ga¹ "he is still sleeping".
Also an epenthetic
vowel gets inserted between two suffixes if necessary to avoid a consonant-cluster; the vowel is either i³ (before or after s, p, or t) or a³ (other cases), e.g., o³ga³i¹ so³g-sa³i¹ → o³ga³i¹ 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-a¹ → si³ba¹bo³ga¹ "he caused the arrow to wound it".
For further details, see Sheldon's 1988 paper.
within another, the embedded clause is turned into a noun with the -sai suffix seen above:
The examples of embedding were limited to one level of depth, so that to say "He really knows how to talk about making arrows", you would need to use more than one sentence.
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 only a finite number of different possible sentences in Pirahã with any given vocabulary, as there is a finite number of chess moves.
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.
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. Noam 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.
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 doctoral thesis to refute his knowledge and conclusions after a further twenty-nine years of research.
Everett's observation that the language does not allow recursion has also been vigorously disputed by other linguists, 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). 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. 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".
claims that there is a relationship between the language a person speaks and how that person understands the world. The conclusions about the significance of Pirahã numeracy and the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis 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.
Being concerned that, because of this cultural gap, they were being cheated in trade
, the Pirahã people asked Daniel Everett, a linguist who was working with them, 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.
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. 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.
. The anthropologist
Marco Antonio 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
." In recent work, Jeanette Sakel of the University of Manchester
is studying the use of Portuguese by Pirahã speakers. 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). 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.
Language
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
spoken by the Pirahã
Pirahã people
The Pirahã people are an indigenous hunter-gatherer tribe of Amazon natives, a subgroup of the Mura, who mainly live on the banks of the Maici River in Brazil's Amazonas state, in the territory on Humaitá and Manicoré municipality....
. The Pirahã are an indigenous people of Amazonas, Brazil
Brazil
Brazil , officially the Federative Republic of Brazil , is the largest country in South America. It is the world's fifth largest country, both by geographical area and by population with over 192 million people...
, living along the Maici River
Maici River
Maici River is a river of Amazonas state in north-western Brazil.-References:*...
, a tributary of the Amazon
Amazon River
The Amazon of South America is the second longest river in the world and by far the largest by waterflow with an average discharge greater than the next seven largest rivers combined...
.
Pirahã is believed to be the only surviving member of the Mura
Muran languages
Muran is a small language family of Amazonas, Brazil.-Family division:Muran consists of 4 languages:# Mura †# Pirahã # Bohurá †# Yahahí †...
language family, all other members having become extinct in the last few centuries. It is therefore a language isolate
Language isolate
A language isolate, in the absolute sense, is a natural language with no demonstrable genealogical relationship with other languages; that is, one that has not been demonstrated to descend from an ancestor common with any other language. They are in effect language families consisting of a single...
, without any known connection to other living languages. It is estimated to have between 250 and 380 speakers. 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; for example, that it provides evidence for the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis
Sapir–Whorf hypothesis
The principle of linguistic relativity holds that the structure of a language affects the ways in which its speakers are able to conceptualize their world, i.e. their world view...
. The controversy is compounded by the sheer difficulty of learning the language; the number of linguists with field experience in Pirahã is very small.
Recent controversy
Daniel EverettDaniel Everett
Daniel Leonard Everett is a U.S. author and academic best known for his study of the Amazon Basin's Pirahã people and their language....
, 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 phonemePhonemeIn a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
inventories of any known language and a correspondingly high degree of allophonicAllophoneIn phonology, an allophone is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds used to pronounce a single phoneme. For example, and are allophones for the phoneme in the English language...
variation, including two very rare sounds, [ɺ͡ɺ̼] and [t͡ʙ̥]. - An extremely limited clauseClauseIn grammar, a clause is the smallest grammatical unit that can express a complete proposition. In some languages it may be a pair or group of words that consists of a subject and a predicate, although in other languages in certain clauses the subject may not appear explicitly as a noun phrase,...
structure, not allowing for nested recursive sentences like "Mary said that John thought that Henry was fired". - No abstract colorColorColor or colour is the visual perceptual property corresponding in humans to the categories called red, green, blue and others. Color derives from the spectrum of light interacting in the eye with the spectral sensitivities of the light receptors...
words other than terms for light and dark (though this is disputed in commentaries by Paul KayPaul KayPaul Kay is an emeritus professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, United States. He joined the University in 1966 as a member of the Department of Anthropology, transferring to the Department of Linguistics in 1982 and now working at the International Computer Science...
and others on Everett (2005)). - The entire set of personal pronounPersonal pronounPersonal pronouns are pronouns used as substitutes for proper or common nouns. All known languages contain personal pronouns.- English personal pronouns :English in common use today has seven personal pronouns:*first-person singular...
s appears to have been borrowed from NheengatuNheengatuThe Nheengatu language , often spelled Nhengatu, is an Amerindian language of a Tupi–Guarani family. It is also known by the Portuguese names língua geral da Amazônia and língua geral amazônica, both meaning "Amazonian General Language," or even by the Latin lingua brasilica...
, a Tupi-based lingua francaLingua francaA lingua franca is a language systematically used to make communication possible between people not sharing a mother tongue, in particular when it is a third language, distinct from both mother tongues.-Characteristics:"Lingua franca" is a functionally defined term, independent of the linguistic...
. Although there is no documentation of a prior stage of Pirahã, the close resemblance of the Pirahã pronouns to those of NheengatuNheengatuThe Nheengatu language , often spelled Nhengatu, is an Amerindian language of a Tupi–Guarani family. It is also known by the Portuguese names língua geral da Amazônia and língua geral amazônica, both meaning "Amazonian General Language," or even by the Latin lingua brasilica...
makes this hypothesis plausible. - Pirahã can be whistledWhistled languageWhistled languages use whistling to emulate speech and facilitate communication. A whistled language is a system of whistled communication which allows fluent whistlers to transmit and comprehend a potentially unlimited number of messages over long distances...
, hummed, or encoded in musicMusicMusic is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...
. In fact, Keren EverettKeren EverettKeren Madora Everett is an American-born linguist and Christian missionary.Keren Everett has spent many years in the Amazon studying the Pirahã tribe and their language. Her former husband Daniel Everett, whom she married in 1969, is better-known as an authority on the language, but he...
believes that current research on the language misses much of its meaning by paying little attention to the language's prosodyProsody (linguistics)In linguistics, prosody is the rhythm, stress, and intonation of speech. Prosody may reflect various features of the speaker or the utterance: the emotional state of the speaker; the form of the utterance ; the presence of irony or sarcasm; emphasis, contrast, and focus; or other elements of...
. 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.
Everett claims that the absence of recursion, if real, falsifies the basic assumption of modern Chomskian
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...
linguistics
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
. This claim is contested by many linguists, who claim that recursion has been observed in Pirahã by 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 Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...
himself, argue that even if Pirahã lacked recursion, that would have no implications for Chomskian linguistics.
Phonology
The Pirahã language is one of the phonologicallyPhonology
Phonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...
simplest languages known, comparable to Rotokas
Rotokas language
Rotokas is an East Papuan language spoken by some 4000 people in Bougainville, an island to the east of New Guinea, part of Papua New Guinea. There are at least three dialects of the language: Central Rotokas , Aita Rotokas, and Pipipaia...
(New Guinea
New Guinea
New Guinea is the world's second largest island, after Greenland, covering a land area of 786,000 km2. Located in the southwest Pacific Ocean, it lies geographically to the east of the Malay Archipelago, with which it is sometimes included as part of a greater Indo-Australian Archipelago...
) and Hawaiian
Hawaiian phonology
This article is a linguistic description of the phonological system of Hawaiian based on documented experiences of the people who developed the Hawaiian alphabet during the 1820s and scholarly research on the Hawaiian language conducted by lexicographers and linguists from 1949 to present.Hawaiian...
. There is a claim that Pirahã has as few as ten phonemes, one fewer than Rotokas, but this requires analysing [k] as an underlying
Underlying representation
In some models of phonology as well as morphophonology, the underlying representation or underlying form of a word or morpheme is the abstract form the word or morpheme is postulated to have before any phonological rules have applied to it. If more rules apply to the same form, they can apply...
/hi/. Although such a phenomenon is odd cross-linguistically, Ian Maddieson
Ian Maddieson
Ian Maddieson is a linguist at UC Berkeley, an Adjunct Professor Emeritus at the University of New Mexico, Vice-President of the International Phonetic Association, and Secretary of the Association for Laboratory Phonology...
has found in researching Pirahã data that /k/ does indeed exhibit an unusual distribution in the language.
The 'ten phoneme' claim also does not consider the tone
Tone (linguistics)
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called...
s of Pirahã, at least two of which are phonemic (marked by an acute accent
Acute accent
The acute accent is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts.-Apex:An early precursor of the acute accent was the apex, used in Latin inscriptions to mark long vowels.-Greek:...
and either unmarked or marked by a grave accent
Grave accent
The grave accent is a diacritical mark used in written Breton, Catalan, Corsican, Dutch, French, Greek , Italian, Mohawk, Norwegian, Occitan, Portuguese, Scottish Gaelic, Vietnamese, Welsh, Romansh, and other languages.-Greek:The grave accent was first used in the polytonic orthography of Ancient...
in 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
| Front Front vowel A front vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a front vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far in front as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Front vowels are sometimes also... |
Back Back vowel A back vowel is a type of vowel sound used in spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a back vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far back as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant. Back vowels are sometimes also called dark... |
|
|---|---|---|
| Close Close vowel A close vowel is a type of vowel sound used in many spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a close vowel is that the tongue is positioned as close as possible to the roof of the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant.This term is prescribed by the... |
i | |
| Mid Mid vowel A mid vowel is a vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned mid-way between an open vowel and a close vowel... |
o | |
| Open Open vowel An open vowel is defined as a vowel sound in which the tongue is positioned as far as possible from the roof of the mouth. Open vowels are sometimes also called low vowels in reference to the low position of the tongue... |
a |
Consonants
The segmental phonemes are:| Bilabial Bilabial consonant In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a consonant articulated with both lips. The bilabial consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:... |
Alveolar Alveolar consonant Alveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli of the superior teeth... |
Velar Velar consonant Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum).... |
Glottal Glottal consonant Glottal consonants, also called laryngeal consonants, are consonants articulated with the glottis. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the so-called fricative, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have; in fact, some do not consider... |
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stop Stop consonant In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or an oral stop, is a stop consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be done with the tongue , lips , and &... |
Voiceless | p | t | (k) | ʔ (written "x") |
| Voiced | b | ɡ | |||
| Fricative Fricative consonant Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate, in the case of German , the final consonant of Bach; or... |
Voiceless | s | h |
[k] has been claimed to be an allophone
Allophone
In phonology, an allophone is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds used to pronounce a single phoneme. For example, and are allophones for the phoneme in the English language...
of the sequence /hi/. Women sometimes substitute /h/ for /s/.
| Phoneme Phoneme In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances.... |
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] | xopóogií “inga Inga Inga is a genus of small tropical, tough-leaved, nitrogen-fixing trees and shrubs, subfamily Mimosoideae. Ingas leaves are pinnate, and flowers are generally white... (fruit)” |
| [n] initially | gáatahaí “can (noun)” | |
| [*] (see below) | toogixi “hoe” | |
| /s/ | [s] | sahaxai “should not” |
| [ʃ] before /i/ | xísiisí “fat (noun)” | |
| /h/ | [h] | xáapahai “bird arrow” |
The number of phonemes is 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. (English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
, by comparison, has thirty to forty-five
English phonology
English phonology is the study of the sound system of the English language. Like many languages, English has wide variation in pronunciation, both historically and from dialect to dialect...
, depending on dialect.) However, many of these sounds show a great deal of allophonic
Allophone
In phonology, an allophone is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds used to pronounce a single phoneme. For example, and are allophones for the phoneme in the English language...
variation. For instance, vowels are nasalized after the glottal consonants
Rhinoglottophilia
In linguistics, rhinoglottophilia refers to the connection between laryngeal and nasal articulations. The term was coined by James A. Matisoff in 1975....
/h/ and /ʔ/ (written h and x). Also,
[b, ʙ, m]: the nasal [m] after a pause, the trill [ʙ] before /o/.
[ɡ, n, ɺ͡ɺ̼]: the nasal [n] after a pause (an apical alveolar nasal
Apical consonant
An apical consonant is a phone produced by obstructing the air passage with the apex of the tongue . This contrasts with laminal consonants, which are produced by creating an obstruction with the blade of the tongue .This is not a very common distinction, and typically applied only to fricatives...
); [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, h]: in women's speech, /s/ occurs as [h] before [i], and "sometimes" elsewhere.
[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
Free variation
Free variation in linguistics is the phenomenon of two sounds or forms appearing in the same environment without a change in meaning and without being considered incorrect by native speakers...
with [kʷa] and [ka], at least in some words.
Because of its variation, Everett states that /k/ is not a stable phoneme. By analysing it as /hi/, he is able to theoretically reduce the number of consonants to seven.
Pirahã is sometimes said to be one of the few languages without nasal
Nasal consonant
A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :...
s. However, an alternate analysis is possible. By analysing the [ɡ] as /n/ and the [k] as /hi/, it could also be claimed to be one of the very few languages without velar
Velar consonant
Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum)....
s:
| Bilabial Bilabial consonant In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a consonant articulated with both lips. The bilabial consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:... |
Alveolar Alveolar consonant Alveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the alveoli of the superior teeth... |
Glottal Glottal consonant Glottal consonants, also called laryngeal consonants, are consonants articulated with the glottis. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the so-called fricative, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have; in fact, some do not consider... |
|
|---|---|---|---|
| Stop Stop consonant In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or an oral stop, is a stop consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be done with the tongue , lips , and &... |
p | t | ʔ |
| Nasal Nasal consonant A nasal consonant is a type of consonant produced with a lowered velum in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. Examples of nasal consonants in English are and , in words such as nose and mouth.- Definition :... |
m | n | |
| Fricative Fricative consonant Fricatives are consonants produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate, in the case of German , the final consonant of Bach; or... |
s | h |
The bilabially trilled affricate
In 2004, Everett discovered that the language uses a voiceless dental bilabially trilled affricate, [t͡ʙ̥]. He conjectures that the Pirahã had not used that phone in his presence before because they were ridiculed whenever non-Pirahã heard the sound. The occurrence of [t͡ʙ̥] in Pirahã is all the more remarkable considering that the only other languages known to use it are the unrelated Chapacura-Wanham languagesChapacura-Wanham languages
The Chapacuran languages are a nearly extinct Native American language family of South America. There are three living Chapacuran languages, which are spoken in the southeastern Amazon Basin of Brazil and Bolivia. The languages in the family are classified into the Madeira and Guapore groups...
Oro Win
Oro Win language
Oro Win is a moribund Chapacuran language spoken along the upper stretches of the Pacaás Novos River in Brazil.Oro Win is one of only five languages known to make use of a voiceless dental bilabially trilled affricate, .- Literature :...
and Wari’
Wari’ language
The Wari’ language is the sole remaining vibrant language of the Chapacuran language family of the Brazilian–Bolivian border region of the Amazon...
, spoken some 500 km west of the Pirahã area. Oro Win too is a nearly extinct language (surviving only as the second language of a dozen or so members of the Wari’ tribe) which was discovered by Everett in 1994.
Lexicon
Pirahã has a few loan words, mainly from PortuguesePortuguese language
Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...
. Pirahã "kóópo" ("cup") is from the Portuguese word "copo", and "bikagogia" ("business") comes from Portuguese "mercadoria" ("merchandise").
Kinship terms
Everett (2005) claims that the Pirahã culture has the simplest known kinshipKinship
Kinship is a relationship between any entities that share a genealogical origin, through either biological, cultural, or historical descent. And descent groups, lineages, etc. are treated in their own subsections....
system of any human culture. A single word, baíxi , is used for both mother and father (like English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
"parent" although Pirahã has no alternative), and they appear not to keep track of relationships any more distant than biological sibling
Sibling
Siblings are people who share at least one parent. A male sibling is called a brother; and a female sibling is called a sister. In most societies throughout the world, siblings usually grow up together and spend a good deal of their childhood socializing with one another...
s.
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 claimed 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 batteries 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 battery, hoí for two batteries, and a mixture of the second word and 'many' for more than two batteries. The second experiment, however, started with ten batteries on the table, and batteries were subtracted one at a time. In this experiment, one speaker used hói (the word previously supposed to mean 'one') when there were six batteries left, and all four speakers used that word consistently when there were as many as three batteries 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
Grammatical number
In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions ....
and plural
Plural
In linguistics, plurality or [a] plural is a concept of quantity representing a value of more-than-one. Typically applied to nouns, a plural word or marker is used to distinguish a value other than the default quantity of a noun, which is typically one...
, even in pronouns.
Color terms
There is also a claim that Pirahã lacks any colorColor
Color or colour is the visual perceptual property corresponding in humans to the categories called red, green, blue and others. Color derives from the spectrum of light interacting in the eye with the spectral sensitivities of the light receptors...
terminology, being one of the few cultures (mostly in the Amazon basin and New Guinea) that only have specific words for light and dark. Although the Pirahã glossary in D. L. Everett's Ph.D. thesis includes a list of color words (page 346), Everett (2006) now claims that the items listed in this glossary are not in fact words but descriptive phrases, based on his subsequent additional twenty years of field research.
Pronouns
The basic Pirahã personal pronounPronoun
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun is a pro-form that substitutes for a noun , such as, in English, the words it and he...
s are ti "I", gíxai [níʔàì] "you (singular)", hi "(s)he, they". These can be serially combined: ti gíxai or ti hi to mean "we" (inclusive and exclusive
Clusivity
In linguistics, clusivity is a distinction between inclusive and exclusive first-person pronouns and verbal morphology, also called inclusive "we" and exclusive "we"...
), and gíxai hi to mean "you (plural)". There are several other pronouns reported, such as 'she', 'it' (animal), 'it' (aquatic animal), and 'it' (inanimate), but these may actually be nouns. 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:
- ti³ "I"
- gi¹xai³ "you" (sing.)
- hi³ "he" (human)
- i³ "she" (human)
- i¹k "it", "they" (animated non-human non-aquatic)
- si³ "it", "they" (animated non-human aquatic)
- a³ "it", "they" (non-animated)
- 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:
| paitá | hi | xitóhoi | |
| Paita | s/he | testicles |
- "Paita's testicles"
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 pacaPaca
The Lowland Paca , also known as the Spotted Paca, is a large rodent found in tropical and sub-tropical America, from East-Central Mexico to Northern Argentina...
there" uses just two words; the copula is a suffix on "paca":
| káixihíxao-xaagá | gáihí | |
| paca-exists | there |
- "There's a paca there"
Pirahã also uses suffixes which communicate evidentiality
Evidentiality
In linguistics, evidentiality is, broadly, the indication of the nature of evidence for a given statement; that is, whether evidence exists for the statement and/or what kind of evidence exists. An evidential is the particular grammatical element that indicates evidentiality...
, a category which English grammar lacks. One such suffix, -xáagahá, means that the speaker actually observed the event in question:
| hoagaxóai | hi | páxai | kaopápi-sai-xáagahá | |
| Hoaga'oai | s/he | [a fish] | catch-ing- (I saw it) |
- "I saw Hoaga'oai catching a pa'ai fish"
(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 aspect
Aspect
Aspect may be:*Aspect , a feature that is linked to many parts of a program, but which is not necessarily the primary function of the program...
s: perfective (completed) vs. imperfective (uncompleted), telic
Telicity
In linguistics, telicity is the property of a verb or verb phrase that presents an action or event as being complete in some sense...
(reaching a goal) vs. atelic, continuing, repeated
Frequentative
In grammar, a frequentative form of a word is one which indicates repeated action. The frequentative form can be considered a separate, but not completely independent word, called a frequentative...
, and commencing. However, despite this complexity, there appears to be little distinction of transitivity
Transitivity (grammatical category)
In linguistics, transitivity is a property of verbs that relates to whether a verb can take direct objects and how many such objects a verb can take...
. For example, the same verb, xobai, can mean either 'look' or 'see', and xoab can mean either 'die' or 'kill'.
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
- Slot C1:
- positive/optative a³a¹ti³
- negative/indicative hia³b + C2
- positive/indicative Ø + C2
- Slot C2:
- declarative a¹
- 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 C2:
- negative/optative sa³i¹ + C1
- 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
- Slot H1:
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-a¹ → ai³ta¹bii³ga¹ "he is still sleeping".
Also an epenthetic
Epenthesis
In phonology, epenthesis is the addition of one or more sounds to a word, especially to the interior of a word. Epenthesis may be divided into two types: excrescence, for the addition of a consonant, and anaptyxis for the addition of a vowel....
vowel gets inserted between two suffixes if necessary to avoid a consonant-cluster; the vowel is either i³ (before or after s, p, or t) or a³ (other cases), e.g., o³ga³i¹ so³g-sa³i¹ → o³ga³i¹ 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-a¹ → si³ba¹bo³ga¹ "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 clauseClause
In grammar, a clause is the smallest grammatical unit that can express a complete proposition. In some languages it may be a pair or group of words that consists of a subject and a predicate, although in other languages in certain clauses the subject may not appear explicitly as a noun phrase,...
within another, the embedded clause is turned into a noun with the -sai suffix seen above:
| 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 | 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", you would need to use more than one sentence.
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 only a finite number of different possible sentences in Pirahã with any given vocabulary, as there is a finite number of chess moves.
Everett has also recently reinterpreted even the limited form of embedding in the example above as parataxis
Parataxis
Parataxis is a literary technique, in writing or speaking, that favors short, simple sentences, with the use of coordinating rather than subordinating conjunctions...
. 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.
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
Universal grammar
Universal grammar is a theory in linguistics that suggests that there are properties that all possible natural human languages have.Usually credited to Noam Chomsky, the theory suggests that some rules of grammar are hard-wired into the brain, and manifest themselves without being taught...
—on the grounds that if these proposals are correct, all languages should show evidence of recursive (and similar) grammatical structures. Noam Chomsky
Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and...
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.
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 doctoral thesis to refute his knowledge and conclusions after a further twenty-nine years of research.
Everett's observation that the language does not allow recursion has also been vigorously disputed by other linguists, 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). 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. 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".
Pirahã and the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis
The Sapir–Whorf hypothesisSapir–Whorf hypothesis
The principle of linguistic relativity holds that the structure of a language affects the ways in which its speakers are able to conceptualize their world, i.e. their world view...
claims that there is a relationship between the language a person speaks and how that person understands the world. The conclusions about the significance of Pirahã numeracy and the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis 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)
Being concerned that, because of this cultural gap, they were being cheated in trade
Trade
Trade is the transfer of ownership of goods and services from one person or entity to another. Trade is sometimes loosely called commerce or financial transaction or barter. A network that allows trade is called a market. The original form of trade was barter, the direct exchange of goods and...
, the Pirahã people asked Daniel Everett, a linguist who was working with them, to teach them basic numeracy
Numeracy
Numeracy is the ability to reason with numbers and other mathematical concepts. A numerically literate person can manage and respond to the mathematical demands of life...
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.
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. 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.
Knowledge of other languages
Everett, who worked with Pirahã for thirty years, states that most of the remaining Pirahã speakers are monolingual, knowing only a few words of PortuguesePortuguese language
Portuguese is a Romance language that arose in the medieval Kingdom of Galicia, nowadays Galicia and Northern Portugal. The southern part of the Kingdom of Galicia became independent as the County of Portugal in 1095...
. The anthropologist
Anthropology
Anthropology is the study of humanity. It has origins in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences. The term "anthropology" is from the Greek anthrōpos , "man", understood to mean mankind or humanity, and -logia , "discourse" or "study", and was first used in 1501 by German...
Marco Antonio 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
Língua Geral
Língua Geral is the name of two distinct linguae francae spoken in Brazil, the língua geral paulista , now extinct; and the língua geral amazônica , whose modern descendant is Nheengatu....
known as Nheengatu
Nheengatu
The Nheengatu language , often spelled Nhengatu, is an Amerindian language of a Tupi–Guarani family. It is also known by the Portuguese names língua geral da Amazônia and língua geral amazônica, both meaning "Amazonian General Language," or even by the Latin lingua brasilica...
." In recent work, Jeanette Sakel of the University of Manchester
University of Manchester
The University of Manchester is a public research university located in Manchester, United Kingdom. It is a "red brick" university and a member of the Russell Group of research-intensive British universities and the N8 Group...
is studying the use of Portuguese by Pirahã speakers. 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). 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
Pidgin
A pidgin , or pidgin language, is a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common. It is most commonly employed in situations such as trade, or where both groups speak languages different from the language of the...
Portuguese of the Pirahã.
External links
- Piraha Alphabet (at Omniglot)
- Everett, Daniel. Home page
- Pirahã language - by Professor Marco Antonio Gonçalves (UFRJUniversidade Federal do Rio de JaneiroThe Federal University of Rio de Janeiro is one of the largest federal universities of Brazil, where public universities comprise the majority of the best and most qualified institutions...
) in Encyclopedia of Indigenous People in Brazil - SIL Ethnologue Report
- Pirahã Dictionary/ Dicionário Mura-Pirahã
- 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 Pirahã Tribe: Living without Numbers or Time — Spiegel
- New Yorker article 'The Interpreter' (abstract)
- Audio sample of sung Pirahã — 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 RobertsIan Roberts (linguist)Ian G. Roberts is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Downing College, Cambridge....
. - Daniel Everett: Endangered Languages and Lost Knowledge (video), presentation for the Rosetta ProjectRosetta ProjectThe Rosetta Project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to develop a contemporary version of the historic Rosetta Stone to last from 2000 to 12,000 AD; it is run by the Long Now Foundation. Its goal is a meaningful survey and near permanent archive of 1,500...
- Sample1 and Sample2 of Pirahã, spoken by native speakers.