Pirahã people

The Pirahã people (pronounced [piɾaˈhã]) are an indigenous hunter-gatherer tribe of Amazon natives, who mainly live on the banks of the Maici River in Brazil. They currently number about 360, which is sharply reduced from the numbers recorded in previous decades, and the culture is in danger of extinction. The Pirahã people do not call themselves pirahãs but instead the Hi'aiti'ihi, roughly translated as "'the straight ones".

The Pirahã speak the Pirahã language. Members of the Pirahã can whistle their language, which is how its men communicate when hunting in the jungle.

Culture

• As far as the Pirahã have related to researchers, their culture is concerned solely with matters that fall within direct personal experience, and thus there is no history beyond living memory.
• The culture has the simplest known kinship system, not tracking relations any more distant than biological siblings.
• There appears to be no social hierarchy, the Pirahã have no leaders. Their social system can thus be labeled as anarchocommunism.
• Curiously, although not unprecedentedly, the language has no cardinal or ordinal numbers. Some researchers, such as Prof. Peter Gordon of Columbia University, claim that the Piraha are incapable of learning numeracy. His colleague, Prof. Daniel L. Everett, on the other hand, argues that the Pirahã are cognitively capable of counting; they simply choose not to do so.
• They barter with external traders but have resisted most external influences (such as encouragement to farm) retaining a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
• They have very little artwork. The artwork that is present, mostly necklaces and drawn stick-figures, is used primarily to ward off evil spirits.
• The Pirahã do not have Gods. They believe in spirits. These "spirits" can be jaguars, trees, or other visible, tangible things.
• The Pirahã take short naps of 15 minutes to two hours through the day and night, and rarely sleep through the night.
• They often go hungry, not for want of food, but from a desire to be tigisái (hard).

Language

Main article: Pirahã language

Anthropological linguist Daniel Everett, who wrote the first Pirahã grammar, claims that there are related pairs of curiosities in their language and culture.

• The language is claimed to have no relative clauses or grammatical recursion, but this is not clear. Should the language truly feature a lack of recursion, then it would be a counterexample to the theory proposed by Chomsky, Hauser and Fitch (2002) that recursion is a feature which all and only human languages must have.

• Its seven and eight consonant phonemes (feminine and masculine, respectively) and three vowel phonemes are the fewest known of any language.

• There is a disputed theory that the language has no color terminology. There are no unanalyzable root words for color; the color words recorded are all compounds like bi³i¹sai, "blood-like", which is not that uncommon.

• The language does not have words for precise numbers.

• It is suspected that the language's entire pronoun set, which is the simplest of any known language, was recently borrowed from one of the Tupí-Guaraní languages, and that prior to that the language may have had no pronouns whatsoever. Many linguists, however, find this claim questionable, noting that there is no historical-comparative evidence indicating the non-existence of pronouns in a previous period of the history of Pirahã. However, if there had been pronouns at an earlier stage of Pirahã, this would not affect Everett's claim of the significance of the system's simplicity today. It is true that there are few Tupi-Guarani loanwords in areas of the lexicon more susceptible to borrowing (such as nouns referring to cultural items, for instance), though there are some for different types of flora and fauna (which itself may indicate that the Pirahã did not originate in their current location). Thus while the idea that all Pirahã pronouns were borrowed is still only a hypothesis and would constitute an unusual case, it would not be unprecedented.

See also

• Indigenous people of Brazil
• Sapir–Whorf hypothesis

Further reading

• Gordon, Peter (2004). "Numerical cognition without words: Evidence from Amazonia". Science. 306 (5695): 496–9. doi:10.1126/science.1094492. PMID 15319490.
• Everett, Daniel (2005). "Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirahã: Another look at the design features of human language" (PDF). Current Anthropology. 46 (4): 621–46. doi:10.1086/431525.
• Nevins, Andrew (2009). "Pirahã exceptionality: A Reassessment"" (PDF). Language. 85 (2): 355–404. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Everett, Daniel (2009). "Pirahã Culture and Grammar: a Response to some criticisms" (PDF). Language. 85 (2): 405–442.
• Nevins, Andrew (2009). "Evidence and Argumentation: a Reply to Everett (2009)" (PDF). Language. 85 (3): 671–681. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Nevins, Andrew Ira, David Pesetsky, Cilene Rodrigues, "Pirahã Exceptionality: a Reassessment" (2007 version of 2009 article)
• Everett, Daniel "Cultural Constraints on Grammar in PIRAHÃ: A Reply to Nevins, Pesetsky, and Rodrigues (2007)" (reply to 2007 version of Nevins et al. article)
• Hauser, M. (2002). "The faculty of language: what is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?". Science. 298 (298): 1569–79. doi:10.1126/science.298.5598.1569. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Rafaela von Bredow (May 3, 2006). "Brazil's Pirahã Tribe: Living without Numbers or Time". Spiegel Online.
• Article appearing in "The Globe and Mail"
• Guardian article: What happens when you can't count past four?
• Language may shape human thought New Scientist article (19 August 2004)
• A people lost for words New Scientist article (18 March 2006)
• Life without numbers
• The Independent article (7 May 2006)
• The Interpreter in the New Yorker (16 April 2007); a lengthy article about the Pirahã and Daniel Everett's work with them
  • Slideshow accompanying the article (16 April 2007)]
• The Piraha challenge: an Amazonian tribe takes grammar to a strange place Science News, December 10, 2005
• Recursion and Human Thought: Why the Piraha don't have numbers

External links

• Indigenous Peoples in Brazil - Pirahã
• Documenting Endangered Languages: The View from the Brazilian Amazon PDF print of Everett (2006).
• Google map of the location where Daniel Everett lived with the Pirahã