They've no myths, numbers or colours and few words for past or present - no wonder the Pirahã people defy our most cherished ideas about language
"How was your world created?" asks the young anthropologist in Portuguese. He awaits the translation into Pirahã. "The world is created," replies one of the assembled men in his own language. "Tell me how your god made all this?" the anthropologist presses on. "All things are made," comes the answer.
Sounds like a reasonable alternative to our Darwinism/creationism nonsense. I'm not going to pay for the article in order to read it, although it looks good, but I'm definitely intrigued by the whole idea. From The Globe and Mail:
They have no written language, and no collective memory going back more than two generations. They don't sleep for more than two hours at a time during the night or day[...] They communicate almost as much by singing, whistling and humming as by normal speech[...] They do not believe that outsiders understand their language even after they have just carried on conversations with them[...]
"Why they have been resistant to adopting Western number systems is beyond me," Ray Jackendoff of Brandeis University, a past president of the Linguistic Society of America, said in an interview.
The lack of ability of Pirahã men to learn algebra seems generally in line with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, although there's always a question of motivation in such artificial tests. The Economist says yea. Others probably don't, but I've put too much work into this already. Let me know if you happen across the actual article, and I'll link to it.
2 comments:
The piraha calls to mind two tribes mentioned by Joseph Chilton Pearce in the Epilogue of his latest: The Biology of Transcendence. Primitive, but perhaps wiser than we more developed tribes. They do not seem to have been exposed to the concepts of good and evil.
Of the Malaysian Senoi he wrote: "These people made up a society of benevolence and what we would call unconditional love, althouh I doubt that they had a word for the concept of love.....they lived with unquestioned acceptance of each other, without judgment or censure, in a natural and spontaneous manner that was simply the only response they knew" (p.256).
That also calls to mind the "little people" in George MacDonald's classic, Lilith.
The world is full of goodness (that's not all of course).
Huh. That's a beautiful idea, maybe- I think I need to sit with it for a while.
I wonder if there's a difference between living in love and valuing love? It seems like I could only value love if I knew it's opposite. I'm not sure if it would be better to not have a framework for knowing the difference, or to know the difference and knowingly choose love. That's the Garden story, I guess.
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