This is great!
It looks like the entire New Yorker article on the Pirahã tribe is posted online.
Now I won't have to keep losing and finding and re-losing and re-finding my copy of the April 16 issue.
Excellent.
“Crooked head” is the tribe’s term for any language that is not Pirahã, and it is a clear pejorative. The Pirahã consider all forms of human discourse other than their own to be laughably inferior, and they are unique among Amazonian peoples in remaining monolingual. They playfully tossed my name back and forth among themselves, altering it slightly with each reiteration, until it became an unrecognizable syllable. They never uttered it again, but instead gave me a lilting Pirahã name: Kaaxáoi, that of a Pirahã man, from a village downriver, whom they thought I resembled. “That’s completely consistent with my main thesis about the tribe,” Everett told me later. “They reject everything from outside their world. They just don’t want it, and it’s been that way since the day the Brazilians first found them in this jungle in the seventeen-hundreds.”
Temple Grandin has always said that the language of animals is music, and I think the Pirahã language may support her case.
Also, the Pirahã and their language, assuming Dan Everett is right, pull the rug out from under Chomsky, who has it coming. I say this because I view his paper on recursive language to be an egregious instance of moving the goalposts where animal cognition is concerned.
slide show
Researchers debate origin of language Harvard Gazette
The Return of Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch
JP VERSUS FHC+CHF VERSUS PJ VERSUS HCF (Language Log)
I'll reserve judgment until some other linguist researches them. Every time some paper has come out claiming that language x has no quantifiers, recursion, etc., it has turned out to be a farce. Every time. My skepticism is increased because this guy is an anthropologist, not a linguist (and please, no lectures on "anthropological linguistics"; my bachelor's degree is in anthropology, and so-called "anthropological linguists" have all the intellectual and academic honesty of used car salesmen).
ReplyDeleteDear rightwingprof,
ReplyDeleteYou might wish to read this reply to Everett, then:
http://ling.auf.net/lingBuzz/000411
Here is Everett's reply to the reply:
http://ling.auf.net/lingBuzz/000427
Click on the title at the top of the page to download the article.
Naturally I'm rooting for Everett, simply because I'd like to see Noam Chomsky take a spill - and that comes from my having 2 autistic kids, etc, etc.
ReplyDeleteI am a severely biased individual in this matter.
Nevertheless, if I had to bet, I'd bet rightwingprof is right -- and, furthermore, I'd bet there are animals with recursive language.
(I'm trying to remember now... is it prairie dogs who appear to have recursive forms of language???)
Also birds.
Birds are way smarter than Noam Chomsky.
I shouldn't be talking.
ReplyDeleteActually, I WILL talk!
ReplyDeleteI actively dislike universalist claims that HUMANS do X; no other creature does X; therefore HUMANS stand at the pinnacle of God's creation except we don't believe in God.
I vastly prefer real religion to its academic forms.
Also, many if not most of these formulations directly deny humanity to people with autism.
Temple has the funniest story about this.
She was took a college philosophy course in which the professor told students that animals aren't human because they don't think in words.
Temple doesn't think in words, either, (though she's come to think in pre-fab phrases, it seems)...
Temple said her reaction was, "If you have to think in words to be conscious I'm going to have to conclude that I'm not conscious."
I tried to nail down how, exactly, she has such a thought, which, obviously, occurs in words.
ReplyDeleteAND: I have now forgotten what she told me. (I can look it up.)
I'm pretty sure she didn't (and doesn't) instantly think to herself, in words, "I'm going to have to conclude.... "
But, as I say, I've forgotten exactly how she described the process to me for the moment.
In any case, her point holds true.
ReplyDeleteWhen I read absolutist statements and arguments, invariably I find that my two autistic kids have been Xed out of the "Person" box and, apparently, Xed into the animal box.
That is wrong on both counts: number one, my autistic kids are clearly human, and number two they would be severely flawed animals.
One of the painful aspects of having a very autistic child is the recognition that your family dog is more socially able than your child.
I don't say that to be hurtful, and I hope it's not.
It's a simple truth that our dog Surfer is more adept at reading the social cues given by other dogs and by people than Jimmy is.
Andrew could probably give Surfer a run for his money.
ReplyDeleteAndrew definitely beats Abby, the yellow Lab.
ReplyDeleteJimmy probably beats Abby.
I think I understand a bt better now why you are interested in this topic. But I think you do an injustice to Chomsky and to his kind of linguistics. Chomsky and his colleagues do not have the opinions that you attribute to them. No one I know in linguistics is in the business of giving value judgments about the faculty of language -- not about the relative worth of different human beings. nor about the comparative worth of human beings and other animals.
ReplyDeleteIf there is a particular morality to Chomskian linguistics (which I think there is), it goes in the exact opposite direction. I think you might want to learn a bit more about the field. It's not claiming what you think it is. And please, don't rely on the New Yorker for this information. The article they published was quite tendentious.