# FROM: http://www.pitt.edu/utimes/issues/27/101394/16.html # Last edited on 2005-03-14 22:48:17 by stolfi [...] Everett also is writing a paper describing a heretofore undocumented grammatical sound that he heard in Brazil while working on his Wari grammar. In English, the sound is rendered as "tp~" and pronounced as the "t" consonant sound followed immediately by what linguists call a "bilabial trill," which sounds like a person releasing air between vibrating lips in imitation of a snorting horse -- or flatulence. "Phonetically, there are two sounds there but they are treated in the language as a single sound. That combination has never been treated as a single sound in any other documented language," Everett said. After hearing the sound for the first time from Wari speakers, Everett was stunned to hear it again weeks later from the Piraha tribesman who had been his main teacher of that language. "I have a videotape of this scene, and you can see the shock on my face when I heard it," Everett said, with a laugh. "I had never before heard this sound from the Piraha in the 17 years I had been working with them." Stranger still, Piraha and Wari are not related linguistically. Everett theorizes that the two languages share the "tp~" sound because, according to the Piraha, some Indians who spoke the now-extinct Tora language -- which is related to Wari -- intermarried with the Piraha. Why, then, didn't the Piraha pronounce the "tp~" sound in Everett's presence until recently? Probably because it sounds funny to Westerners, Everett said. "These Indians tend to get made fun of when they use certain sounds that are funny-sounding to us, so they substitute other sounds in their place when they're talking to Westerners. This is a socio-linguistically interesting phenomenon in itself," he said. [...] FROM: http://www.ascentofhumanity.com/book/2-07-The_Marvellous_Case_of_the_Piraha.html [...] They cannot even draw straight lines; as Everett continues from above, "In literacy classes, however, we were never able to train a Piraha to even draw a straight line without serious 'coaching' and they are never able to repeat the feat in subsequent trials without more coaching." This is highly significant, given that the straight line is itself an abstraction, being absent from nature, an abstraction, moreover, fraught with powerful cultural and psychological implications. At the most literal level, the Piraha do not engage in linear thinking. [...] FROM: http://www.pitt.edu/utimes/issues/29/030697/19.html [...] Recent research, Everett pointed out in his lecture, "Jungle Talk: Conversational Style in Amazonia," has shown that there are some very real advantages to lying even in animal communication. "Part of the purpose of communicating is to survive and one of the ways you survive is to give people bum steers so that you come out ahead," Everett said. "Whether you are a bee or a bird or a human, it turns out to be advantageous to do that." The people of the South American region of Amazonia have some very interesting ways of lying, according to Everett. The language of the Piraha, the group that Everett has worked with the most in his research in the region, has verbs that have "two to the 16th power possible verb forms." Included within the verb suffixes are things called "evidentials," according to Everett, which the speaker uses to support the subject and explain whether he or she saw it, overheard it or deduced it. Everett said such a system is great for lying because people can be made to think a certain way just by the inflection in the voice. "If you tell somebody what you saw and that's just part of the verb inflection," he explained, "then they will assume you saw it when you didn't." The grammar of a language is the "code," Everett said, and the tone the "channels of the code." Members of the Piraha actually can whistle their language, which is how its men communicate when hunting in the jungle. [...] FROM: http://www.manchester.ac.uk/press/newsarchive/title,3978,en.htm Tribe and tested theory (13 Oct, 2004) Professor Everett and his wife have lived with the Piraha for up to six years at a time [[WRONG!!]], and are the only two people in the world who speak their language. Piraha is the only language known without numbers or counting of any kind. FROM: http://www.languagehat.com/archives/001506.php The Piraha view language as a defining characteristic of group identity in a strong sense: you speak the language of your group . . . . Americans in their opinion are identified partially by their ability to speak other languages (since the only Americans they know are the only people they know that speak more than one language). Even so, it is difficult for them to grasp the fact that I can speak their language. They will often have conversations about me in front of me and then look astounded when I enter into the conversation --- even after all the years that I have worked there. When we go to villages that we haven't worked in much (i.e. other Piraha villages), they literally look at us with their mouths open in disbelief when we address them in Piraha. They eventually answer us, but the experience is clearly unsettling for them. (Everett, personal communication) It should not be surprising to learn that the Piraha also believe that they are incapable of ever speaking any language other than their own, and remain to this day a predominantly monolingual community. http://www.tc.edu/faculty/home.htm?facid=pg328 http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/rapidpdf/1094492v1?ijkey=RIIR9EHCfph2I&keytype=ref&siteid=sci ScienceExpress Report Numerical Cognition Without Words: Evidence from Amazonia Peter Gordon [...] matching tasks began with simple linear arrays of batteries. This progressed to clusters of nuts matched to the battery line, orthogonal matching of battery lines, matching of battery lines that were unevenly spaced, and copying lines on a drawing. In all of these matching experiments, participants responded with relatively good accuracy with up to 2 or 3 items, but performance deteriorated considerably beyond that up to 8 to 10 items. In the first simple linear matching task A, performance hovered around 75% up to the largest quantities. Matching tasks with greater cognitive demands required mental transposition of the sample array to the match array without benefit of tagging for numerical quantity. Performance dropped precipitously to 0% for the larger target set sizes in these tasks. One exception was task D with unevenly spaced objects. Although this was designed to be a difficult task, participants showed an anomalous superiority for large numerosities over small. Performance initially deteriorated with increased set size up to 6 items, then shot up to near perfect performance for set size 7 through 10. A likely interpretation of this result was that the uneven spacing for larger set sizes promoted recoding of arrays into smaller configurations of 2 or 3 items. This allowed participants to use a chunking strategy of treating each of the subgroups as a matching group. [...]