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Background
Background
In the 1970s, a man from the USA called Daniel Everett went to the Amazon to see a tribe called the Piraha in an attempt to convert them to Christianity. Eventually, by the mid-1980s they converted him to atheism.
A very surprising language
A very surprising language
Daniel Everett spent many decades working with the Piraha and studying their language.
He says that the Piraha language has many surprising features, including:
Pirahã can be whistled, hummed, or encoded in music.
No colour words other than terms for light and dark.
Piraha does not have any numbers - there are only words for ‘a few’, ‘some more’, and ‘many’.
Piraha does not really have any conjunctions: and, that, because, for, so, but, either, both. This really limits the kind of things that can be said in Piraha. They cannot embed clauses, so they can’t say things like, ‘Dave said that Mary thought he was great.’ They can only make such meanings using parataxis - that is putting the sentences next to each other: ‘Dave spoke. Mary spoke. Dave is great.’
Every Piraha verb must have a suffix that tells us how we know - You saw it, you heard it from someone who saw it, you deduced it. Dave spoke -I saw him. Dave ran -Ian (who saw him) told me.
The Immediacy of Experience Principle
The Immediacy of Experience Principle
According to Everett, what all these features have in common is what he calls the immediacy of experience principle: the Piraha cannot talk about anything which falls outside their own personal immediate experience. This means that they don’t worry about the past, or the future. They’re not afraid of death. The main moral rule of the Piraha is don’t tell other people what to do - why would you need to? Life is hard enough.
Discussion
Discussion
Go back to the description of your hopes and dreams that you wrote at the beginning of the class. Imagine that you were Piraha - amend your description until it could be translated into Piraha. You will need to remove:
Any references to colour or numbers.
Rewrite any sentences that use conjunctions.
You should delete any sentence
That you have not seen directly,
That you have heard from someone else who did see it, or
That you did not manage to deduce.
Tasks
Tasks
Explain some of the unusual features of the Piraha language
Why does this mean that they are such a happy people?
Would you like to live like the Piraha? Do you think that it would be possible to?
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