There is no easy way to categorize this story of a Christian missionary’s linguistic adventures in the Amazon forest. It’s a little as if Paul Theroux’s The Mosquito Coast had been rewritten by Steve Pinker, but only a little. In 1977, Daniel Everett took his young family to live with the Pirahas, a small and remote tribe in the Brazilian interior with one of the least understood languages in the world. Supported by a missionary organization with the slightly misleading title of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, his aim was to learn Piraha so that he could translate the Bible.
As no Piraha could read or write, or even understand the concept of written language, this might have seemed like an act of vainglorious folly. But Everett had other problems. Within months, his wife and daughter almost died of malaria. And one evening, drunk on a trader’s cheap booze, the tribe decided to kill Everett, who managed to talk his prospective killer into laying down his shotgun.
Then there was the language itself. Where did he begin? Piraha shares no root or vocabulary with any other known language. As no one among the Pirahas could speak any other language, Everett had to construct a painstaking system of trial and error. The job was made almost impossible by the fact that Piraha is a tonal language and many words appear to take an arbitrarily changing form.
Like a true missionary, however, Everett persisted over the course of several decades and gradually mastered the language. In the process he learned that the Piraha were not interested in the Bible, Christ or, indeed, any abstract philosophy or experience that they could not themselves witness. He also discovered that he no longer believed in God.
In many respects, Everett’s memoir conforms to the myth of the noble savage. At first, he is shocked by the realization that Piraha women are left to die in childbirth, unattended by loved ones. And he is horrified when a young motherless baby, whose life he desperately tries to save, is killed by her father. But he comes to see these events as part of a culture that renders the Piraha the happiest and most contented people he has ever encountered.
If that were the extent of the book, it would amount to an interesting, if rather formal, travelogue, another tale of a presumptuous Westerner finding enlightenment in the depths of primitive society. The difference here is that Everett, an academic linguist, also presents a radical challenge to Noam Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar, which has dominated linguistics for half a century.
It always seemed a little odd that someone with Chomsky’s belligerent ability to be wrong about almost everything in politics could be so right in another intellectual field. But the fact is that Chomsky saved linguistics from a behavioral ghetto. Noticing the complexity of human language skills, and the striking grammatical similarities that underpinned them, Chomsky proposed that the organizing principle of language — grammar — was not learned so much as encoded: humans were born, as it were, with a grammar gene.
But it only takes one black swan to falsify the proposition that swans are by definition white. And Piraha, according to Everett, is the linguistic black swan that does for Chomsky. Instead of saying, “The man, who was tall, came into the house,” Pirahas say, “The man came into the house. He was tall.” This is because Piraha language apparently lacks what is known as “recursion,” the process by which relative clauses are embedded in sentences to produce an infinite set of possibilities. It’s this fundamental trait, Chomsky says, that distinguishes human from animal communication.
The fact that Piraha has no recursion, Everett contends, means that there is no universal grammar. What matters about language, Everett argues, is that it’s cultural. We may all have the natural cognitive skills to derive meaning from language, but what determines the shape of the language, its basic architecture, is the surrounding culture.
It is not, he maintains, an
accident that Piraha lacks recursion. Rather, it’s a cultural imperative derived from what Everett terms the “immediacy of experience principle.” Pirahas have little interest in that which they cannot directly verify, thus they communicate through a sequence of simple declarative assertions, negating the need for embedded clauses.
It’s a fascinating thesis. The one obvious drawback is that it suffers from its own immediacy-of-experience principle. Everett is the primary interpreter and translator of Piraha and as there are only a few hundred speakers left, it’s unlikely any linguist will ever possess sufficient knowledge to challenge his conclusions. Nevertheless, his conviction should give linguists pause for thought. There’s only so much that can be deduced from the comfort of an academic’s office.
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