Linguistics and Anthropology
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One only gets a tiny inkling from the linked article of what an awesomely cool culture the Pirahã are. Everett is one of the few people to have learned the language and spend years living with them. His book still just gives a small taste of it.
He went there to convert them to his religion, and they ended up converting him to no religion. (No offense to religion intended by me.) Not only are all their sentences three words long, but they follow what Everett calls the immediacy principle. They are generally only interested in what you have to say if you have seen it yourself or if you have heard it directly from someone who has. They are not interested in anything more remote than that.
They have no numbers, but they may have "a few" or "many". He tried to teach them to count, but as soon as one started to learn, they would take him out of Everett's class and replace him with someone else. They do not value any knowledge outside of their culture. Their word for any language other than their own is "crooked head".
They do not do any work that will take more than three days to bear fruit. They wanted him to give them a canoe, but they did not want him to teach them how to make one themselves.
They do not allow anyone to boss anyone else around. When he interfered with their alcohol supply at the request of the women, they planned on killing him. He foiled the attempt, and they were so impressed that he had learned their language well enough to understand it when he heard their planning, that they agreed not to kill him ever.
Etc.
Why language is not everything that Noam Chomsky said it is | Aeon Essays
I took on Noam Chomsky’s ideas about language and unleashed a decade of debate and ridicule. But is my argument wrong?
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@jinpa said in Linguistics and Anthropology:
They do not do any work that will take more than three days to bear fruit
In time they might even fully convert to the Great
.When he interfered with their alcohol supply ... they planned on killing him
Language aside, some things do transcend even cultures who have never met
Hold on...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirahã_people#Language said:
None of the markers encode features such as person, number, tense or gender
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@jinpa They don't need complex social structure, nor language concerned with distant future and distant past, when there is always enough food growing in their surroundings. But they couldn't live like that in places with significant seasons like Europe.
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in Linguistics and Anthropology:
None of the markers encode features such as person, number, tense or gender
Although, curiously, there is a tonal sound that only the men use.
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I was with Everett until the end of his essay. His conclusion seems like quite a jump:
Recursion is not the basis of human language. One language shows that. Language does not seem to be innate. (emphasis mine) There seems to be no narrow faculty of language nor any universal grammar. Language is ancient and emerges from general human intelligence, the need to build communities and cultures.
Of course, language is innate in that a large part of the brain is specialized for it. Maybe he meant something different than what the plain meaning of the sentence seems to be.
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@jinpa I may have misunderstood it, but I drew some parallels with what people deaf from birth have as the language they think in. Sign language, while built upon on the concepts of the languages around them, involves different parts of brain rather than just those commonly associated otherwise.
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@jinpa said in Linguistics and Anthropology:
I was with Everett until the end of his essay. His conclusion seems like quite a jump:
Recursion is not the basis of human language. One language shows that. Language does not seem to be innate. (emphasis mine) There seems to be no narrow faculty of language nor any universal grammar. Language is ancient and emerges from general human intelligence, the need to build communities and cultures.
Of course, language is innate in that a large part of the brain is specialized for it. Maybe he meant something different than what the plain meaning of the sentence seems to be.
I suspect that to really understand what he's talking about you'd need to be more familiar with Chomsky's theories. That stuff had a strong whiff of being linguistics jargon and probably shouldn't be interpreted as "plain language." He gave what seemed to me to be really brief thumbnail type sketches of the debate, which was appropriate for this, but not really enough to penetrate to where the real arguments were.
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@boomzilla I think it really needs to be interpreted in context what Chomsky specifically meant by that formulation.
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@Bulb well, yeah, that's basically what I was getting at.
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@boomzilla I mean, there is nothing that could be called “linguistics jargon”, just “Chomsky's jargon”.
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@Bulb eh, since everyone has followed his work, I'd say they're the same things, but whatever.
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@boomzilla I'm sure there is linguistics jargon that pre-dated Chomsky and/or was not coined by him. Maybe not relevant to the Chomsky-Everett dispute, though.
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@jinpa said in Linguistics and Anthropology:
I was with Everett until the end of his essay. His conclusion seems like quite a jump:
Recursion is not the basis of human language. One language shows that. Language does not seem to be innate. (emphasis mine) There seems to be no narrow faculty of language nor any universal grammar. Language is ancient and emerges from general human intelligence, the need to build communities and cultures.
Of course, language is innate in that a large part of the brain is specialized for it. Maybe he meant something different than what the plain meaning of the sentence seems to be.
I haven't read all of it (I remember it was posted some time ago so I won't re-read it), but it probably refers to this earlier part:
While that debate rages, however, its focal point has come to be how much, if any, of human grammar is innate.
While the ability to speak and learn a language is, of course, in some sense innate, I think the idea that any kind of universal grammer is innate is quite far fetched.
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@topspin said in Linguistics and Anthropology:
I think the idea that any kind of universal grammer is innate is quite far fetched.
You're looking at higher-order pattern matching, and that's something that the LLM people actually have right. There isn't a universal grammar, just ever higher and higher order patterns. It ought to be possible to work out what depth of pattern matching there really is, but we're not quite there yet (I've seen something similar for social relationships; religion tends to be predicated on having a particular depth of inference graph in that area). I suspect that very intelligent people may have an extra layer than average, at least some of the time.
Of course, it's also possible that the Pirahã have a mutation that discourages quite such deep inference. There's also the social aspects, and the interesting fact that that reinforces the development of brain structures; even if the adults don't have such a mutation, they still may find it very difficult to do complex inferential tasks. Nature and nurture are not cleanly separated in the brain at all!
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@dkf said in Linguistics and Anthropology:
Of course, it's also possible that the Pirahã have a mutation that discourages quite such deep inference.
Everett addresses the genetic possibility and does not believe. The gene pool has some outside influence. They do have some contact with Brazilian outsiders. The Pirahã have few taboos (or at least different ones) and the women sometimes do rent their bodies to outsiders. (I don't offhand know if it's for money or goods. But since they can't count, Pirahã are liable to be taken advantage of in business dealings with outsiders.)
But more significantly, some Pirahã children have left the tribe before learning Pirahã and been raised by outsiders . They have no problem learning Portuguese and recursion and counting, etc.
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@jinpa said in Linguistics and Anthropology:
But since they can't count, Pirahã are liable to be taken advantage of in business dealings with outsiders.
That is actually a very difficult question to answer. The two cultures have different evaluations for the exchanged goods, so it is not easy to compare them and say that one side came out ahead in a scenario like this.
If both sides give something away that they perceive of as low value and receive something that they perceive of as high value who cheated whom?
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@Dragoon said in Linguistics and Anthropology:
If both sides give something away that they perceive of as low value and receive something that they perceive of as high value who cheated whom?
Sometimes, both sides walk away from a trade thinking "haha, really pulled the wool over their eyes, the fools!" (or the equivalent in whatever language/culture they do their thinking in).
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@Dragoon said in Linguistics and Anthropology:
@jinpa said in Linguistics and Anthropology:
But since they can't count, Pirahã are liable to be taken advantage of in business dealings with outsiders.
That is actually a very difficult question to answer. The two cultures have different evaluations for the exchanged goods, so it is not easy to compare them and say that one side came out ahead in a scenario like this.
If both sides give something away that they perceive of as low value and receive something that they perceive of as high value who cheated whom?
If you ever get tired of the programming thing, there are some good opportunities in scamming old people.
