Last week's (April 16th) New Yorker presented an article The Interpreter by John Colapinto (not online, abstract here, photo above by Martin Schoeller from this portfolio), describing the language and culture of the Amazonian Pirahã.
The
article reviews the research of ex-missionary and linguist Dan Everett
into the unique language of the Pirahã. The language nominally contains
eight consonants and three vowels, but words and conversations between
Pirahã who know each other well dispense with the consonants and vowels
entirely.
So, for example, when the Pirahã are introduced to
someone new, they talk among themselves and agree upon a name for the
newcomer, and then iteratively whittle that name down to a single
agreed-upon tone, stress and duration combination, one note.
In essence, then, they sing rather than speak, and their language has
more in common with music than with language. Or, to put it another
way, it has more in common with the language of birds and other animals
than with the dominant human languages of the planet, which are so
structurally similar to each other that, as Chomsky has put it, an
alien landing on the planet would have no doubt that all human
languages came from a single root. Chomsky has spent much of his life
writing the 'rules' to this language, and argues that the human brain
is 'hard wired' for it.
Not surprisingly, the discovery of a
language which does not appear to follow any of these rules has stirred
up a lot of controversy and denial. Yet a language based on the
principles of music seems entirely natural to me, especially for a
people who have lived for millennia in a rainforest replete with the
musical language of thousands of birds and other species. I suspect
that what is troubling the linguistic establishment most about
Everett's findings are these three things:
- The language lacks tenses, and therefore suggests that, like wild creatures, the Pirahã live in 'now time', not in the clock time that the rest of us live in. Life in now time does not need
tenses or terms related to clock time; in fact they would make no sense
to such people. The study of whale sounds indicates that whales, and
probably all non-human creatures, likewise'speak' in a prosodic
language based on tone, stress and duration (i.e. a musical language)
rather than a highly synthetic, syntactic one. We might well discover
that the 350 Pirahã, uniquely,
might have the capacity to understand and communicate with non-human
creatures in their own, related, language. What a remarkable, and
immensely threatening to the status quo, possibility! If they tell us
what the raven is really saying to us, what basis would we have to
argue with them?
- The language lacks taxonomy.
It has no terms for colours, numbers, or other absolute distinctions or
hierarchies. In Pirahã language, everything is relative, contextual. Something that we might call 'red', using that abstract construction, they would describe by comparing it to what it is like, right now,
in a variety of comparative contexts. The nuance of what aspect of
'likeness' they are referring to might be difficult for us to grasp,
but if this was your native language it would not be difficult. There
is a misconception that indigenous Arctic peoples have dozens of words for 'snow', when in fact these words describe practical, useful, necessary qualities of snow in a particular context. The distinction is not taxonomic, it is contextual and pragmatic.
This would suggest that language has no need for conceptual taxonomy, and hence complex language is possible
(and if so, I would say it is certain) among creatures who are less
skilled at (and who have no use for) abstract conception. This is also
a terribly threatening idea. It means that the way other creatures
communicate might be just as sophisticated if not more sophisticated
than our own clumsy, unmusical, unintuitive way. It means our human
communications capability is nothing special, and may in fact be
inferior. Rather than having developed uniquely 'sophisticated'
languages because we had the large brain for it, perhaps we developed
complicated, poor languages (or, if Chomsky is right, one complicated,
poor proto-language) because, like novices trying to work with
complicated machinery, we just couldn't handle our brains very well and
weren't able to come up with simpler, more effective languages. Perhaps
our dumb language is like the awkward, inefficient, digital,
complicated made-up machine language of clunky old mainframe computers,
while the Pirahãs' and other creatures' languages are like the music
from an iPod – natural, elegant, analog, intuitive, at once simple and
complex. - The Pirahã have no interest in our language or our culture.
Unlike cultures more closely akin to our own, the Pirahã are
uninterested in our artifacts or our knowledge. It has no use for them,
so why would they want to learn it? They don't need it. Everett
describes how the Pirahã laughed at a King King film shown to them, and
clearly understood it, but showed no interest in or grasp of its
cultural message. To them it was just pictures, slapstick. It meant nothing. We have nothing to teach these people, for all our study and learning and technology.
They tolerate us, but apparently (and I think understandably) see us as
an inferior, maladapted species. Repeated attempts to teach them
farming have been completely unsuccessful – why should they want to
give up a resilient life for one of great fragility? They have no
creation myth (to them, life has always been as it is now) and hence
they have no need for religion. Or for civilization.
I
sense that wild creatures, including those who visit my bird feeder
when it's convenient for them, feel the same way about us that the
Pirahã do. They feel sorry for us, perhaps the same way we feel sorry
for big, clumsy, maladapted King Kong, or the dinosaurs. We'll
put up with these big dumb creatures, but if they were to all disappear
suddenly once and for all, that would be just fine with us, too.
Perhaps their instincts, much more nuanced and attended to than ours,
have made them prophets. We just can't hear their warning.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
