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Language: The Cultural Tool by Daniel Everett – review | Books | The Guardian - http://www.guardian.co.uk/books...
Language: The Cultural Tool by Daniel Everett – review | Books | The Guardian - http://www.guardian.co.uk/books...
1 decade ago
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"Native speakers of Pirahã, in the Amazon lowland jungle, have no words for left or right, they use the same term for blue and green, and their definitions of red, black and white turn out to be similes, rather than dedicated words."
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It is quite obvious that Everett's core assertion (to be true, I am not sure whether he asserts it directly or whether he wants us to draw that conclusion or whether the media want to interpret it like this), that speakers of Pirahã don't participate in a universal grammar or language acquisition device or language instinct, is just wrong. The argument against him, in Chomsky's words: " It can't be true. These people are genetically identical to all other humans with regard to language. They can learn Portuguese perfectly easily, just as Portuguese children do. So they have the same universal grammar the rest of us have. What Everett claims is that the resources of the language do not permit the use of the principles of universal grammar.
That's conceivable. You could imagine a language exactly like English except it doesn't have connectives like "and" that allow you to make longer expressions. An infant learning truncated English would have no idea about this: they would just pick it up as they would standard English. At some point, the child would discover the resources are so limited you can't say very much, but that doesn't say anything about universal grammar, or about language acquisition. Actually, I doubt very much that a language like that could exist." An interview with Chomsky can be found here: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://ff.im/T6m13"&... ;
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