Any linguists familiar with the Pirahã tribe? Pretty interesting.
A Reporter at Large: The Interpreter : The New Yorker
 
From the above article:
Seriously, any comments on the Pirahã are welcome. Anybody think they might "undermine Chomsky"?
A Reporter at Large: The Interpreter : The New Yorker
 
From the above article:
"Inspired by Sapirs cultural approach to language, he hypothesized that the tribe embodies a living-in-the-present ethos so powerful that it has affected every aspect of the peoples lives. Committed to an existence in which only observable experience is real, the Pirahã do not think, or speak, in abstractionsand thus do not use color terms, quantifiers, numbers, or myths. Everett pointed to the word xibipío as a clue to how the Pirahã perceive reality solely according to what exists within the boundaries of their direct experiencewhich Everett defined as anything that they can see and hear, or that someone living has seen and heard. "When someone walks around a bend in the river, the Pirahã say that the person has not simply gone away but xibipíogone out of experience, " Everett said. "They use the same phrase when a candle flame flickers. The light goes in and out of experience. "
"To Everett, the Pirahãs unswerving dedication to empirical realityhe called it the "immediacy-of-experience principle"explained their resistance to Christianity, since the Pirahã had always reacted to stories about Christ by asking, "Have you met this man?" Told that Christ died two thousand years ago, the Pirahã would react much as they did to my using bug repellent. It explained their failure to build up food stocks, since this required planning for a future that did not yet exist; it explained the failure of the boys model airplanes to foster a tradition of sculpture-making, since the models expressed only the momentary burst of excitement that accompanied the sight of an actual plane. It explained the Pirahãs lack of original stories about how they came into being, since this was a conundrum buried in a past outside the experience of parents and grandparents."
Who else has an "unswerving dedication to empirical reality"? Sounds like philosophical naturalism. Hmm, I wonder where Richard Dawkins' family comes from? "To Everett, the Pirahãs unswerving dedication to empirical realityhe called it the "immediacy-of-experience principle"explained their resistance to Christianity, since the Pirahã had always reacted to stories about Christ by asking, "Have you met this man?" Told that Christ died two thousand years ago, the Pirahã would react much as they did to my using bug repellent. It explained their failure to build up food stocks, since this required planning for a future that did not yet exist; it explained the failure of the boys model airplanes to foster a tradition of sculpture-making, since the models expressed only the momentary burst of excitement that accompanied the sight of an actual plane. It explained the Pirahãs lack of original stories about how they came into being, since this was a conundrum buried in a past outside the experience of parents and grandparents."
Seriously, any comments on the Pirahã are welcome. Anybody think they might "undermine Chomsky"?