Submission + - Tribe Upended our Understanding of Languages?
alberion writes: "The New Yorker brings an article about Dan Everett's work with the Piraha tribe in the Amazon that may change the way linguists define human languages. Not all linguists agree.
From the Article: "The Piraha, Everett wrote, have no numbers, no fixed color terms, no perfect tense, no deep memory, no tradition of art, and no common terms of quantification. His most explosive claim was that Piraha displays no evidence of recursion, the linguistic operation of embedding one phrase inside another. Noam Chomsky has argued that recursion is the cornerstone of a "universal grammar" shared by all languages.""
From the Article: "The Piraha, Everett wrote, have no numbers, no fixed color terms, no perfect tense, no deep memory, no tradition of art, and no common terms of quantification. His most explosive claim was that Piraha displays no evidence of recursion, the linguistic operation of embedding one phrase inside another. Noam Chomsky has argued that recursion is the cornerstone of a "universal grammar" shared by all languages.""