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Dont sleep there are snakes9/22/2023 Chomsky made his claim long before talk of recursion in saying that human languages were not finite. They agree with me that the language of the Pirahã not only lacks recursion but is what was considered to be an impossible human language: a finite language. But we actually have a new paper - several MIT brain and cognitive sciences faculty and students and me - in which they’ve spent the last three years rigorously going through the data testing my claims and are prepared now to come out and, in effect, say that I seem to be correct. Recursion is this crucial proponent of grammar proposed by Chomsky as what distinguishes the human communication system from all other communication systems. I claimed that their language didn’t have recursion - that’s been very controversial. So, I made the claim they don’t have numbers and they don’t even have the number one that’s now been tested by three separate teams in publications in Cognition, Cognitive Science, and Science. All the claims that I’ve made about the Pirahã have been subsequently tested. As I understand it, they don’t have numbers do they? Not least, presumably, because the Pirahã had such an unusual language. I’m very happy that I have had the experience in the Amazon that has affected my thought about the relationship between language and culture and the mind so profoundly. I had this crisis of conscience and eventually left the mission. But I realised that the relationship of trust I had built up with the people didn’t allow me to knowingly tell them things I didn’t believe as though I did believe them. For a number of years I was able to just do my linguistics because it was considered part of Bible translation and I even started and translated the Gospel of Mark. I had many encounters with snakes and spiders and anacondas and jaguars and all sorts of things.īut the upshot of all of that was that I was fascinated with how this people had constructed a way of life over time and spoke a language unrelated to any other known human language that was alive - is alive. At the same time, I was living for about eight years with the Pirahã people, hunting in the jungle, fishing, helping people make fields. I was commissioned as a missionary and generally they don’t want to support people that don’t believe in God. There was a lot of adventure and there was tremendous trauma in coming to the realisation that I was no longer a believer and what would that mean to my family, and my income. The way you describe it makes it sound very straightforward but I’ve read your book, Don’t Sleep There Are Snakes, and being chased by an anaconda can’t be a straightforward thing! So, I finished my PhD in linguistics and have worked as a professional academic linguist ever since. I went there in 1977 and, through the course of the next several years, found out that I was more interested in linguistics than I was in Bible translation. So then I went to Brazil as a missionary and they asked me, because I had done well on these linguistic courses, if I would be willing to take the assignment of this language called Pirahã that no one had been able to figure out and I said yes. I had never heard of linguistics and then it turned out that, in order to be a translator, I had to take more or less the equivalent of a master’s degree in linguistics. I got interested in language first of all because I wanted to be a Bible translator and I really didn’t know what that entailed. How did you get interested in studying language and its relation to thought? Foreign Policy & International Relations.
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