An interesting but rather odd book, drawing on long experience in the Amazonian jungle with the Pirahã, a very small people living on the banks of a tributary of the Amazon – a tributary which can be 40 feet deep in the rainy season. At the time Everett was there, they appeared to have numbered less than 500 people, scattered in a number of small villages – so it is hard to see how they are going to survive as a people, even supposing that was what they wanted. Odd in that we are given no clear narrative of how Everett spent the thirty or more years during which he was associated with the Pirahã, and we have to try and pick that up from a rather fragmented narrative, broken up by long stretches of material about the Pirahã language. With the reason for my having arrived at the book in the first place being that it is a very odd language.
But before language, just a few words about the thirty or more years. Everett starts out as a missionary from SIL (reference 3), this despite the fact that the Brazilians had forbidden missionary work among the tribes. A born again Christian with a lot of evangelical experience, topped up with training in linguistics. And he probably started out with Spanish rather than Portuguese. After a spell by himself in the deepest jungle, he takes his wife and young family there – and lived there for years. Eventually in the face of Pirahã refusal to take any serious interest in Jesus, he loses Jesus himself, and in consequence loses his family and his funding. At which point I lose the thread; perhaps that is when he became a university teacher.
I am doubtful about the wisdom of inflicting such a life on one’s young children. They were certainly doing something unusual and it was no doubt rewarding in its way. But it was scarcely much of a preparation for life back in the United States. After spending their formative years in a real jungle, how are they going to survive in the urban jungle? I have similar doubts about sending children to very small schools – like our Cornerstone School here in Epsom (reference 4) – or, worse still, home education. Unless, of course, there are special needs.
The language was built on a very small number of sounds, with one of those that they did have being for men only. By way of compensation, they made a lot of use of tone and stress, to the point that one could drop the sounds and hum the language. This was a form of communication used by nursing mothers and lovers. The men could also whistle it and both sexes went in for yelling it and singing it. Or they could use their sounds and speak it in the ordinary way of western folk.
There were no articles – words like ‘a’ and ‘the’ – and no quantifiers – words like ‘any’, ‘all’ and ‘most’. As far as could be ascertained there were no words for numbers and the Pirahã could not even count on their fingers and toes – leading them wide open to exploitation from the river traders to whom they sold jungle products – like Brazil nuts.
The sentences were simple, with a low limit on permitted complexity, and no subordinate clauses. So there had to be work arounds for sentences like ‘the man in the punt was smoking’.
On the other hand, verbs were very complicated with a number of sets of particles for tagging on the end. Particles which I assume were mostly, in English, accommodated by free standing particles. A different parceling up of the world of language into words than ours.
Everett makes a lot of the interaction between language and culture, taking time out to join in the Chomsky hunt – with it seeming to be open season for Chomsky bashing these days. Perhaps he is paying the price for having been such a huge force in linguistics in the second half of the last century. That aside, it seems to me that there is an interaction between language, culture and the inner world; the language one ends up with, for whatever reason, does shape one’s inner world. One’s inner world, in part, is a vision of the outer world seen through the lens of language. And one lens is not the same as another.
One aspect of this is that the Pirahã live very much in the present. They are not interested in stuff which cannot reported by someone who has seen it for themselves. Stories about someone who lived two thousand years ago being out of it altogether – although they do allow reports about conversation with spirits, deemed to be as real as you or I.
Language apart, the Pirahã appear to have been a happy people, with a lot of smiling and laughing. They did well on the various indices of happiness brandished by sociologists and anthropologists. On the other hand, there was a high rate of sudden death, not least in child birth. Some person-on-person violence, including some rape. Some drunkenness, when they got hold of drink. Don’t know about tobacco. Very little property of any sort. And while happy to take in some conveniences from the outside, like picture books, they showed no great interest, at that time, in joining the wide world, never mind the world wide web.
So, as I started out by saying, interesting if odd. Very pleased that I happened upon it.
PS: given that Everett used to be a professor at Illinois State University, I thought there might be a tie in with the Illinois flavoured funding of ‘The Key’, noticed at reference 2. Maybe in the minds of the Illinois arty folk, gaelic was another quaint language from deep in the jungle, worthy of a grant from the anthropology department. Digging a bit, I find that the Illinois Arts Council seems to be all about promoting the arts by the Illinois people for the Illinois people. Now the Dalkey Archive people do claim connections to two places in Illinois, Champaign and McLean, of which two the latter is only a village - and that is as close as I can get. No connection with the Amazon at all, after all.
Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Everett.
Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/the-paperkeepers-tale.html.
Reference 3: http://www.sil.org/. They look there like an outfit for studying small languages around the world, but Wikipedia says ‘SIL International (formerly known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics) is a U.S. based, worldwide, Christian non-profit organization, whose main purpose is to study, develop and document languages, especially those that are lesser-known, in order to expand linguistic knowledge, promote literacy, translate the Christian Bible into local languages, and aid minority language development’. Certainly Everett talks of them as a missionary outfit. Nevertheless, a centre of excellence in the matter of small languages. Maybe world class.
Reference 4: http://www.cornerstoneschool.org.uk/.
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