Pivo Pirahã indigenous people
Elements are not part of their vocabulary: they tried to learn to count up to 10 in Portuguese, but abandoned classes. Saying “small quantity” and “larger quantity” is sufficient in the Amazon tribe.
In the heart of the Amazon rainforest, there is an indigenous community whose language and culture leads experts to rethink ancient ideas about human cognition and language.
Os Pihãwhich inhabit small villages along the Maici River, in Brazil, speak a language that seems to have no words for exact numbers, nor terms for color – A very rare feature that has feeds the debate between linguists for decades.
With an estimated population of about 700 people, the Pirahã take a semi-omnical way of life, says the.
Your language has become known thanks to the linguist Daniel Everettmissionary who arrived in the Amazon in the late 1970s with the objective of translating the Bible and converting the Pirahã to Christianity – a mission he abandoned to devote himself to the study of the language and culture of this community of Brazil.
In his first studies, Everett suggested that the Pirahã used the words bald e high For “one” and “two”, differentiated by a slight tone in pronunciation.
However, in 2005, he himself reviewed this interpretation and argued that these terms did not indicate exact numbers, but relative quantities, as “Small quantity” e “Larger quantity”. There was still the term murderwhich refers to approximately “many”Or“to bring together”.
The Pirahã language does not include words for accurate numbers, nor quantifiers like “all”, “each”, “most” or “some”.
Attempts to teach numerical concepts to the pirahã failed. Everett and the family organized night classes for eight months in 1980 to help the village adults learn to count up to ten in Portuguese. Despite the initial enthusiasm, the Pirahã eventually abandoned classes.
This difficulty in understanding numbers was confirmed by experiences performed years later by Everett’s son, Caleb, also an anthropological linguist. In one of the tests, Pirahã adults were invited to align rubber balloons to correspond to the number of lines of line shown.
Although they were able to align small amounts, they failed when the numbers exceeded two or three.
The work of the former ministerist challenges Universal Grammar Theoryproposed by Noam Chomsky, who argues that all human beings are born with innate language capacity – a set of grammatical principles common to all languages.
According to this theory, linguistic diversity occurs within a universal picture inscribed in the human brain.
For Everett, the Pirahã language shows the opposite: culture, not biology, shapes language. In your opinion, the structure of language reflects the vision of the specific world of the Pirahã people and not a universal pattern. As he wrote in 2005, “Universal Grammar proposed by Chomsky must be revised.”
But Everett’s ideas were also contested, as he contested Chomsky. Critics admit that the former minor may have interpreted badly certain aspects of Pirahã grammar and that the evidence of the absence of quantity concepts are not conclusive.
