# The most obscure language in the world - Does Pirahã disprove UG?



## Divisionbell

Hi, I have stumbled upon this article, and thought that it would be good to share it with you, it's the least I can do for your patient help. It's about a tribe in Brazil, that uses a very strange language and how it affects their thinking. They are for example not able to understand concept of religion or even supplies! They have a really small amount of letters and tone is what changes the meaning of words. It's one of the best articles about languages I've ever read! The author also writes about psychology behind linguistics and things like that. Enjoy: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_colapinto


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## berndf

Very interesting article. Thank you for sharing it with us.

This is what I've been fearing too: _Everett...: “Noam Chomsky thinks of himself as Aristotle!” he declared. “He has dug a hole for linguistics that it will take decades for the discipline to climb out of!”_

Discussion is on.


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## Divisionbell

On the other hand, he clearly states, that Chomsky's work was important to him as a linguist. It reminds me of Edison, when he was asked if it didn't frustrate him when he hadn't had success with many attempts to invent a lightbulb: "I haven't found a way to invent a lightbulb, but I have found many ways how to not invent it."


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## LilianaB

Yes, it was very interesting, but I think many other languages do not use recurring forms, as far as I know. Native American languages may be similar, although probably not to such extremes.


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## Divisionbell

It reminds me a bit of Orwell and his newspeak. A language which doesn't allow people to think against the government.


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## Ghabi

Divisionbell said:


> They are for example not able to understand concept of religion ...


I doubt that Daniel L. Everett has said something to this effect. What he says, if I understand what he writes in his book correctly, is more like that the Abrahamic religions are irrelevent to the Pirahã. "_The immediacy of experience principle means that if you haven't experienced something directly, your stories about it are largely irrelevant. This renders them relatively impermeable to missionary efforts based on stories of the long-ago past that no one alive has witnessed. And this explains why they have resisted missionaries for so long. Creation myths are no match for this demand of evidence._" (Daniel L. Everett, _Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes_, Vintage, 2008, p.270)


> They have a really small amount of letters and tone is what changes the meaning of words.


These are not supposed to be "strange".


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## Divisionbell

". It was two years before he attempted to translate a Bible story; he chose the Prodigal Son from the Book of Luke. Heinrichs read his halting translation to a Pirahã male. “He kind of nodded and said, in his way, ‘That’s interesting,’ ” Heinrichs recalled. “But there was no spiritual understanding—it had no emotional impact. It was just a story.” "


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## berndf

Divisionbell said:


> On the other hand, he clearly states, that Chomsky's work was important to him as a linguist.


Granted. But the comparison to Aristotle fits in this respect too: Aristotle certainly was a great philosopher but the dogmatism of his views eventually became a major inhibiting factor to the advancement of sciences.

But to be fair: Failure to detect features in a language's grammar which are considered essential to UG suggests but does not _prove_ UG didn't exist: Cultural factor could not only create grammatical features but could also inhibit its development even if they were inborn.


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## LilianaB

They definitely could not experience other religions or feel touched by them: I think there is nothing about their spiritual world in that article. Everything in their culture seems to be based on immediate experience and is unique just for their own experience of reality.


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## Explorer41

A few bytheways...

1). Using words like "all", "one" looks not to be necessary to build, say, mathematics.
Let us wonder, what do words mean. When one says "human", s|he means an object, which bears all the properties of a human. Now, what is that object? Only context can define. It may be a specific human; it may be a generic human, whose only role is to bear properties. In the latter sense the word "human" is equivalent to the word "all humans"; its context may incline us to think so.
As for "one", it looks more difficult, how to eliminate a need in this word. Well, in some cases a context helps as well. I wonder if it can help always...
In maths, we refer to it using a quantifier of existence, right? So it looks we may do without the word "one". There are words "exist" and like, which imply the appropriate context. As well, we know that humans are one kind of animals, and Peggy is one kind of humans. We use it too - for choosing.
So, if we had a word for natural numbers and sums, we could say something like "the head number being odd, also the next number being odd, the sum is even", meaning "for each A, belonging to the set of odd numbers, is true that for each B, belonging to the set of odd numbers the sum of A and B is even" (imagine it in the quantor form), and I doubt which variant is more logical.
I'd say, "all" in English is a modifier of a noun, which affects the way of choosing objects expressed - much in the same way, "the" does. Say, Russian doesn't have the definite article; and Piraha doesn't have "all". What's then? We can as well choose objects by adding modifiers of less general kind - "an animal with two legs, speaking the language".

2). How to define numbers? We rarely think about it, because we learn them in childhood, and we forget quickly ourselves being childs. But now: we can define natural numbers as objects representing sets, a number being a cardinality of a set; I believe, the notion of numbers in our mind has exactly this origin. We get a next number by adding an additional object to the set; in this very way we handle adding numbers together and subtracting numbers (do you remember that counting sticks we played with at schools?). The idea is, we can define numbers from scratch, using the means of Piraha. "The head sticks-lot being here, they bringing another stick here, the next sticks-lot is" (I don't know though whether they have a word for a lot).
It's another matter, whether it's useful. It seems more useful to count sticks and crocodiles differently, and therefore not to have a universal way of counting. But of course, they can invent numbers, once they will have such a need (a need in arithmetics).

3). Tenses. Russian doesn't have the English present perfect tense too, and in most cases you don't express its meaning in Russian precisely. But it doesn't mean we can't think about actions which have impact on the present: we can, but we say about it differently, and may not to say about it at all. As well as English mostly silences the meaning of the Russian perfective aspect, but it doesn't mean that englishmen can't think about events as opposed to processes. They can, but they never say about them (OK, mostly never).
In fact, we express our thoughts so approximately, that I can't agree with Divisionbell who says a language constrains thinking. Language does point preferable ways for thinking, but it doesn't constrain it. We think much more than say anyway. Much-much more.
I don't know whether we have a general word for a "result" in Piraha (maybe not, though I saw in that article a construction like "finish eating, to you speak I want", here "kabaob" "finish" seems to express a part of the meaning), but it doesn't prevent us from using different words for different results (maybe, I'm full) or something like that.

4). Colors. What is the point for having words for colors? Especially in a jungle. Colors are not the main distinguishing properties of things; rather, shapes are.

5). Repeating a word is a best means of expressing the pronominal sense. We use pronouns for the beauty of speech, as we understand it. No impact on meanings.

6). Grammatical numbers. In fact, this lack is an advantage. The only good part of having grammatical numbers is the same as the only good part of having grammatical genders: we can more easily distinguish roles of pronouns in complex utterances. As for the rest, it is useless. Or it's really true that the diference between one cow and three cows is more evident than the difference between three cows and one thousand cows? This feature of Piraha is the only one I envy - I'd like not to have grammatical numbers in English and Russian too.

I hope, my bytheways will be useful for the discussion.

================

I have also another bytheway. Sorry for intervening in the discussion while being ignorant in what the Chomsky's approach exactly is, but anyway, my question seems to me being logical: what did change the discovery of a new language, which has some features you consider dangerous for the approach, if one can invent such a language from scratch anyway, even if only theoretically (it's too hard a work - to invent a whole new language absolutely from nihil), but one can?

===============

What about sign languages? I heard, they use a "strange" lexicon too. Having features like different "words" for striking a dog and striking a plate.


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## Explorer41

Divisionbell said:


> ". It was two years before he attempted to translate a Bible story; he chose the Prodigal Son from the Book of Luke. Heinrichs read his halting translation to a Pirahã male. “He kind of nodded and said, in his way, ‘That’s interesting,’ ” Heinrichs recalled. “But there was no spiritual understanding—it had no emotional impact. It was just a story.” "


For many of us too. I think, the perception of a religion depends more on a culture itself, than on a language.


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## Divisionbell

But there is one thing that supports what I said. Piraha are A LOT less developed than other tribes in the region and the only difference is their mothertongue.  Also don't forget that 1984 quote is a piece of art, not science, but Orwell made a pretty good point there. Ad. religion - Our defience of religion is more the output of logical process which is able to understand this concept. Piraha aren't. But you are right that religion is connected to culture. E.g.: The concept would be really different if there were people on Mars


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## Explorer41

Remove the propaganda from 1984, and Newspeak will not affect the way of thinking of its characters (then Newspeak will be most likely destroyed, but it's another point).
As for the interdependence between language and culture, I agree with you and Everett, it exists  My "bytheways" were just about the fact that Piraha seemingly allows all the ways of thinking and think-telling, a human usually performs. It is another matter that it "recommends" ways of thinking which are distinct from ours...
As for religion... I don't see what features of language make Piraha to be not interested in religion.

I think, the only notions which are needed to understand a religion, are the notions of "good", "bad" and "power". All the rest is a story-telling. I don't know whether they have the specific abstract words for these notions (maybe not), but definitely they should know what is good and what is bad, and how can one be powerful enough to do something, or else they will not be able to act (I mean just the act of life).


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## Divisionbell

ad. 1984 - I wouldn't be so sure about that. What makes you think that?

ad. language vs. culture - It's nice to see me mentioned alongside Everett  It certainly does allow to think about lots of usual aspects of life, but you can't disprove they are lot less developed. The biggest "manque" of Piraha is that they are not able to produce complex sentences. But I am certainly no linguist, so don't take it too seriously, I would be glad to hear other opinions (professional or not)


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## Perseas

Divisionbell said:


> But there is one thing that supports what I said. Piraha are A LOT less developed than other tribes in the region and the only difference is their mothertongue.  Also don't forget that 1984 quote is a piece of art, not science, but Orwell made a pretty good point there.


Is it so, because the way we perceive the world, our culture, our mentality are reflected in our language? Of course, the influence that language has upon thought is given, but it is also the other way round. Humans at their primitive stages spoke also a less developed language than modern humans do.


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## Explorer41

Divisionbell said:


> It certainly does allow to think about lots of usual aspects of life, but you can't disprove they are lot less developed. The biggest "manque" of Piraha is that they are not able to produce complex sentences. But I am certainly no linguist, so don't take it too seriously, I would be glad to hear other opinions (professional or not)


Well, why can't we break sentences down in two? There will be more sentences, and sentences will be smaller.
(I'm certainly not a linguist too)

As for "less developed"... Yes, their language certainly fits bad our life, but it should fit well their life. I don't know whether our languages do fit their life, maybe our languages are too dull for them...


Divisionbell said:


> ad. 1984 - I wouldn't be so sure about that. What makes you think that?


Well, imagine they say to you: "bad is good". You're not a robot, you will think about that, not just collapse... And it will make you think more freely because you will hear a new idea.
It is another point that the language of Orwell seems not to be stable (just a feel, I can't argue). It may be ready to be changed, when people are ready to be changed.


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## LilianaB

Do they have words for sounds? I have a feeling that a color is whatever stays in the sphere of visual perception for them, so I would suspect they may not have words for sounds, or things related to sounds either. To tell you honestly I have a problem talking about colors or sounds in words


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## Explorer41

Interesting. I have a big problem talking about smells. I don't have any words for them, at all. Well, no problem -- I don't need it; but anyway, maybe there are languages who have words for smells?


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## LilianaB

There are languages which have words for different shades of snow, or different shades of water in the lake. There are some languages that used to distinguish up to 400 different shades of water. The Eskimos have about 1000 words to refer to snow. There are languages on the other hand which do not have any words for colors. There was another linguist before who claimed that differences between various languages are caused by differences in the ways people think, that there is no universal way people think. He studied Native American languages, Hopi mostly, I think.


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## berndf

Explorer41 said:


> As for religion... I don't see what features of language make Piraha to be not interested in religion.


That's not the issue and no-one claimed it were. The claim is that spirituality is culturally inhibited and the linguistic limitations exist for the same reason, i.e it has not been claimed there is a causal relationship between limitations of the language and the absence of religious believes here but rather two different causal relationship to a third factor. As the author of the article stresses, that is exactly why Everett's analysis is *not *Whorfian.

The same applies to your "by-the-ways" about numbers and colours in #10: Thinking in abstract categories is culturally inhibited and for the that reason they won't develop math (not that they couldn't - they simply wouldn't) and the won't develop words for cardinal numbers. Colours *are* important to fruit-gathering people in the jungle and they are concerned with colours they just don't have fixed terms for them because they don't express abstracts. They use concrete comparisons to describe colours.


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## LilianaB

Colors in modern AE are somewhat like that: more and more people start referring to colors as melon, cherry, burgundy, instead of red, bright red, dark red, etc.


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## Copperknickers

I would guess what happened is that they were descended from a normal group of South American tribes, but were subsequently isolated or suffered some catastrophe that caused them to forget their history/creation stories etc. You must remember it took humans a good hundred thousand years to develop all of Chomsky's grammatical ideas, so say all the elders of the village were killed in a tribal attack one day leaving only the younger hunters alive, they might completely lose thousands of years of progress if their language had lost mutual intelligibility with their surrounding cousin tribes (that might also explain their xenophobia, incidentally). 

It is amazing how much can be lost in a culture due to environmental factors, especially when that culture is made up of less than 500 people as the Piraha's is, and it's a lot easier to lose things than regain them. Also, we might be certain that the Piraha will never reveal their full ideas about spirituality and history to us: the main reason they are so insular is that their tribe, the Mura, suffered horrifically at the hands of the Brazilians and fought bitterly against them. That is why they refuse to learn anything from them: it is quite possible they have a blackout against white culture that forbids them from trusting anything they say.


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## Divisionbell

Just look at French - marron = nutty, brown; orange;...


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## LilianaB

Yes, that too. Thank you. I do not speak French, but I did not mean the etymology of colors as much as what is happening now that colors are called like vegetables and fruits rather than the traditional way. The the colors would be: apricot , peach, melon, sage, orange, lemon, lime, celery, avocado, green apple, banana, camel( not a fruit really), chocolate, olive, sand, ocean foam, sky, charcoal, spruce, many other colors, I think, depending on somebody's imagination.


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## Explorer41

berndf said:


> The same applies to your "by-the-ways" about numbers and colours in #10: Thinking in abstract categories is culturally inhibited and for the that reason they won't develop math (not that they couldn't - they simply wouldn't) and the won't develop words for cardinal numbers. Colours *are* important to fruit-gathering people in the jungle and they are concerned with colours they just don't have fixed terms for them because they don't express abstracts. They use concrete comparisons to describe colours.


Oh, thank you for the point, about the jungle! I did never live in the jungle, nor did I hear much about it, so I cannot really judge what do they need. I heard that many animals don't perceive colours though. But, on the other hand, as we perceive colours, it's likely for us to use them to distinguish berries or like -- what does grow there...
I understood: you mean, they describe colours in exactly the same way we describe smells: it smells like a cake, it smells like cheese, it smells like fish, it smells like gas. No-one can really explain what gas smells like -- we have to smell it ourselves at some point in our life, or else we shall not be able to raise an alarm in the case of gas leakage.


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## berndf

Explorer41 said:


> Oh, thank you for the point, about the jungle! I did never live in the jungle, nor did I hear much about it, so I cannot really judge what do they need. I heard that many animals don't perceive colours though. But, on the other hand, as we perceive colours, it's likely for us to use them to distinguish berries or like -- what does grow there...


Among land-living mammals, colour vision has mainly been developed by animals feeding on fruits, like primates. Animals like cows don't need colour vision to find their food.


Explorer41 said:


> I understood: you mean, they describe colours in exactly the same way we describe smells: it smells like a cake, it smells like cheese, it smells like fish, it smells like gas. No-one can really explain what gas smells like -- we have to smell it ourselves at some point in our life, or else we shall not be able to raise an alarm in the case of gas leakage.


Yes, that is how I understand the article.


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## LilianaB

So, I think we are going in the same direction, maybe it is a cycle in the development of some languages, if you open any US catalogue you will see how colors are described. Woman's shirt size M - color lettuce, berry or hickory. I have myself no problem talking about colors if I have 300 colors to choose from, it is hard just with the standard colors. Most Modern Indo-European languages do not have that many words for colors, I think. At least Slavic, Modern Baltic and most Germanic do not.


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## Explorer41

I'd note that this way of talking about colours (involving apples, camels and whatever) already implies an abstraction. The only difference between the words "camel" and "red" to describe colours is that the first word has an additional "concrete" meaning, and the second word has not. Once I forget about existence of camels, there will be no difference.

What I wonder about is in what degree similar are the problems of talking about colours and smells. I mean, whether one can classify smells in a way similar to classifying colours. We can say, "it colours like a mix between an orange and a camel" and give an overall idea of the colour in question. But it's a strange idea to say, "it smells like a mix between fish and cheese", one will not understand. I wonder whether there is no appropriate scheme of classifying smells, which would allow comparisons of this kind, or such scheme in principle exists but we can't get it in our culture. (?????) 

==================== 

What struggles me the most are quantifiers.

It looks plausible to do without the word "all", as we can describe generic objects instead (like in "a dog is an animal", not like in "a human is a king of the nature", where "a human" represents a whole system of humans, not a generic human).

I struggle with the word "one", which has a synonym "particular". It looks like this word enables us to choose an object with a given name ("a human", here the name is "human"), using an unnamed property (as opposed to, say, choosing "blond-hair humans"). That is, we choose some human; but we don't name a criterion of choosing, the criterion may be any; we deal with an "abstract property". It is a crazy abstraction; I don't know whether we really need this abstraction for our thinking and for telling about our thoughts, or we can somehow manage without it, at least when telling. This is the second question I have. (?????)

Once this problem is resolved (once we know how to translate sentences involving "particular" things), the rest seems logical: each human is "humans taken by one", that is, when we tell something about "each human", we tell something about a human in general and about a randomly chosen particular human; the same applies to the word "every" (with some variations in meaning, I don't precisely know which, (probably the difference is in logical stresses), but it shouldn't be a problem). The meaning of "some" can be built from the meaning of "particular" yet more easily: it is a few particular things taken one to one (and Piraha has this primitive).


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## berndf

LilianaB said:


> Colors in modern AE are somewhat like that: more and more people start referring to colors as melon, cherry, burgundy, instead of red, bright red, dark red, etc.


These are fixed and lexicalized description. The point was not that they didn’t have words for colours but that they don’t have *fixed *words for colours. Words like _rose_ and _orange_ are of course also descriptions by comparison but they are lexicalized and therefore became abstractions. The Pirahã didn’t take this step and that is an interesting fact. They would describe colours by reference to any object that happens to come to mind, much like we describe smells.


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## LilianaB

I think the colors from American catalogues are like that too; whatever comes to the designer's mind. Some designers would call some color lettuce, whereas others may call it pea, avocado, or whatever.


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## berndf

LilianaB said:


> I think the colors from American catalogues are like that to; whatever comes to the designer's mind. Some designers would call some color lettuce, whereas other may call it pea, avocado, or whatever.


Not if they are professionals (fashion designers and the like). For them it is really necessary to distinguish several hundred coulour with exact terms. People who want to sound posh might be tempted to imitate this kind of language without actually knowing it. But that is a different story.


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## LilianaB

If you go to a paint sore, you will see how many colors they have and all the sophisticated names they use, morning mist and things like that. I am  wondering if it is the same in Great Britain. I have never been to a paint store in Britain.


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## francisgranada

_Ad _ "one/many", or singular versus plural:

In Hungarian we say "Kék szeme van" (litt. He/she has blue eye) and not "Kék szemü*k* van" (He/she has blue eye*s*). Thus the noun _szem _is grammatically in singular instead of plural (as in English), but I'd say it is rather "indifferent" than “singular”, because this expression doesn't tell us anything about the number of the eyes that are blue (we implicitely suppose that all, i.e. both in this case). We also say “Egy szem” (One eye), "Három szem" (litt. Three eye), “Sok szem” (litt. Many eye). The noun _szem _is again in "singular", because the words one/three/many bear the information about the “plurality”, so no explicit plural marker (-*k*) is needed.

We can suppose, that the grammatical distinction between "one" and "many" (singular versus plural, as we understand it today) did not necessarily exist in the past. The today's singular was rather "number indifferent", while the plural evolved probably later.

In the early phases of the PIE the situation could be similar, the development of the case endings (declension) then caused the today's "clear" opposition between the singular and plural.

All I want to say with these Hungarian examples is, that what for us seems to be "obvious", in the past or in other circumstances may not be, because of the lack of the real necessity. So we can easily imagine, for example, a language that has no grammatical cathegory for the singular/plural, or a language that has no specific expressions for one, many etc. ...


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## J.F. de TROYES

francisgranada said:


> In Hungarian we say "Kék szeme van" (litt. He/she has blue eye) and not "Kék szemü*k* van" (He/she has blue eye*s*). Thus the noun _szem _is grammatically in singular instead of plural (as in English), but I'd say it is rather "indifferent" than “singular”, because this expression doesn't tell us anything about the number of the eyes that are blue (we implicitely suppose that all, i.e. both in this case). We also say “Egy szem” (One eye), "Három szem" (litt. Three eye), “Sok szem” (litt. Many eye). The noun _szem _is again in "singular", because the words one/three/many bear the information about the “plurality”, so no explicit plural marker (-*k*) is needed.



Your example from Hungarian can be oportunaly connected to tha A. Nevin, D.Pesetsky and C.Rodriguez's comments about general-number languages ( See here > PDF p.387 n.46 ). Many languages have no grammatical categories of number with one or several suffixes expressing plurality or collectivity as Chinese, Japanese , Burmese ... ). Piraha would have the same kind of suffix with _xaı´tiso ._ More generally these pages are questionning Everett's principle of immediacy of experience that would explain the alleged lacks of Piraha.






francisgranada said:


> We can suppose, that the grammatical distinction between "one" and "many" (singular versus plural, as we understand it today) did not necessarily exist in the past. The today's singular was rather "number indifferent", while the plural evolved probably later.
> 
> In the early phases of the PIE the situation could be similar, the development of the case endings (declension) then caused the today's "clear" opposition between the singular and plural.
> 
> All I want to say with these Hungarian examples is, that what for us seems to be "obvious", in the past or in other circumstances may not be, because of the lack of the real necessity. So we can easily imagine, for example, a language that has no grammatical cathegory for the singular/plural, or a language that has no specific expressions for one, many etc. ...



I think your assumption is arguable, as it implies that grammatisation would be a feature of evolution in languages. There are a lot of counterexamples. Many IE languages have lost the dual number used in Sanskrit and ancient Greek and Malay has never developped a grammatical category of number. On the contrary endangered languages as Tamoan spoken by few native American people show a very complicated system of plural markers (here :http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Taos_dialect#Number_inflection ).


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## LilianaB

Yes, I know some Native American people use even different forms if they are referring to a person who is directly involved in the conversation as opposed to a witness or onlooker who is not directly involved in the conversation: the third. They will use a different form of the second person verb if they are talking to the onlooker as opposed to the form they would use to refer to somebody involved in the conversation directly.


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## francisgranada

LilianaB said:


> ... Theyl will use a different form of the second person verb if they are talking to the onlooker as opposed to the form they would use to refer to somebody involved in the conversation directly.



This reminds me some Romance pronouns, e.g.  Spanish _vosotros, nosotros_, Italian _voialtri, noialtri _etc... as opposed to _vos, nos_ (now archaical in Spanish) and _noi, voi_ respectively.


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## francisgranada

J.F. de TROYES said:


> ... I think your assumption is arguable, as it implies that grammatisation would be a feature of evolution in languages. There are a lot of counterexamples. Many IE languages have lost the dual number used in Sanskrit and ancient Greek and Malay has never developped a grammatical category of number. On the contrary endangered languages as Tamoan spoken by few native American people show a very complicated system of plural markers (here :http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Taos_dialect#Number_inflection ).




Thank's for the link, it's really interesting (though I din't have time enough to study it in details). 

I didn't want to generalize anything, of course, neverthless I wanted to express the idea that when something is formally marked  (case ending, suffix, prefix, particle ...) then if becomes a grammatical critrerion/cathegory, while the unmarked forms may (_may b_ut not_ must_) retain their "neutrality". It does not mean that the proper idea of the plurality should be somehow consequence of the language evolution. 

It seems to me (at least at the "first glance") that this is valid also for Tamoan, i.e. the unmarked forms of the nouns represent some "default", while the suffixes give them a concrete sense of plurality or   "singularness" (_singularity _means something else ...).   

I think, this doesn't contradict to the disapearance of the dual in the IE languages. Finally, not only the dual has disappeared but many other cathegories and forms (practically the whole Germanic or IE declension and conjugation in English etc...) as consequence of the evolution (whatever we mean under this term; the evolution can go also "backwards", towards the formal simplification etc ...).


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## Lugubert

LilianaB said:


> The Eskimos have about 1000 words to refer to snow.


If you can find more Eskimo snow terms than the dozen professor Anthony Woodbury (U Texas, Austin) has collected, professor Laura Martin, Dept. of Anthropology, Cleveland State University, would be very happy to see them.

I recommend prof. Geoffrey K. Pullum's essay The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax in the book with the same name, and the many discussions at http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/.


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## LilianaB

Thank you. Some people, some linguists also claim that Baltic peoples had 400 words for different shades of water, I do not find it highly possible but I still did not get hold of the entire work done by a Swedish linguist in fact. I only read some excerpts of his work and some things could have been misinterpreted, or perhaps this was really the fact.


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## J.F. de TROYES

francisgranada said:


> Thank's for the link, it's really interesting (though I din't have time enough to study it in details).
> 
> the unmarked forms of the nouns represent some "default", while the suffixes give them a concrete sense of plurality or "singularness" (_singularity _means something else ...).



Does the absence of plural forms may be really considered a " default ", a kind of gap in language ? Isn't it due to a sense of weirdness : it seems to me we've got this feeling, when we are used to speaking a language or languages with these markers and get in touch with another lacking them. Your previous example from Hungarian (#34) shows that a plural marker is useless in that case as opposed to French : _elle a *des* *yeux* bleus _( she has blue eyes ) with two markers in speech ( _des_ ; _yeux_ )and three ( plus the ending _-s_ ) in writing. As you know several languages as Chinese have no plural. In most cases marking plural is redundant due to the presence of numerals or quantifiers or merely to the context.

I'll add that it doen't mean redundancy is a flaw as it can make the wording clearer and contribute to the richness or beauty of a language.


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## francisgranada

J.F. de TROYES said:


> Does the absence of plural forms may be really considered a " default ", a kind of gap in language ? ...



No, of course. With the term "default" I wanted to say a "default value" (as this term is used in programming languages, for example), meaning an "implicit value" (singular or plural, in our case) and not a "gap".


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## LilianaB

Some languages do not have plural: this is just their characteristic. Some Uralic languages do not have plural, such as Chinese, which does not make them deficient in my opinion. These languages just have different methods of rendering reality.


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## Lugubert

It's not quite true that Chinese has no plurals. Some nouns and pronouns can be marked for plural. _Wo _"I", _women_ "we"; _haizi _"child", _haizimen _"children (in general)"


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## Explorer41

Lugubert said:


> It's not quite true that Chinese has no plurals. Some nouns and pronouns can be marked for plural. _Wo _"I", _women_ "we"; _haizi _"child", _haizimen _"children (in general)"


But Chinese does not have the grammatical plurals, true? I mean, it is an example of Chinese word formation, it does not affect the Chinese ways of building sentences, just like the English formative postfix "er" ("beat" => "beater") does not affect the English grammar.

=============

Also, I see this link, I think it has to do with the topic: http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~gawron/mathling/readings/nevinsEtAl_07_Piraha-Exce.pdf


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## J.F. de TROYES

Lugubert said:


> It's not quite true that Chinese has no plurals. Some nouns and pronouns can be marked for plural. _Wo _"I", _women_ "we"; _haizi _"child", _haizimen _"children (in general)"



It's  partly right for plural pronouns  as _wǒmen , nǐmen,  tāmen_where the suffix -men marks totality rather plurality. So with nouns it is chiefly used when a group is being referred to as in _nushìmen, xiānshengmen _( _Ladies and gentlemen _), but _háizi  _means either _child _or_ children _; it depends on the context. _ The teacher and the pupils_ is usually said : _lǎoshī  hé xuésheng _where neither noun has the suffix -_men._


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## koniecswiata

I read this article some years ago, and it is fascinating.  I also don't think it necessarily disproves UG--it probably means that the parameters of UG have to be reset.


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## Hulalessar

There are several possibilities:

1. The analysis of Pirarhã is incorrect. Every now and then some linguist pops up with a claim that some language has some unique feature, e.g. only 3 phonemes; at least 123 phonemes; really simple; extraordinarily complex. Further investigation often proves that the claim was ill-founded.

2. The analysis of Pirahã is correct, but does not disprove Chomsky. Disproving Chomsky can be as difficult as proving the existence of the soul. I think one has to be wary about drawing conclusions from languages spoken by small/isolated communities. On the whole, language change is unconscious, but such communities may consciously seek either to complicate or simplify things. By way of comparison we only need to look at the way children use language among themselves. The idea that the Pirahã may have suffered some disaster that wiped out all the adults is entirely plausible.

3. The Pirahã have lookouts posted ready to call out: _Harvard linguist coming - everyone avoid recursion._


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## swift

Hi,

An update, for those of you who had not read this before:



> Since very few of the press reports on Pirahã had even raised the key questions of evidence and argumentation, we considered it important to try to put these issues on the agenda at large, a task rendered particularly timely by the continuing public interest.
> 
> Navins, Pesetsky & Rodrigues. Evidence and argumentation: A reply to Everett (2009).
> 
> http://web.archive.org/web/20110604103316/http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~nevins/npr09b.pdf


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## Cenzontle

> There was another linguist before who claimed that differences between various languages are caused by differences in the ways people think, that there is no universal way people think. He studied Native American languages, Hopi mostly, I think.


For those who want to follow up on this idea, Liliana is referring to Benjamin Lee Whorf.


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