The Piraha challenge: an Amazonian tribe takes grammar to a strange place

Science News,  Dec 10, 2005  by Bruce Bower

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A psycholinguist who studied the Piraha people disagrees with Everett. Peter Gordon of Columbia University spent several months with the Everetts in the Amazon testing Piraha counting abilities. Gordon asked villagers to line up AA batteries so that they matched, in number, arrays of 1 to 10 objects that he presented. Other tasks included asking volunteers to indicate when all the nuts that Gordon had deposited in a can and extracted one at a time had been removed.

Piraha counting words consist of one, two, and many, with the word for one sometimes meaning "small," Gordon reported in the Oct. 15, 2004 Science. Given this limited counting vocabulary, math problems with quantities greater than three usually stump the Piraha villagers, he found.

Some other languages, such as Warlpiri in Australia, also use a one-two-many counting system, Gordon notes.

Everett, however, argues that Gordon misinterpreted three Piraha words that are easy to confuse with numerals. The words really mean "small size or amount," "large size or amount" and "cause to come together," Everett holds. The last word refers to any group consisting of individual elements, such as foreigners camping in a nearby jungle.

A related dispute concerns Piraha color terms. Everett says that villagers use whatever descriptive turns of phrase strike them as appropriate when talking about particular colors rather than designated words for each color.

However, another of the few researchers who speak the Piraha language reported that 25 of the villagers named colors on a palette that he showed to them. This work, conducted by Steve Sheldon of the Summer Institute of Linguistics in Dallas, was part of a study that tested people in 110 non-industrialized populations. All the groups named basic colors using words that correspond to white, black, red, green, yellow, and blue. The team, led by linguist Paul Kay of the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, Calif., reported its findings in the June 7 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

As in the counting studies, the color-naming investigation got lost in translation, Everett responds. He says that Kay and Sheldon misinterpreted descriptive phrases for colors as color words. For instance, the Piraha word they cite as red actually means "bloodlike" and the alleged word for black really means "dirty blood."

After reexamining his data, Sheldon now agrees. Piraha participants in his experiment openly discussed color responses with their comrades, despite having been told not to do so, he notes. That could explain why volunteers came up with common terms for each color.

"For those who don't speak the Piraha language, Everett's conclusions sound far-fetched" Sheldon says. "I do not believe they are."

IN THE NOW The extreme focus on talking about immediate experience in Piraha culture not only eliminates counting and color terms, in Everett's opinion, but it also strips the language of recursion. This common linguistic device consists of embedding sentences--clauses--within other sentences. By extending and recombining ideas through the use of clauses, speakers can generate a very large number of expressions from a finite repertoire of sounds and words.