Connections: The Blindness of Cultural Arrogance

Don’t Let Your Facts Interfere with My Theory

Deep in the Amazon, a small tribe — the Pirahã — has rejected virtually every aspect of modern life, save the convenience of T-shirts and shorts. In his piece, “The Interpreter,” New Yorker reporter John Colapinto demonstrates how these 360 people have upended the received wisdom of linguist Noam Chomsky — that human language evolved from a universal grammar intrinsic to all Earth’s tongues.

Members of the remote Pirahã tribe in Brazil’s Amazon basin. Their language has no words for numbers or color, nor any art or myths.

Problem is, the Pirahã’ speech, unrelated to any other existing language, is based on just eight consonants and three vowels (women use one fewer consonant than men). Simple? Hardly. The language encompasses “a complex array of tones, stresses, and syllable lengths that its speakers can dispense with their vowels and consonants altogether and sing, hum, or whistle conversations,” Colapinto writes.

The Pirahã do not count. They have no single words for colors. They have no history beyond two generations, no art or drawing. The common building blocks linguists expect play no role in this culture.

Leading linguist Noam Chomsky asserts these common building blocks are uniquely human and should form the cornerstone of all our languages. Except it turns out the Pirahã managed to create a complex language completely free of those notions. How? The American linguist, Dan Everett, who has lived with and studied the Pirahã over the course of 25 years, explains that the tribe’s culture is so rooted in the present, in only what they can perceive in their direct experience, that anything else is merely irrelevant.

This academic controversy may not mean much to you and me, as we’re quite comfortable with being able to count, create art and write really long sentences. But there is an important connection.

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