Re: Sapir-WhorFreakiness

Andreas:
> The genetic defect hypothesis would in principle be easy to test;
> kidnap a few infants and raise them in a Portuguese-speaking milieu.
> The ethics commitee will strike that one down, but it would be
> interesting if there were any people of Pirahã origin who for
> whatever reasonw were adopted by outsiders as young children.
One or other of Everett's papers mentions that this in fact
happened (without anything remarkable being observed).

And your point is well-made that even if there is a lot of
in-breeding, there are presumably genes coming in from the
river traders too.

Mark Line's suggestion that the Piraha were deceiving Everett
doesn't really square with the fact that he lived among them
for so long.

As for John's suggestion of SLI, it is very interesting, but I
wonder why Everett's own explanation is so hard to swallow, given
that there are so few Piraha (200 odd) and their culture is so
isolationist and unenterprising. There is a resistance to
innovation and sophistication, and few potential sources of
innovation. If an embeddingless language meets their
communicative needs, as it evidently does, there would be
no pressure for the language to evolve embedding.

--And.