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Re: Sapir-WhorFreakiness

From:Joe <joe@...>
Date:Saturday, August 21, 2004, 8:12
Mark P. Line wrote:

>John Cowan said: > > >>Mark P. Line scripsit: >> >> >> >>>Actually, Piraha is much freakier than the article in _Science_ lets on. >>>Also, there may be a reason for much of the freakiness in Piraha that >>>has >>>nothing to do with Sapir-Whorf relativity: >>> >>> >>This is beyond freaky. I strongly suspect that the Pirahã have >>some kind of inbred genetic defect: maybe not SLI but something like it. >> >> > >Although I'm as ready to beat up on notions of "Universal Grammar" as >anybody, I think the Piraha case goes quite a ways beyond anything I'd >ever be prepared to expect in a natlang, even if it is an isolate. All the >other isolates I've looked at fall well within the evolutionary space I >can imagine for human languages. Piraha falls outside that space in a >number of ways (lack of embedding is the worst, for me). So I'm prepared >to consider very unusual conditions that make this language such an >outlier. > >A genetic defect is one possibility, I suppose. Perhaps something very odd >happened during the evolution of this language. (I dunno, pidginization >followed by stunted creolization, with lexifiers and substrates all lost >in the meantime. Or something. *shrug*) > >Alternatively, maybe there is an additional cultural constraint that >cannot, due to its nature, be discovered by outsiders: "Don't talk >straight with outsiders." > >
<snip> Yes, but surely someone would notice after a while that, when they weren't aware that an outsider was nearby, they'd talk differently.

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Mark P. Line <mark@...>