Re: Sapir-WhorFreakiness

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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