Re: Sapir-WhorFreakiness

Doug Dee said:
> In a message dated 8/21/2004 1:15:22 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
> mark@POLYMATHIX.COM writes:
>
>>Alternatively, maybe there is an additional cultural constraint that
cannot, due to its nature, be discovered by outsiders: "Don't talk
straight with outsiders."
>
> Not even with an outsider who lived among the Piraha for _six years_, as
> Everett says he did in his paper?  That would be a _lot_ of effort.

Americans don't require a lot of effort to abstain from eating horse meat
throughout their entire lifetimes.

But yeah, I know. I'm just playing devil's advocate on this one.

I think Piraha might be a creole that didn't evolve much beyond a pidgin
precursor, for whatever reason. If something caused all the lexifier and
substrate languages to cease to be spoken in the community, we might be
left with a pidgin that only had whatever vocabulary it had accrued up to
a certain point.

For example, there might have been a breakaway community of pidgin
speakers who became separated from all lexifier speakers and who quickly
evolved a system of isolationist and anti-substrate taboos. Their children
would learn only the pidgin (then technically a creole) as their L1, with
no further access to possible lexifier languages nor to their parents'
substrate.

We can still wonder why this creole would not have elaborated itself the
way most creolists believe always happens when a pidgin acquires native
speakers. But that's perhaps letting the tail wag the dog: If we accept
the possibility that creoles might not always look like what most
creolists would expect, then there may be *lots* more languages that have
been creolized at some time in their evolution, thus there might be lots
of potential data points that we're not using, thus resulting in a skewed
picture of what creoles are like.

Maybe the elaboration only happens if the community remains in contact
with at least one lexifier language.

This scenario might also explain why the Piraha have no oral literature.
That literature would have been in the substrate, and the anti-substrate
taboos would have automatically put the kibosh on it. After a few
generations, nobody would be alive who knew the substrate language(s),
much less the oral literature of their forefathers.


-- Mark

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