Re: Sapir-WhorFreakiness
| From: | Doug Dee <amateurlinguist@...> |
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| Date: | Sunday, August 22, 2004, 18:37 |
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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."
One thing that could be mentioned in support of this idea is that Everett
says "In my first visit to the Pirahas, they tended to give Tupian (Nheengatu)
words as answers to my attempts to elicit vocabulary in their language. I might
not have spotted this for a while . . . except that my wife, Keren Everett,
speaks a Tupian language . . ."
So, there's at least one linguistic matter in which the Pirahas were not
entirely straight with him, at least at first. (He doesn't speculate about their
motives for this.)
Doug