Re: Sapir-WhorFreakiness

Quoting John Cowan <jcowan@...>:

> Mark P. Line scripsit:
> > Alternatively, maybe there is an additional cultural constraint that
> > cannot, due to its nature, be discovered by outsiders: "Don't talk
> > straight with outsiders."
>
> That was my first thought.  But how could they be so consistent,
> including even the children?  I'd rather believe in a pervasive
> genetic defect than a pervasive conspiracy.
This sounds like a situation where alcohol could be useful in linguistic
fieldwork ...

The thing that strikes me as the freakiest is the apparent abscence of counting.
His description of the "maths classes" almost sounds like the Pirahã are making
fun of him, but it's an obscence amount of effort to fool someone into
believing something that will hardly benefit them. Not to mention the whole
trade issue; having your trade partner believe you're more clueless than you
are is all well and good, but not if you achieve it by actually acting
cluelessly.

> > 2. Never mention color.
>
> This is the one of your six rules I just can't swallow.  How would they
> know how important basic color terms are to us?
They saw what happened to the Ungabunga ...

But lacking colour terms isn't _that_ weird, is it? Seems positively normal
compared to much of the rest to me.

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.

(If it's a gentic defect, children fathered by river traders will lack at least
one allele of it, and potentially pass it on to half-caste children of their
own, who'd lack it entirely. What would happened to a child with normal innate
linguistic capacity growing up in a society where everyone else, in effect, is
linguistically challenged?)

                                                       Andreas

Replies