The Pirahã () are an Indigenous people of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. They are the sole surviving subgroup of the Mura people and are hunter-gatherers. They live mainly on the banks of the Maici River in Humaitá and Manicoré in the state of Amazonas. , they numbered 900 individuals. The name Pirahã is an exonym; the Pirahã call themselves the or , roughly translated as "the straight ones".

The Pirahã speak the Pirahã language. They call any other language "crooked head".

Daniel Everett states that one of the strongest Pirahã values is no coercion; one does not tell other people what to do. However, on seeing a novelty such as an airplane, a child may make a model of it, which may be soon discarded.

Their romantic relationships include that “[they] do not allow marriage outside their tribe, they long have kept their gene pool refreshed by permitting their women to sleep with outsiders” according to John Colapinto

According to Everett, the Pirahã have no concept of a supreme spirit or god; however, they do believe in spirits that can sometimes take on the shape of things in the environment. These spirits can be jaguars, trees, or other visible, tangible things including people. In addition to a formal school being introduced to the culture, the documentary also reported that the Brazilian government installed a modern medical clinic, electricity, and television in the remote area.

Language

Anthropological linguist Daniel Everett, who wrote the first Pirahã grammar, claims that there are related pairs of curiosities in their language and culture.

After working with the language for 30 years, Everett states that it has no relative clauses or grammatical recursion. Everett points out that there is recursion of ideas: that in a story, there may be subordinate ideas inside other ideas. He also pointed out that different experts have different definitions of recursion. If the language lacks grammatical recursion, then it is proposed as a counterexample to the theory proposed by Chomsky, Hauser and Fitch (2002) that recursion is a feature which all human languages must have.

Pirahã is perhaps second only to Rotokas in New Guinea for the distinction of having the fewest phonemes of any of the world's languages. Women sometimes pronounce s as h, reducing the inventory further still. the language has no cardinal or ordinal numbers. Some researchers, such as Peter Gordon of Columbia University, claim that the Pirahã are incapable of learning numeracy. His colleague, Daniel L. Everett, on the other hand, argues that the Pirahã are cognitively capable of counting; they simply choose not to do so. They believe that their culture is complete and does not need anything from outside cultures. Everett says, "The crucial thing is that the Pirahã have not borrowed any numbers—and they want to learn to count. They asked me to give them classes in Brazilian numbers, so for eight months I spent an hour every night trying to teach them how to count. And it never got anywhere, except for a few of the children. Some of the children learned to do reasonably well, but as soon as anybody started to perform well, they were sent away from the classes. It was just a fun time to eat popcorn and watch me write things on the board."

It is suspected that the language's entire pronoun set was recently borrowed from one of the Tupí–Guaraní languages, and that before that the language may have had no pronouns whatsoever. Many linguists, however, find this claim questionable due to lack of evidence. However, if there had been pronouns at an earlier stage of Pirahã, this would not affect Everett's claim of the significance of the system's simplicity today. There are few Tupi–Guaraní loanwords in areas of the lexicon more susceptible to borrowing (such as nouns referring to cultural items, for instance).

See also

  • Keren Everett, Everett's ex-wife and the most fluent non-Pirahã in their language
  • Linguistic relativity

Notes

References

Further reading

  • (a lengthy article about the Pirahã and Daniel Everett's work with them, with accompanying Slideshow. Correction appended online.)
  • (reply to 2007 version of Nevins et al.)
  • (2007 version of article)
  • Google map of the location where Daniel Everett lived with the Pirahã
  • A Conversation with Augusto and Yapohen Pirahã A conversation with Jose Augusto and Yapohen Pirahã, who represent the leadership of the Pirahã tribe. (Portuguese with English subtitles.)