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  • From: Peter Bekins <pbekins AT fuse.net>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [b-hebrew] Colors and Language
  • Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2007 11:00:40 -0400

James,

You state:

>>It is impossible for the Piraha to not understand
>>colour because it is an intrinsic part of our cognitive
>>development (the foundation upon which we build
>>language.

This is the issue with Piraha. The Linguist, Dan Everett, is arguing that the language is an exception to Chomskyian generative grammar and linguistic universals. This is most evident in the fact that they do not seem to use recursion, which is one of the most fundamental language universals. Recursion is the ability to create a more complex thought by embedding a phrase within a phrase within a phrase. If I remember correctly from when I previously read the New Yorker article, the example he gives is that they would not say "The dog who went down to the river caught a fish." Instead they would use a series of short assertions: "The dog went down to the river. The dog caught a fish."

Everett anticipates the argument that this would imply they are a cognitively inferior ethnic group. He does not hold that they are cognitively inferior, but that they have a cultural aversion to any sort of abstraction or cultural memory. Rather their way of thinking is entirely framed by the present. They create no art and have no myths or legends that are passed down in their society. This is also reflected in the way they speak about color in that they chose whatever analogy fits them in the moment to describe color. It's not that they don't understand color, but that they don't care about having a generic term for "red". Thus Yitzhak's point:

>>Thus, one day they may say, take the gold-colored bowl, the next day,take the fire-colored bowl, etc.

The reason why Bible translation has been unsuccessful, in Dan Everett's opinion, is not completely that the target language is unsuitable, but that the Piraha could care less about stories about people from another time or another place.

Now, the Everetts disagree about how successfully they have been at learning the Piraha language (Dan's ex-wife is still a SIL translator and still working on learning the language. Her opinion is that it is partly a tone language so that more subtlety can be expressed by tone). Further, the Piraha feel threatened by outsiders and aggressively resist change, so one has to wonder exactly how much of their culture they have decided to share with these linguists and anthropologists, even the Everetts who have slowly built their trust (I love the story in the article about the two anthropologist brothers who try to "delight" the locals by making silly sounds only to receive blank stares). Lastly, as Everett has attacked the foundation of contemporary linguistics, the issue has obviously become polemicized so it is difficult to wade through the rhetoric. This is why other linguists have attacked Everett's view of the color issue.

Personally, I find the issue very interesting, but am in no position to make judgments either way. It is a good reminder to us to balance our more "universal" statements about language by constantly reading individual texts to remember all the weird ways real language can vary. At the same time, Piraha is such a rare and extreme case we should be careful about how much weight we give it in the big picture.

Sincerely,
Pete Bekins

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