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  • From: "JAMES CHRISTIAN READ" <JCR128 AT student.anglia.ac.uk>
  • To: b-hebrew AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [b-hebrew] Colors and Language
  • Date: Tue, 21 Aug 2007 17:44:23 +0100

Hi Pete,

yes! Recursion is Chomsky's latest big thing which he
loves to harp on about. For me there is no great surprise
to discover a language that does not exhibit recursion
in this way. In fact, even in English, sentences of such
type only occur late in the linguistic development of a
child and are quite complex in nature both for the
listener and for the speaker as they employ the use of
mental variables in order for communication to be
possible.

The Piraha speech is, in a way, superior, as it is both
less mentally taxing for the speaker and for the
hearer as it requires no such use of mental variables
to reach the end of the sentence. Such speech is in no
way, for me, a sign of cognitive inferiority and as
observered by Everette, a Piraha child born in the
states would be just as genetically capable of
mastering English (probably one of the grammatically
poorer languages) than any other child, or even
Ukrainian, Polish or Russian (better examples in my
mind).

What would make the Piraha cognitively inferior would
be the inability to distinguish colour. The inability
to distinguish colour in such an environment would
have most likely led to the tribe's extinction a very
long time ago. Their lack of a standardised system for
colour expression does not detract from their ability
to express just as many colours (if not more, think
about it) as us.

But let's think about it for a while. Why would a
hunter gatherer tribe need to speak about colour every
day. The young learn about the local botany and zoology
by hands on experience, being shown what can be eaten
and what can kill you. Their cognitive systems make
subconscious notes of colours of objects for later
recognition but no particular need to communicate these
colours is needed because all objects are referred to
by concrete names. Contrast this with growing up in
Western society where Granny only gives you a biscuit
if you tell her your favourite colour and intellectual
appraisal comes about for your ability to colour in
the colouring book with its codes. Given such a massive
brainwashing into believing that understanding colour
is essential to infant survival it is hardly surprising
why we grow up believing that talking about colour is
such a fundamental, everyday skill.

I too, have learned a number of languages by the very
same monolingual method that Everette had to employ.
The main difference being that my learning was by
whereas Everette had no other point of entry to the
language. And on a number of occasions I have reached
one of those shocked conclusions that people X have no
way of expressing concept Y only to find, in later
experiences that earlier, that these conclusions had
been prematurely drawn. Everette's new look at colour
could be something worth waiting for.

Anyway, in summary, the points being made are:

1) They make cognitive colour distinctions just like
everyone else.
2) They have the ability to understand descriptions
with colour terms (no matter how rudimentary).
3) They have the ability to produce descriptions with
colour terms.

In short, they are deficit in no way other than the
lack of a standardised system which their culture proves
to be unnecessary to their survival. Colour can still
therefore be considered a language universal even if
recursion can't. Their language is of great interest to
me because while apparently deficit in a number of areas
it preserves the most basic of cognitive abilites

1) shape discrimination
2) colour discrimination
3) bigger/smaller discrimination

>From a cognitive scientist perspective. It's a pearl of
a language.

James Christian Read
BSc Computer Science (thesis: concept driven machine translation using the
Aleppo codex)
http://www.lamie.org/hebrew
















































































n't. Their language is of great interest to
me because while apparently deficit in a number of areas
it preserves the most basic of cognitive abilites

1) shape discrimination
2) colour discrimination
3) bigger/smaller discrimination







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