- the fewest phonemes of any language
- no distinct concept of family beyond sister/brother
- no concept of history, even fictional
- For them, the only concept of "real" or "existing" is that which is seen or directly experienced. It's been said that if one were to board a canoe in front of a Pirahã and float down the river, you would, to their minds, cease to exist the moment the canoe were out of sight.

I'm almost certain they don't have the time to sit in front of a computer all day and pull shit out of their asses about architecture and marxist philosophy.

The tribal member surveys his livestock. "Ah, I see I have some pigs. Better than no pigs. Excellent, I can still feed my kin."

From a linguistic point of view, the most interesting thing about the Piraha is that they seem to lack recursion in their grammar (e.g. a sentence being embedded in another sentence). If this can be proved conclusively, it would throw a wrench into a lot of modern linguistic theory.

On average, they performed about as well as college students engaged in more complex numerical estimation tasks. Their skill levels were similar to those in pre-linguistic infants, monkeys, birds and rodents ...

However, there are ways to test whether somebody understands the concept of linguistic recursion without needing to know their native language. There was a New Yorker article on this a couple years back, and it describes the tests that Tecumseh Fitch ran on members of the Piraha tribe.

AS to idiocy of rural life-- he is quoting Marx. At at time when rural life meant you worked 12 hours a day and never travelled more than 2 miles from where you were born and the big landowner controlled you and you literally had to get to a city to have any art, diversity, stimulation, educaiton, commerce, etc.

It's not at all like rural life today which is vastly more connected.

So it's kind of idiotic to ignore that.

But once again it's just the snobbery of the avant garde. Tres petite bourgeousie.

It's more impressive that this tribe has survived with stone age technology. You try living in the woods for your entire life, Chuckles.

They don't tell stories. They don't remember their grandparents. They believe things are as they always were, even as they rapidly slide toward extinction.

People counted sheep and told fairy tales for tens of thousands of years before plummeting into capitalism ... but it seems the world is full of these very slippery slopes, which you are no doubt wise enough to avoid.

There is a very interesting article about Dan Everett and the Piraha in the New Yorker, including this:

Unrelated to any other extant tongue, and based on just eight consonants and three vowels, Pirahã has one of the simplest sound systems known. Yet it possesses such a complex array of tones, stresses, and syllable lengths that its speakers can dispense with their vowels and consonants altogether and sing, hum, or whistle conversations. It is a language so confounding to non-natives that until Everett and his wife, Keren, arrived among the Pirahã, as Christian missionaries, in the nineteen-seventies, no outsider had succeeded in mastering it.

I find that to be quite incredible. But not Charles, no! You blaze into Slog, insecurities (or just incompetency) at full bore, and utter your profound pronouncement on this culture and language, of which you apparently know nothing: "Idiotic." "More idiotic."

Thank you, Charles, THANK YOU, for your valuable and perceptive contribution to the discussion on human culture and language. Where would we be without you?

Ugh. This post is so dumb it's making me feel kind of queasy.

This is why the Inuit (Innuvut) language has thousands of words for snow and ice - the difference matters to them, and the French have many words for romance and love, but we have few in American English.

http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge213.html#rc

This is the only time I'm going to bother writing what I think whenever I read your posts: get over yourself.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_colapinto

And, er, literacy and math didn't become the handy thing pigs the king started tallying up how many sheep you should give him for your tax bill each year. The Smithers to his Burns had to handle all that paperwork (papyrus work...clay tablet work...) "Guns, Germs & Steel", where ya been, Chaz?

Meanwhile, chimps are displaying some incredible short term memory skills. Of course, they've never put any Hegel into their noggins, so the mental tubes work smoothly.

You're from Zimbabwe, right? If anyone should know a thing or two about one culture looking down upon another, it should be you. Grow the fuck up.