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Article I.3 The Interpreter: Has a remote Amazoniantribe upended our understanding of Language?By John ColapintoOne morning last July, in the rain forest of northwestern Brazil, Dan Everett, an Americanlinguistics professor, and I stepped from the pontoon of a Cessna floatplane onto the beachbordering the Maici River, a narrow, sharply meandering tributary of the Amazon. On the bankabove us were some thirty people--short, dark skinned men, women, and children--someclutching bows and arrows, others with infants on their hips. The people, members of a huntergatherertribe called the Pirahã, responded to the sight of Everett--a solidly built man of fifty-fivewith a red beard and the booming voice of a former evangelical minister--with a greeting thatsounded like a profusion exotic songbirds, a melodic chattering scarcely discernible, to theuninitiated, human speech. Unrelated to any other extant tongue, and based on just eightconsonants and three vowels, Pirahã as one of the simplest sound systems known. Yet itpossesses such a complex array of tones, stresses, and syllable lengths that its speakers candispense with their vowels and consonants altogether and sing, hum, or whistle conversations. Itis a language so confounding to non-natives that until Everett and his wife, Keren, arrived amongthe Pirahã, as Christian missionaries, in the nineteen-seventies, no outsider had succeeded inmastering it. Everett eventually abandoned Christianity, but he and Keren have spent the pastthirty years, on and off, living with the tribe, and in that time they have learned Pirahã as noother Westerners have.“Xaoi hi gaisai xigiaihiabisaoaxai ti xabiihai hiatiihi xigio hoihi,” Everett said in the tongue'schoppy staccato, introducing me as someone who would be "staying for a short time" in thevillage. The men and women answered in an echoing chorus, "Xa6i hi go6 kaisigiaihlxapagaiso."Everett turned to me. "They want to know what you’re called in 'crooked head’.'" "Crookedhead" is the tribe's term for any language that is not Pirahã, and it is a clear pejorative. ThePirahã consider all forms of human discourse other than their own to be laughably inferior, andthey are unique among Amazonian peoples in remaining monolingual. They playfully tossed myname back and forth among themselves, altering it slightly with each reiteration, until it becamean unrecognizable syllable. They never uttered it again, but instead gave me a little Pirahã name:Kaaxáoi, that of a Pirahã man, from a village downriver, whom they thought I resembled. "That'scompletely consistent with my main thesis about the tribe," Everett told me later. "They rejecteverything from outside their world. They just don't want it, and it's been that way since the daythe Brazilians first found them in this jungle in the seventeen-hundreds."Everett, who this past fall became the chairman of the Department of Languages, Literature, andCultures at Illinois State University, has been publishing academic books and papers on thePirahã: (pronounced pee-da-HAN) for more than twenty-five years. But his work remainedrelatively obscure until early in 2005, when he posted on his Web site an article titled "CulturalConstraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã," which was published that fall in the journalCultural Anthropology. The article described the extreme simplicity of the tribe's livingconditions and culture. The Pirahã, Everett wrote, have no numbers, no fixed color terms, noperfect tense, no deep memory, no tradition of art or drawing, and no words for "all," "each,""every," "most," or "few" --terms of quantification believed by some linguists to be among the© 2008 Dr. Catherine CollierAll Rights Reserved14
common building blocks of human cognition. Everett's most explosive claim, however, was thatPirahã displays no evidence of recursion, a linguistic operation that consists of inserting onephrase inside another of the same type, as when a speaker combines discrete thoughts ("the manis walking down the street," "the man is wearing a top hat") into a single sentence ("The manwho is wearing a top hat is walking down the street"). Noam Chomsky, the influential linguistictheorist, has recently revised his theory of universal grammar, arguing that recursion is thecornerstone of all languages, and is possible because of a uniquely human cognitive ability.Steven Pinker, the Harvard cognitive scientist, calls Everett's paper "a bomb thrown into theparty." For months, it was the subject of passionate debate on social-science blogs and Listservs.Everett, once a devotee of Chomskyan linguistics, insists not only that Pirahã is a "severecounterexample" to the theory of universal grammar but also that it is not an isolated case. "Ithink one of the reasons that we haven't found other groups like this," Everett said, "is becausewe've been told, basically, that it's not possible." Some scholars were taken aback by Everett'sdepiction of the Pirahã as a people of seemingly unparalleled linguistic and cultural primitivism."I have to wonder whether he's some Borgesian fantasist, or some Margaret Mead being stitchedup by the locals," one reader wrote in an e-mail to the editors of a popular linguistics blog.I had my own doubts about Everett's portrayal of the Pirahã shortly after I arrived in the village.We were still unpacking when a Pirahã boy, who appeared to be about eleven years old, ran outfrom the trees beside the river. Grinning, he showed off a surprisingly accurate replica of thefloatplane we had just landed in. Carved from balsa wood, the model was four feet long and hada tapering fuselage, wings, and pontoons, as well as propellers, which were affixed with smallpieces of wire so that the boy could spin the blades with his finger. I asked Everett whether themodel contradicted his claim that the Pirahã do not make art. Everett barely glanced up. "Theymake them every time a plane arrives," he said. "They don't keep them around when there aren'tany planes. It’s a chain reaction, and someone else will do it, but then eventually it will peterout." Sure enough, I later saw the model lying broken and dirty in the weeds beside the river. Noone made another one during the six days I spent in the village.In the wake of the controversy that greeted his paper, Everett encouraged scholars to come to theAmazon and observe the Pirahã for themselves. The first person to take him up on the offer wasa forty-three-year-old American evolutionary biologist named Tecurnseh Fitch, who in 2002 coauthoredan important paper with Chomsky and Marc Hauser, an evolutionary psychologist andbiologist at Harvard, on recursion. Fitch and his cousin Bill, a sommelier based in Paris, weredue to arrive by floatplane in the Pirahã village a couple of hours after Everett and I did. As theplane landed on the water, the Pirahã, who had gathered at the river, began to cheer. The twomen stepped from the cockpit, Fitch toting a laptop computer into which he had programmed aweek's worth of linguistic experiments that he intended to perform on the Pirahã. They werequickly surrounded by curious tribe members. The Fitch cousins, having traveled widely togetherto remote parts of the world, believed that they knew how to establish an instant rapport withindigenous peoples. They brought their cupped hands to their mouths and blew loon calls backand forth. The Pirahã looked on stone-faced. Then Bill began to make a loud popping sound bysnapping a finger of one hand against the opposite palm. The Pirahã remained impassive. Thecousins shrugged sheepishly and abandoned their efforts."Usually you can hook people really easily by doing these funny little things," Fitch said later."But the Pirahã kids weren't buying it, and neither were their parents. Everett snorted. "It's notpart of their nature," he said. "So they're not interested."© 2008 Dr. Catherine CollierAll Rights Reserved15
Page 2 and 3: "Those who arrive by age 12 or 13 m
Page 5: Article I.2 Are Signed Languages "R
Page 8 and 9: Biological analyses of the status o
Page 10 and 11: and beyond, speaking and signing ch
Page 12 and 13: Conclusion: Are Signed Languages Re
Page 16 and 17: A few weeks earlier, I had called F
Page 18 and 19: “We struggled even getting to the
Page 20 and 21: herself by strapping a cassette rec
Page 22 and 23: In 1998, after nine years as the ch
Page 24 and 25: momentary burst of excitement that
Page 26 and 27: can shape core grammar. Because the
Page 28 and 29: The authors compared animal and hum
Page 30 and 31: monkey moved. He followed it with h
Page 32 and 33: delight, fear, laughter, and surpri
Page 34 and 35: Piipaío in a hut: Pirahã huts typ
Page 36 and 37: LEP students, and equitable organiz
Page 38 and 39: 4. Second language development crea
Page 41 and 42: curriculum or "teaching to the test
Page 43 and 44: portfolio work was scanned and stor
Page 45 and 46: experiences of many groups of stude
Page 47 and 48: While not disagreeing that interpre
Page 49 and 50: sound educational practice, however
Page 51 and 52: arises from the efforts to abstract
Page 53 and 54: Article II.2 Cross-Cultural Communi
Page 55 and 56: males who can serve as positive rol
Page 57 and 58: Understanding another culture is a
Page 59 and 60: Pets and AnimalsWhich animals are v
Page 61 and 62: to teach standard English is reflec
Page 63 and 64: Asking personal questions of a pers
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Using Cross Cultural Communication
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Why Do Nonstandard English-Speaking
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Before beginning to teach standard
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• Negative attitudes toward low p
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New standardized tests and assessme
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Each of the behaviors listed above
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Article II.3 Hard Work Hypothesis:
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each point higher in SES, students
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This case does not provide strong s
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Article II.4 Language Acquisition a
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1992, p. XI). These researchers, wh
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comprehend a word within a specific
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more to the truthfulness of the chi
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This idea of “semilingualism” c
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Article III.1 A Brief Description o
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take different lengths of time to c
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example, should involve the same co
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As with all stages of BICS acquisit
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Assessment techniques at stage 3 ca
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different. Therefore, the social di
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integrative motivation. Basically,
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(Ellis, 1985; Hakuta, 1986). Howeve
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that sociocultural processes have o
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Article III.3 How Children Acquire
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phonetic units (unique to signed la
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Article III.4 Toward a Sociocultura
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emember is that the fundamental goa
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The best practices models can be th
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By focusing on the dialectic betwee
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intergenerational wisdom shared by
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Daily Realities RecappedThe above v
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traditions. At a time in our histor
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We will now look at two examples of
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Speakers communicate fluently, main
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question the effects of such attitu
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Article IV.3 Culture Change: Effect
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and psychological characteristics o
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Contraryto what wewere expecting, t
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Article V.1 Assessment in ESL & Bil
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vocabulary does the student lack?Is
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whether they are LEP and to provide
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Fourth, ESL and bilingual program s
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competent reader/writer. All versio
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Table 1Comparison of Recent Accultu
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unilinear model, which measures the
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an English-only instructional progr
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Article V.3 Assessment of English L
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8. Change answers only for a very g
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Riles, 1979; Jose P. v Ambac, 1983)
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proficiency is often underestimated
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Finally, when second language reade
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for their decisions, noting issues
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As mentioned above, when the transi
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ather than generic adjectives and t
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their imagined points of view. Ther
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English texts and demonstrate progr
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using inter-district teams). In the
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