![]() ![]() That doesn't mean everyone is happy all the time: they have struggles, they have insecurities, they lose their temper, they face danger. In my first book, Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes, I describe them as a very happy people. You talk about a grammar of happiness – it's a lovely idea, but are you simply perpetuating another myth? ![]() And I said: "But I do understand you, I am speaking Pirahã" and that was hard for them at first and the children would look at me open-mouthed. ![]() They thought I was just mimicking them like some jungle animal, and I would say something to them and they would say, "Look he sounds like us" and they would talk about me. It was difficult for them to understand when I was learning the language that I actually understood some of what they were saying. Well, initially they saw me as a sort of talking parrot. Within the next couple of years I was saying pretty much what I wanted to say, and now it's a cumulative total of almost eight years in the village and I speak the language very well. I stayed in the village with my family for a year, initially, and at the end of that year I could talk, I could say quite a few things. There is no language in common, so I started off just pointing and learning nouns and then verbs. My experience with the Pirahã was absolutely fundamental in shaping my ideas about human language. This constellation of features really cried out for an explanation and, it took me about 20 years to realise that there might be a unifying explanation for all of these things. A number of things like this, including, the special characteristic of recursion, the ability to keep a process going in the syntax forever. I mean the absence of numbers, the absence of counting and colours, the absence of creation myths, and the refusal to talk about the distant past or the distant future. All languages have unique characteristics, but the Pirahã just seems to have so many unique characteristics. I was assigned there to translate the Bible for them because no one could figure out the language – it's not related to any other known living language. Is there something especially interesting about Pirahã language? You studied the Pirahã community in the central Amazon. Language is the tool that was invented to solve that problem. Humans are a social species more than any other, and in order to build a community, which for some reason humans have to do in order to live, we have to solve the communication problem. But the fundamental building block of language is community. Coming together they make language possible. Language is possible due to a number of cognitive and physical characteristics that are unique to humans but none of which that are unique to language. And what can we put in its place? A complex interplay of factors, of which culture, the values human beings share, plays a major role in structuring the way that we talk and the things that we talk about.įrom your experience in the Amazon, and generally, what is it that makes language possible? There are two claims, the first is that universal grammar doesn't seem to work, there doesn't seem to be much evidence for that. I realised that I wanted to go on to graduate work.Ĭan you give me a very quick summary of the essential claim of this book? The first phase of Bible translation is to figure out how the language works. I joined a organisation called Wycliffe Bible Translators that had the objective of translating the Bible into all the languages of the world, and to do that you had to study linguistics, and so that was my initial exposure to linguistics.
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