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72 of 76 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Book It's Hard to Put Down, November 21, 2008
If you like strange languages and exotic jungle adventures, you'll love this book. It has plenty of both!
The author, Daniel L. Everett, is Chair of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Illinois State University. He spent many of his younger years living with and studying the aboriginal Piraha people of Brazil. Their language "defies all existing linguistic theories" and "reflects a way of life that evades contemporary understanding." Unrelated to any other known language, the Piraha dialect is so confusing that most outsiders have given up on it. The Pirahas whistle and hum as they talk, and a given verb can potentially have as many as 65,000 forms. Everett, however, has been able to puzzle out the strange grammatical quirks of Piraha expressions.
This book tells in fascinating detail about Everett's struggles with the language, the land, and the culture of the Pirahas. This struggle ultimately cost the author his faith and broke up his family. The language theories which he developed as a result of his acquaintance with the Piraha tongue have also put him in conflict with the ideas of distinguished linguist Noam Chomsky.
However, it is obvious that Everett feels the Piraha experience has been the defining mission of his life and is well worth what it has cost him personally. I recommend this book both for its page-turning excitement and its insights on the nature of human language.
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60 of 63 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Life and language of the Pirahć people, December 16, 2008
Daniel L. Everett is a linguist who first visited the Pirahć tribe as a family man and missionary. His experiences over the next 30 years broke up his family, put him at odds with the linguistic establishment, turned him into an atheist --- and have provided us with a fascinating book, which is part Boy Scout adventure, part reality TV, part crisis of faith, part anthropological study, and part linguistic treatise.
The Pirahć (pronounced Pee-da-HAN) are a little known tribe of Amazonian Indians who live on the banks of two rivers in territory that, before Everett encountered them, had never been assigned officially to the tribe but that they defended, occasionally to the death. Largely peaceful, they have intermarried and retained a very primitive lifestyle that they consider to be in every way superior to that of outsiders, including Americans, for thousands of years. They are far less colorful than many Amazonian groups, with no decorative arts or inventions. They purchase some pots and axes and make their own bows and arrows. If a plane comes, boys will make models of the planes but will throw them away days later. They live in the crudest of rudimentary stick and leaf shelters and survive by eating manioc, which simply grows nearby without being cultivated, and by hunting and fishing. They have no special rituals, and apart from the occasional visit from a spirit to frighten or inform them, they have no religion.
When Everett took his family and went to live for shorter and longer periods of time with this strange tribe, he was expected to learn their language, make a translation of the Bible and then convert the natives. What he learned was that the language itself held the key to their culture. And discovering the essence of that culture, he realized that they would never be converted --- not as long as they remained as they are --- and he saw no reason to change them, just as they saw no reason to change themselves.
There is an illustrative story (among many) of Everett being approached by men in the tribe who wanted him to buy them a big canoe from a neighboring tribe. With all the right instincts as a missionary and development agent, he did everything needed to transfer the skill of canoe construction to them. He invited the neighbors to come in and demonstrate, and insisted that the Pirahć men work alongside them. Not long afterwards, the same men came to him for money to buy another big boat. "I told them they could make their own now. They said, `Pirahćns don't make canoes.'"
Everett came to understand that the Pirahćns live entirely in the moment. They have no creation myths, no history past the living generations. Their language, which has only a few words, speaks primarily of immediacies, and is so dependent on tone that it can be hummed or whistled for clarification. All verbs have up to 65,000 combinations but only a handful of tenses. Everett is one of the few outsiders who ever learned to speak it, but he believes that after 30 years, the Pirahć people still do not regard him as a speaker any more than we consider a computer to be an English speaker. The tribe does not theorize or plan. They just exchange chit-chat. Yet the typical Pirahć is happier, Everett believes, "than any Christian or other religious person I have ever known."
The Pirahćns did not accept Jesus because they had never met Him. Their simple view deeply affected Everett, who had been well trained as a missionary to confront and overcome almost any challenge --- superstition, malaria, filth, alligators. But this startling way of looking at life as entirely evidential shook his faith and eventually caused him to confess that he had lost it. Everett not only shocked his missionary peers and fractured his marriage; he sent ripples through the linguistic establishment with his claims about the construction of the Pirahć language, saying it did not build upon itself and was not recursive, which challenged the theories of the great Noam Chomsky. Chomsky's linguistic doctrine postulates a universal grammar, ever-increasing, ever able to branch out and express ever more complex concepts. Everett was saying that, perhaps unique in the world, here in the Amazon was a group of people whose language did not grow, whose experience did not expand with increased contact with the outside, and who liked it that way.
As Chair of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Illinois State University, Everett has proven his points and earned his laurels. He still visits with the Pirahć.
--- Reviewed by Barbara Bamberger Scott
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24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Amazon tribe converts the missionary, April 16, 2009
The Pirahć are the "Show me!" tribe of the Brazilian Amazon. They don't bother with fiction or tall tales or even oral history. They have little art. They don't have a creation myth and don't want one. If they can't see it, hear it, touch it or taste it, they don't believe in it.
Missionaries have been preaching to the Pirahćs for 200 years and have converted not one. Everett did not know this when he first visited them in 1977 at age 26. A missionary and a linguist, he was sent to learn their language, translate the Bible for them, and ultimately bring them to Christ.
Instead, they brought him to atheism. "The Pirahćs have shown me that there is dignity and deep satisfaction in facing life and death without the comfort of heaven or the fear of hell and in sailing toward the great abyss with a smile."
Not that they have escaped religion entirely. Spirits live everywhere and may even caution or lecture them at times. But these spirits are visible to the Pirahćs, if not to Everett and his family, who spent 30 years, on and off, living with the tribe.
But they don't have marriage or funeral ceremonies. Cohabitation suffices as the wedding announcement and divorce is accomplished just as simply, though there may be more noise involved. Sexual mores are governed by common sense rather than stricture, which means that single people have sex at will while married people are more circumspect.
People are sometimes buried with their possessions, which are few, and larger people are often buried sitting "because this requires less digging." But there is no ritual for each family to follow.
"Perhaps the activity closest to ritual among the Pirahćs is their dancing. Dances bring the village together. They are often marked by promiscuity, fun, laughing, and merriment by the entire village. There are no musical instruments involved, only singing, clapping, and stomping of feet."
Everett's language studies began without benefit of dictionary or primer. None of the Pirahćs spoke any English or more than the most rudimentary Portuguese (Among their many eccentricities is their total lack of interest in any facet of any other culture including tools or language - not that they won't use tools, like canoes, they just won't make them or absorb them into their culture).
Amazingly, "Pirahć is not known to be related to any other living human language."
At first it seems rather deprived. There are only 11 phonemes (speech sounds). There are no numbers, no words for colors. No words for please, thank you or sorry. There are, however, tones, whistles and clicks. And the language comes in three forms - regular plus Humming speech and Yelling speech.
Over the years Everett comes to the conclusion that the Pirahć language reflects and arises from their culture in its directness, immediacy and simplicity. Ultimately he defies Noam Chomsky's theory of Universal Grammar (Pirahć lacks a basic requirement) and starts a firestorm in the linguistics field. Everett alludes mildly to this in the book, but a little Internet browsing will leave readers shocked - shocked! - at the way linguists talk to one another.
There are plenty of anecdotes involving the reader in Everett's adventures, hardships, terrors, epiphanies and the pure strangeness of daily life with a people who live in the immediate present and whose most common "good-night" is "Don't sleep, there are snakes." (sound sleep is dangerous and, besides, toughening themselves is a strong cultural value - foodless days are also common).
Fascinating as both anthropological memoir and linguistic study, Everett's book will appeal to those interested in very not-North American cultures and in the ways people shape language and it shapes us.
It's a book that rouses a sense of wonder and gives rise to even more questions than it answers.
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