The Battle of the Linguists | Pirahã Part 2

Thanks to my patrons!!

Sources:

Barkham, P. (2008). "The power of speech". The Guardian.

de Bot, K. (2015). A History of Applied Linguistics: From 1980 to the Present. Routledge.

Everett, D. (2005). "Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã". Current Anthropology v. 46, n. 4.

Everett, D. (2007). "Recursion and Human Thought: Why the Pirahã Don't Have Numbers". Edge.

Frank, M., Everett, D., Fedorenko, E. & Gibson, E. (2008). "Number as a cognitive technology: Evidence from Pirahã language and cognition". Cognition v. 108.

Gordon, P. (2004). "Numerical Cognition Without Words: Evidence from Amazonia". Science.

Hauser, M., Chomsky, N. & Fitch, T. (2002). "The Language Faculty: What is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?" Science 298: 1569–1579.

Hurford, J. (1995). "Nativist and Functional Explanations in Language Acquisition". Logical Issues in Language Acquisition.

Ibbotson, P. & Tomasello, M. (2016). "Evidence Rebuts Chomsky’s Theory of Language Learning". Scientific American.

Murphy, J. (1974). Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: A History of Rhetorical Theory from St. Augustine to the Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Pawley, A. (2005). In: Everett, D. "Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã". Current Anthropology v. 46, n. 4: Comments.

Piantadosi, S., Stearns, L., Everett, D. & Gibson, E. (2012). "A corpus analysis of Pirahã grammar: An investigation of recursion".

Sampson, G. (2005). The 'Language Instinct' Debate: Revised Edition. Bloomsbury Academic.

Tymoczko, T. & Henle, J. (2004). Sweet Reason: A Field Guide to Modern Logic. Springer Science & Business Media.

Valian, V. (1986). "Syntactic Categories in the Speech of Young Children". Developmental Psychology.

Whorf, B. (1936). "An American Indian Model of the Universe". Published 1950 by Institute of General Semantics.

Wells, P. (2022). "The Implications Of Everett". 3 Quarks Daily.

Wierzbicka, A. (2005). In: Everett, D. "Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã". Current Anthropology v. 46, n. 4: Comments.

NOTE ABOUT CHOMSKY: No part of this video should not be taken as an endorsement of Noam Chomsky’s politics. Mr Chomsky has recently made several comments in favour of Ukraine laying down arms and allowing a Russian invasion in the Ukraine War. Both myself and my artist find these pro-imperialist comments disgusting and sinister, and stand in stark political opposition to this view.

Chapters:
00:00 - Intro
01:59 - Everett, Chomsky, and Universal Grammar
06:30 - Recursion
09:22 - Chomsky’s Response and the End of UG
11:38 - Credits

Written and created by me
Art by kvd102
Music by me.

Translations:
Leeuwe van den Heuvel - Dutch
Ümit Duran - Turkish

#chomsky #linguistics #recursion

[jeffersonmcgee]

It's ironic how Chomsky defends UG, by citing UG.
That's a pretty recursive argument Noam.

[Crw]

It annoys me to no end that there has been a huge debate about piraha and the language itself just has not been studied more in practice.

[jozesveticic]

I think the fact that he refers to the Pirahã without using their names might be due to the fact that their names don't appear to be a permanent thing. A quote from the man himself, for what it's worth:
Once when I arrived in Posto Novo, I went up to Kóhoibihiai and asked him to work with me, as he always did. No answer. So I asked again, "Ko Kóhoi, kapiigakagakaisogoxoihi?" (Hey Kóhoi, do you want to mark paper with me?) Still no answer. So I asked him why he wasn't talking to me. He responded, "Were you talking to me? My name is Tiáapahai. There is no Kóhoi here. Once I was called Kóhoi, but he is gone now and Tiáapahai is here."

[rextanglr]

Pirahã's supposed lack of subordinate clauses reminds me of Toki Pona: if you want to say "I know you know I know" in Toki Pona, you have to say "mi sona e ni: sina sona e ni: mi sona", which literally translates to "I know this: you know this: I know".

[artembaguinski]

Since having met Everett Pirahã's grammar has developed a new rule: "Don't recurse. Daniel is within earshot"

[linseyspolidoro]

Chomsky being unable to let go of his theory of UG makes me think of J. Eric S. Thompson, who basically held the decipherment of the Maya script back for decades because he was certain it was completely logographic. Since he was essentially the leading scholar on the matter he would heavily criticize anyone who insisted phonetic components to the glyphs and basically held back the amount we could decipher until after he died.

People really don’t want to admit that their life’s work may have been incorrect or flawed. Which, I mean, of course they don’t but it is detrimental.

[ThisCommentWroteItself]

To be fair to Chomsky, he has another somewhat better response, which is that recursion doesn't have to be present in every language for it to be the fundamental thing that causes language to arise. But as Everett points out, this seems to imply that in principle, it's possible for there to be no languages with recursion (the theory doesn't rule out that every language with recursion in it could die, leaving only Piraha remaining), putting Chomsky in the unenviable position of arguing that something that doesn't need to exist in any language is fundamental to all language

[GermanZindro]

I think it’s fascinating that Pirahã is the only language without recursion. You could probably write English completely without recursion, so the only benefit is brevity. The fact that almost all languages have this feature is amazing.

[andro_king]

Ngl I have a hard time not seeing Chomsky as just someone who wants his theory to be the correct one for the sake of his own ego, even though evidence seems to point at it being completely wrong.

[Mnogojazyk]

I studied for a doctorate in linguistics 35 years ago. I ended up leaving the program without earning one. There were two main reasons: my department had begun practicing an almost ideological reeducation mentality; and I read a few papers questioning whether universal grammar was indeed universally applicable. The example language I recall was Lakota. According to the authors of one such study, it seemed Lakota had basically a flat grammar while UG was designed around hierarchical grammars. It was enough to raise doubts in my mind; and given the attitude in the department, I had to flee.

Since then I have read very few papers in theoretical linguistics, but from the ones I have read, UG is hanging on for dear life.

[joaovitormatos]

"I'm right, therefore, you're wrong" - Chomsky, 2021

[Tyuf_]

I know nothing about linguistics at all but these videos are just so damn entertaining/fascinating and I don't know why

[nitfens]

It's interesting to observe how much Chomsky's humanism and wider philosophies hinge on his UG. He uses it a basis to give supposed empirical validity to concepts like human nature and moral realism. It paints it like he has more than just academic credibility hanging on his theory being correct. It also gives off vibes close to the modernist "my social philosophy is based on science" in a way that put me off from the first time I learned it...

[JordanSullivanadventures]

For anyone interested in this topic, I highly recommend Everett's book, "Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes." It's honestly one of the most fascinating books I've ever read. It changed the way that I think about basically all cultural norms, and this goes beyond just types of politeness: the idea that we sleep at night for a set amount of time, sexual norms, acknowledgement of the supernatural, what is literally possible to say.

The book essentially tells the story of how Everett went into the Amazon rainforest as a *Maverick linguist missionary* to convert the Pirahã people to Christianity, but over time learned that, not only was he was completely out of his depth, but his whole approach was imperialist and ultimately completely lost his faith in God.

The writing style is really interesting because he sort of shifts perspective back and forth between when he encountered the Pirahã and the Amazon for the first time and his perspective now in the modern day, with vastly more experience and open-mindedness. Personally I didn't find his writing racist or particularly prickly; far from it, he seemed to be encouraging the reader to question every assumption of their society. He draws explicit attention to the complexity and contradictions of race, esp in a place as ethnically and culturally diverse as the Amazon. But hey, that was just my experience; totally valid to have a different opinion.

[Pazx]

just want to take a moment to echo the sentiment that this is one of your most thoroughly researched and polished videos ever, bravo

[joshpitre]

There's a video of some other researchers giving evidence for recursion in Pirahã

[RyszardPoster]

I think that many Chinese sentences resemble Pirahã, where they use full sentences where in English it would be just a clause. (Of course there's still recursion in Chinese, but I think that it's much less used than in English, so maybe it wouldn't be a stretch of imagination that there's a language that doesn't use it at all)

[JM-lhrl]

I don’t know what you may have planned for this channel, but I would love to see more videos on linguistic theories, analyzing ideas about language and the criticisms other linguists express toward them (since it seems that linguists are very prone to beefing with each other)

[leksiscarr]

My undergraduate education in linguistics has honestly taught me more about how to spot bullshit fallacious logic in science than about the actual languages people speak, lol. I study at a school where UG is basically the only theory taken seriously in the Linguistics department, and it required a great deal of personal effort to learn about theories that don’t fit within that model. I’m so glad criticism of Chomskyan linguistics has become so much more mainstream in the past decade or so.

[stephenj]

Chomsky: Every language is basically underlyingly English structure, but gets changed before it comes out of the mouth.