Scan barcode
dbaguti's review against another edition
4.0
Metaphysical linguistics. Might as well have been the inspiration for Arrival when it comes to the impact learning a language may have on one's understanding of reality.
trangham283's review against another edition
4.0
UPDATE 2/28/2019 -- revised review and rating.
Ughhh I mentioned this book in my thesis proposal today and one of the committee members (linguistics professor) said to not take Everett's claims too seriously. The examples cited in this book were anecdotal, which is not necessarily always a problem. BUT - the issue was Everett has never been open to sharing his data (as he seemed to claim in this book).
#######
I came across this book from a linguistics seminar on language perception and production. This was when, for the first time, my limited understanding (and belief) of Chomsky's theory of Universal Grammar (UG) was challenged. UG (Chomsky) or The Language Instinct (Pinker) claims that human's ability to learn languages is innate, because all languages share some underlying common "grammar" whose "parameters" (e.g. word order, number of phonemes) are turned on/off depending on the language environment where the human is born (e.g. a baby born into Japanese environment will have object-initial word order turned on, and the "l/r" distinction turned off). Because of this supposed universality, it was often presumed that culture and grammar don't interact. While it is generally agreed that culture affects certain aspects of language, most notably vocabulary, effects on grammar have largely been dismissed. This book challenges this last point (among others in Chomsky's theory, e.g. recursion in languages) -- Everett argues, through his experience learning Piraha and living among Pirahas, that:
The book provides many interesting examples regarding the Piraha language: there are only 11 or so phonemes in Piraha (compared to 44 in English), pitch in Piraha words constitute different communication "channels" (musical speech, hum speech, etc.), and (to me most fascinating) the presence of suffixes for "evidentials":
Isn't this SO COOL?!?
This "evidential" aspect of language is tied to/explained by the fact that Piraha language and culture are constrained by immediate experience -- facts are only considered facts by the Pirahas if there's an eyewitness, which also helps explain why all efforts to convert Pirahas have failed over more than 200 years. The author himself, a missionary, ended up being un-converted.
Overall, I really enjoyed this read -- Everett did a surprisingly good job of giving enough rigorous explanations on the classic linguistic theories he is challenging. What I also like was how Everett depicts Pirahas culture and people in a matter-of-fact and non-judgemental way, especially in aspects that are certainly deemed at least controversial in western cultures. Finally, the last practical message of the book is the importance of preserving endangered languages:
Ughhh I mentioned this book in my thesis proposal today and one of the committee members (linguistics professor) said to not take Everett's claims too seriously. The examples cited in this book were anecdotal, which is not necessarily always a problem. BUT - the issue was Everett has never been open to sharing his data (as he seemed to claim in this book).
#######
I came across this book from a linguistics seminar on language perception and production. This was when, for the first time, my limited understanding (and belief) of Chomsky's theory of Universal Grammar (UG) was challenged. UG (Chomsky) or The Language Instinct (Pinker) claims that human's ability to learn languages is innate, because all languages share some underlying common "grammar" whose "parameters" (e.g. word order, number of phonemes) are turned on/off depending on the language environment where the human is born (e.g. a baby born into Japanese environment will have object-initial word order turned on, and the "l/r" distinction turned off). Because of this supposed universality, it was often presumed that culture and grammar don't interact. While it is generally agreed that culture affects certain aspects of language, most notably vocabulary, effects on grammar have largely been dismissed. This book challenges this last point (among others in Chomsky's theory, e.g. recursion in languages) -- Everett argues, through his experience learning Piraha and living among Pirahas, that:
... we cannot study languages effectively apart from their cultural context, especially languages whose cultures differ radically from the culture of the researcher.
The book provides many interesting examples regarding the Piraha language: there are only 11 or so phonemes in Piraha (compared to 44 in English), pitch in Piraha words constitute different communication "channels" (musical speech, hum speech, etc.), and (to me most fascinating) the presence of suffixes for "evidentials":
Perhaps the most interesting suffixes, however (though these are not unique to Pirahã), are what linguists call evidentials, elements that represent the speaker’s evaluation of his or her knowledge of what he or she is saying. There are three of these in Pirahã: hearsay, observation, and deduction. To see what these do, let’s use an English example. If I ask you, “Did Joe go fishing?” you could answer, “Yes, at least I heard that he did,” or “Yes, I know because I saw him leave,” or “Yes, at least I suppose he did because his boat is gone.” The difference between English and Pirahã is that what English does with a sentence, Pirahã does with a verbal suffix.
Isn't this SO COOL?!?
This "evidential" aspect of language is tied to/explained by the fact that Piraha language and culture are constrained by immediate experience -- facts are only considered facts by the Pirahas if there's an eyewitness, which also helps explain why all efforts to convert Pirahas have failed over more than 200 years. The author himself, a missionary, ended up being un-converted.
Overall, I really enjoyed this read -- Everett did a surprisingly good job of giving enough rigorous explanations on the classic linguistic theories he is challenging. What I also like was how Everett depicts Pirahas culture and people in a matter-of-fact and non-judgemental way, especially in aspects that are certainly deemed at least controversial in western cultures. Finally, the last practical message of the book is the importance of preserving endangered languages:
The view of this book is that every language and culture pair shows us something unique about the way that one subset of our species has evolved to deal with the world around it. Each people solves linguistic, psychological, social, and cultural problems in different ways. When a language dies without documentation, we lose a piece of the puzzle of the origin of human language. But perhaps more important, humanity loses an example of how to live, of how to survive in the world around us.
liralen's review against another edition
3.0
Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes has been on my radar for years and years—I think my father read it not long after it was published, in fact, and thought I might enjoy it. I wonder what I might have made of it then, when I'd read so much less of this sort of thing (anthropology-lite?) than I have now.
Everett spent years living with (on and off) the Pirahã people in Brazil, learning their customs and—his primary work—their language. Initially there as a missionary (disguised as an academic), he underwent a gradual change of belief as he learnt just how different the Pirahã worldview could be from his own and thought about what that meant for his broader understanding. Gradually, too, he became one of a very few people who speak the Pirahã language.
But: As with [b:The Forest People|159882|The Forest People|Colin M. Turnbull|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1172281494l/159882._SY75_.jpg|154313], I have a distinct sense that some of the takeaways would have been different—or at least differently explored—if the book had been written by a woman. Everett was accompanied by his wife and three children during this fieldwork, though they are very minor side characters (perhaps because the marriage, as Everett tells us at the very end, did not survive his loss of faith). But listen to this:
On a different note, I'd have been very curious to know more about how Everett's family played into his experience with the Pirahãs and with his research. Again, I suspect that their limited visibility in the book is partly/largely due to strained relations, but I am curious: was it helpful, when learning a language from scratch (with nobody able to translate), to have children who must have learnt in a more native-speaker way? (Did his children learn to speak Pirahã fluently?) Were they ever called upon to translate? What were their daily lives like? Everett's children, he says, made friends amongst their age group—what sorts of activities did they do together? What did Everett's wife do while Everett was studying the language or off doing manly-man things with the men?
I hope someday one of Everett's kids writes his or her own memoir about their time with the Pirahãs, because I bet it would be fascinating.
Everett spent years living with (on and off) the Pirahã people in Brazil, learning their customs and—his primary work—their language. Initially there as a missionary (disguised as an academic), he underwent a gradual change of belief as he learnt just how different the Pirahã worldview could be from his own and thought about what that meant for his broader understanding. Gradually, too, he became one of a very few people who speak the Pirahã language.
One of the things about Pirahã that immediately fascinated me was the lack of what linguists call “phatic” communication—communication that primarily functions to maintain social and interpersonal channels, to recognize or stroke, as some refer to it, one’s interlocutor. Expressions like hello, goodbye, how are you?, I’m sorry, you’re welcome, and thank you don’t express or elicit new information about the world so much as they maintain goodwill and mutual respect. The Pirahã culture does not require this kind of communication. Pirahã sentences are either requests for information (questions), assertions of new information (declarations), or commands, by and large. There are no words for thanks, I’m sorry, and so on. I have become used to this over the years and forget most of the time how surprising this can be to outsiders. Anytime someone visits the Pirahãs with me, they ask how to say these things. And they stare suspiciously at me when I say that the Pirahãs have no such forms of communication. (20)Some of the information about language I found fascinating (as above); in other places (as with the extended discussion of recursion) I felt my eyes glazing over a bit—but then, I am no linguist. I was more interested in the points Everett makes about what the way the Pirahã language is put together says about the Pirahã culture.
But: As with [b:The Forest People|159882|The Forest People|Colin M. Turnbull|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1172281494l/159882._SY75_.jpg|154313], I have a distinct sense that some of the takeaways would have been different—or at least differently explored—if the book had been written by a woman. Everett was accompanied by his wife and three children during this fieldwork, though they are very minor side characters (perhaps because the marriage, as Everett tells us at the very end, did not survive his loss of faith). But listen to this:
Aggression is observed from time to time, from mild to severe (Keren witnessed a gang rape of a young unmarried girl by most of the village men). But aggression is never condoned and it is very rare. (99)This casual mention of gang rape—never discussed again—is mind-boggling to me. It's true that in most of the rest of the book, aggression is depicted as unusual, but throwing a mention of a gang rape involving 'most of the village men' in, casually, while trying to suggest that aggression isn't condoned...? That warrants far, far more discussion than a parenthetical. Too, when Everett tells us (as part of a discussion on children being seen as small adults) that So long as children are not forced or hurt, there is no prohibition against their participating in sex with adults (120), the example he gives is of a pre-pubescent girl with a 'man in his late thirties' (120), and I wonder where boys fit into this scenario; whether they too are sexualised young in Pirahã society. It's not that Everett needs to pass judgement there (not his job to change a culture that is not his), but it's...uncomfortable...to see such things (such gendered things) taken so much at face value. But violence against anyone, children or adults, is unacceptable to the Pirahãs (122), says Everett. What, then, if any, is the fallout when there is violence (like, to pull a totally random example, the gang rape of a young girl)?
On a different note, I'd have been very curious to know more about how Everett's family played into his experience with the Pirahãs and with his research. Again, I suspect that their limited visibility in the book is partly/largely due to strained relations, but I am curious: was it helpful, when learning a language from scratch (with nobody able to translate), to have children who must have learnt in a more native-speaker way? (Did his children learn to speak Pirahã fluently?) Were they ever called upon to translate? What were their daily lives like? Everett's children, he says, made friends amongst their age group—what sorts of activities did they do together? What did Everett's wife do while Everett was studying the language or off doing manly-man things with the men?
I hope someday one of Everett's kids writes his or her own memoir about their time with the Pirahãs, because I bet it would be fascinating.
ben_smitty's review against another edition
4.0
As interesting as it was frustrating. Everett's got a bit of beef with Chomsky, and his attempts to disprove Chomsky (which takes over like 1/3 of the book?) is a little distracting when it comes to understanding his theory on how cultures can limit the emergence of language that serve no practical purpose.
Still, Everett's a talented storyteller, and his retelling of the struggles he went through with his family as missionaries are raw and difficult to read; he doesn't glamorize the sufferings he endured. There is no "silver lining" when his family almost dies of malaria with no doctor in town. I suspect his refusal to reassure his readers that everything will be okay stems from his abandonment of his faith, but I've never read an account so real without any attempts at abstracting away the difficulties of living life as a missionary.
Still, Everett's a talented storyteller, and his retelling of the struggles he went through with his family as missionaries are raw and difficult to read; he doesn't glamorize the sufferings he endured. There is no "silver lining" when his family almost dies of malaria with no doctor in town. I suspect his refusal to reassure his readers that everything will be okay stems from his abandonment of his faith, but I've never read an account so real without any attempts at abstracting away the difficulties of living life as a missionary.
natgeographic's review against another edition
5.0
As someone who is interested in language, culture, and missions, this book was extremely interesting! He explains enough that a non-linguist or non-anthropologist would still understand it well. Kind of frightening to read about a Bible translator who abandons the faith but it was still a valuable perspective to me.
claudia_is_reading's review against another edition
4.5
Well, talk about going native!
I must say that my own ugly prejudices almost led me to ditch this book when I learn that the author was a missionary; I thought it was going to be condescending and paternalist. Boy, I was wrong!
I really found fascinating the evolution of the author in his vision of... well, everything, to be honest. The book is full of anecdotal stories, anthropological bits and, at some point, very heavy in linguistics (which I adore, mostly because he says that Chomsky is wrong :P) and a lot of philosophical contemplation about happiness and the pertinence of God on achieving it. (Spoiler: none at all)
Thought-provoking and mind-opening, this was a very interesting read and I really enjoyed it. I think that the audiobook format is the best way to appreciate it, though. Hearing how the Pirahas language sounds, so different to all that we know, is truly amazing
I must say that my own ugly prejudices almost led me to ditch this book when I learn that the author was a missionary; I thought it was going to be condescending and paternalist. Boy, I was wrong!
I really found fascinating the evolution of the author in his vision of... well, everything, to be honest. The book is full of anecdotal stories, anthropological bits and, at some point, very heavy in linguistics (which I adore, mostly because he says that Chomsky is wrong :P) and a lot of philosophical contemplation about happiness and the pertinence of God on achieving it. (Spoiler: none at all)
Thought-provoking and mind-opening, this was a very interesting read and I really enjoyed it. I think that the audiobook format is the best way to appreciate it, though. Hearing how the Pirahas language sounds, so different to all that we know, is truly amazing
"'The Pirahas know that you left your family and your own land to come here and live with us. We know that you do this to tell us about Jesus. You want us to live like Americans. But the Pirahas do not want to live like Americans. We like to drink. We like more than one woman. We don't want Jesus. But we like you. You can stay with us. But we don't want to hear any more about Jesus. OK?'"
Kind of a nice resume of 30 years of work *laughs*
marcasdeb's review against another edition
funny
informative
inspiring
lighthearted
medium-paced
4.0
spacestationtrustfund's review against another edition
1.0
Read this one ages ago and absolutely loathed it in every way possible, from the poor ethnography to the racism and misogyny; full RTC when I have time lol.