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A review by trangham283
Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle by Daniel L. Everett
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).
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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.