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Has a remote Amazonian tribe upended our understanding of language? (2007)
- chrispeel 6y agoArchive version: https://archive.ph/dHzkc https://archive.ph/dHzkc
- dang 6y agoIf curious, past related threads: Languages That Could Change the Way You See the World (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26224117 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26224117 - Feb 2021 (50 comments) Talking is throwing fictional worlds at one another - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24468639 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24468639 - Sept 2020 (42 comments) A Simple Structure Unites All Human Languages - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21030971 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21030971 - Sept 2019 (53 comments) ‘Anumeric’ people: when a language has no words for numbers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14697453 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14697453 - July 2017 (42 comments) Grammar isn't merely part of language (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13615273 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13615273 - Feb 2017 (68 comments) Chomsky, Wolfe and me - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13378341 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13378341 - Jan 2017 (33 comments) Has Chomsky been blown out of the water? [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12511631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12511631 - Sept 2016 (36 comments) Evidence Rebuts Chomsky's Theory of Language Learning - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12450033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12450033 - Sept 2016 (95 comments) Tom Wolfe tries to take down Darwin and Chomsky - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12402713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12402713 - Sept 2016 (12 comments) The Chomsky Puzzle - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12367289 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12367289 - Aug 2016 (78 comments) There is no language instinct (2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10612447 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10612447 - Nov 2015 (30 comments) MIT claims to have found a “language universal” that ties all languages together - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10016052 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10016052 - Aug 2015 (94 comments) Brazil's Pirahã Tribe: Living Without Numbers or Time (2006) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8772388 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8772388 - Dec 2014 (30 comments) What happens when a language has no numbers? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6569989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6569989 - Oct 2013 (53 comments) Language may shape human thought - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2812011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2812011 - July 2011 (25 comments) Pirahã: a non-Turing-complete human language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1033741 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1033741 - Jan 2010 (39 comments) How does language shape the way we think? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=804101 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=804101 - Sept 2009 (1 comment) Pirahã defies Chomsky's theory of universal grammar - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=740687 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=740687 - Aug 2009 (6 comments) Recursion and human thought - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=283678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=283678 - Aug 2008 (6 comments) MIT-led team finds language without numbers (update to earlier studies on the Piraha) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=246459 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=246459 - July 2008 (2 comments) Recursion and Human Thought: Why the Piraha Don't Have Numbers (quicktime video) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=61237 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=61237 - Sept 2007 (1 comment) Btw, there are a ton more of these; the above are just the ones that got comments.
- raihansaputra 6y agodang, do you tag topics somewhere and can pull up these summaries quickly? Or do you search for `Piraha` on the title and comments?
- fogihujy 6y agoLooks like something from a bookmark collection of someone interested in the topic.
- eindiran 6y agoI believe dang uses Algolia to search for past threads: https://hn.algolia.com/ https://hn.algolia.com/
- dang 6y agoI just use HN Search along with client-side software to make it easier to build these lists. I described this at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26158300 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26158300 but have since written more code. It's still kind of a primitive process but much faster than before.
- raihansaputra 6y agoThanks for your answer! > The endgame is probably not to fully automate these lists but to have software generate a starter version and then give the community ways to edit it. I agree. There has been a lot of recurring-interesting topics discussed on HN but there's no one place to tag them all. Relying on you/someone else to pop up and give the curated links is currently the only way for others to know what have been discussed before.
- de6u99er 6y agoWow! Thanks for all the links.
- meepmorp 6y ago14 years later, the answer is still no.
- joe_the_user 6y agoYeah, Dan Everett managed a few good years of self-promotion via his Piraha/"I have disproved Chomsky" thing but it really hasn't amounted to much. IE, 14 years later, Everett's claims about the Piraha remain unproven and pretty much hinge on him being the primary translator of it. Notice that wikipedia descriptions of Piraha are essentially descriptions of what Everett says about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language
- meepmorp 6y agoI saw him give a talk about Pirahã and recursion in 2007 or 2008, and his argument depended entirely on data that he collected and translated. Pointing that out made him really defensive; understandable, perhaps, but recursion has been found in literally every other language in the world. You can't be that surprised when people have serious reservations an argument that hinges on the validity of a tiny data set from a language that only you understand. I stopped paying attention after that, though. Maybe there's other people doing work on it now.
- raihansaputra 6y agoYeah. Possibly a black swan knowledge (every swan is white until a black one is found much later) but can't be accepted as valid until someone else verified it.
- garbagetime 6y agoDoesn't matter if some specific language lacks recursion. UG refers to a capacity of the human mind: if it happens to be the case that there is some language which does not feature recursion, that does not show that humans do not have that capacity. Just like how if there was a person somewhere who had grown up in isolation and never learned a language wouldn't show anything about UG.
- Breefield 6y agoIf you enjoy this article you may like the Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle.
- Zamicol 6y agoWouldn't the quantum of language be the idea?
- tremon 6y agoThat's a philosophical question. In the end, we don't know what came first: the word (sound), or the abstract mental image. It's quite possible that our analytic ability (the ability to perform abstract thought) evolved after the first communicative speech, simply because there is no need to form coherent abstract "ideas" if your interaction with the world consists solely of concrete objects.
- Zamicol 6y agoGenuinely asking. - Bits are the quantum of information. - Genes are the quantum of genetics. - Memes are the quantum of culture. - Action is the quantum of physics. If "idea" is the wrong word for the "quantum of human thought", what would be? I'd preemptively say "word" is a poor candidate as it is in reference to oral language. If there's a distinction for a "thought word", then that would seem appropriate, just as in computer architecture "word" is distinct. Anecdotally, I usually don't think in English words, but in my own "ideas". Related ideas carry meaning and compose thoughts. Those thoughts I then translate into oral sentences via words. Words are the quantum of speech, ideas are the quantum of thought.
- tremon 6y agoSpeaking technically about the production of human speech, the quantum would be the phoneme, the linguistic definition for a unit of sound. Words, after all, are composite objects and should therefore not be considered quantum: in written language, they are composed of letters, and in spoken language, they are composed of phonemes. But that wasn't what the OP was asking, or at least not how I interpreted the question. The question was whether thought should be considered the mechanism/substrate underpinning human language. My comment was about the relationship between thought and language, about which of those shapes the other, and to what extent they should be considered independent or universal. Yes, when we (adults) reflect on how we talk, we tend to form opinions and meanings in our head before we produce sentences. So that might lead us to conclude that thought informs language, and not the other way around. Yet children learn to speak before they learn to think, at least that's the prevailing theory in child development studies. So then "the idea" cannot be the quantum of language because it is only true for adults who have already learnt both. Then we also have evidence from cultures like the one in the article, which shows that when a language is missing certain concepts (numbers in this case), the adults who grew up in that language also lack the abstract mental capacity associated with it (counting in this case). The blanket statement "the idea is the quantum of language" implies that ideas are universal concepts, yet the evidence we have shows that ideas are shaped by one's childhood language. So, to reiterate my point: language and thought are most likely two interdependent processes, each of which shapes the other. The more interesting question is whether we should really consider them as separate processes, or whether "thought" is just a manifestation of an internal dialog with ourselves, in which "ideas" are the langauge.
- trhway 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky#Linguistic_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky#Linguistic_theory >The basis of Chomsky's linguistic theory lies in biolinguistics, the linguistic school that holds that the principles underpinning the structure of language are biologically preset in the human mind and hence genetically inherited.[150] As such he argues that all humans share the same underlying linguistic structure, irrespective of sociocultural differences.[151] In adopting this position Chomsky rejects the radical behaviorist psychology of B. F. Skinner, who viewed behavior (including talking and thinking) as a completely learned product of the interactions between organisms and their environments. that reminds a similar theory that stone axe making is a result of genetic transfer (like 'bird song') and not social transfer https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5066817/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5066817/ . Curiously if one replaces "axe" with "language" in the article it would look a lot similar as how one would go proving Chomsky linguistic theory.
- datenwolf 6y agoThere's this one sentence in the article, that – I think – may give a hint on the difficulties explaining linguigenesis if constrained in the way portrayed by the article: > The authors compared animal and human communication, eliminating the aspects of vocalization that are shared by both, and concluded that one operation alone distinguished human speech: recursion. In the course of working on the article, Fitch grew sympathetic to Chomsky’s ideas and became an articulate defender of the theory of universal grammar. "(…) distinguished human speech(…)", if you think about it, that's a weird assertion/assumption to make. The idea, that there's a clear line between human and non-human communication, as if this was something binary. We humans have this weird concept, that there's "something", that makes us fundamentally different from the rest of the animal life on this planet. Yes, we've got the largest impact on the biosphere, we can reason about it. But if you were to track back on the coginitive abilities of our evolutionary ancestors, I'd say it would be very difficult to put a hard threshold in the phylogenetic tree, where suddenly a whole subset of means of communication discretly vanishes. Just my 2 cents…
- bad_alloc 6y ago> We humans have this weird concept, that there's "something", that makes us fundamentally different from the rest of the animal life on this planet. Yes, we've got the largest impact on the biosphere, we can reason about it. But if you were to track back on the coginitive abilities of our evolutionary ancestors, I'd say it would be very difficult to put a hard threshold in the phylogenetic tree, where suddenly a whole subset of means of communication discretly vanishes. Agreed, there is no hard threshold (biology seems to avoid those anyways) but subjectively there is some sum of fuzzy attributes in humans which allows for us to achieve the highest complexity of lifestyle(?) of all lifeforms on the planet.
- linknoid 6y agoA lot of things a human can do can be found in other species, but I think the ability to read and write arbitrarily complex ideas really does set us apart, and caused a phase transition. It allows us to transmit ideas across time and space that would otherwise be lost. It allows the accumulation of knowledge that no brain is large enough to hold. Outsourcing our memories to persistent storage. Someone can write down an idea, it can be forgotten for hundreds of years, and then rediscovered and applied. It can allow one person to design something, and communicate that design to thousands of other people. Take that away, and local achievements in knowledge remain local until they are forgotten because other knowledge has takes precedent. A beaver might instinctively know how to build a dam because it's built into its DNA, but a human can read the writings of past dam builders, learn the abstract theory of dam building, come up with their own improvements, debate those changes with other people interested in dam building, communicate their design to dam builders, and publish their work to become a permanent part of dam building literature. For a beaver to change how it builds dams, it would require a change in their DNA to pass on to future generations.
- bjoli 6y agoRegardless of the discussion here, the biographical part of "don't sleep, there are snakes" is a rather good read. I was only 19 then, but I remember liking it a lot.