Amazing. This reads like a contrived science fiction story, but it's true (maybe it's just that the science fiction I've read is based on "alien" cultures on Ea

Amazing. This reads like a contrived science fiction story, but it's true (maybe it's just that the science fiction I've read is based on "alien" cultures on Earth - like the gaits in "walking with dinosaurs" made me think that birds walk like dinosaurs. But they based the gait on birds.). > But what if a language didn't show recursion? ... First of all, it would mean that the language is not infinite A regular language (like a* b) is infinite, but not recursive --- But he's probably not using a mathematical regular expression, but a Chomsky Hierarchy type-3 regular grammar (like A -> aA, A-> b), which is recursive. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy#The_hierarchy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy#The_hierarchy > Pirahã doesn't have expressions like "John's brother's house" ... you have to say "John has a brother. This brother has a house" It seems very technical to say that this means the language isn't recursive, because that's only true at the sentence level. It seems to have the quality of recursion, but at the multi-sentence level. > If you go back to the Pirahã language, and you look at the stories that they tell, you do find recursion. You find that ideas are built inside of other ideas, and one part of the story is subordinate to another part of the story. That's not part of the grammar per se, that's part of the way that they tell their stories. So he agrees. It does seem very limiting to define a language in terms of the sentence structure. There are typical and non-typical ways for sentences to follow one another - surely that's part of the language. Of course, if your discipline has a certain structure for analyzing things (like the Chomsky Hierarchy), it's hard to think outside that structure (and harder to get it published). BTW: I think Chomsky was (and is) brilliant. > That's one of the strongest Pirahã values; no coercion; you don't tell other people what to do. > The Pirahã ... in some ways are the ultimate empiricists—they need evidence for every claim you make I like them