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Skepticism is usually warranted about claims that <super obscure language> has a <really unique feature> or doesn't have <really common concept>. Linguists lik

Skepticism is usually warranted about claims that <super obscure language> has a <really unique feature> or doesn't have <really common concept>. Linguists like to publish this kind of thing because it's catchy, but many of these claims don't stand up to closer scrutiny. A few examples: * Daniel Everett made an entire career out of claiming various dubious things about the Piraha language, including that it has no colors other than light/dark, lacks recursion and has phonemes used in no other language on the planet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language#Unusual_features_of_the_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language#Unusual_f... * Guugu Yimithirr supposedly only has absolute directions (north, west, etc, instead of left, right) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guugu_Yimithirr_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guugu_Yimithirr_language

Tainnor 4y ago
Nobody knows anything about Everett's claims, because they're so outlandish and nobody has been able to verify them. But the absolute directions in GY are well-established, and not really all that unusual cross-linguistically. Relative directions also play a minor role in a number of other smaller languages.
macleginn 4y ago
The second claim is much less radical than the first one. In many small communities, absolute directions (often based on local landmarks rather than abstract cardinal directions) are perfectly reasonable, but these systems have to be recalibrated when speakers migrate. Viking migrations and their interaction with speakers of Greenlandic Inuit is an interesting case outside Australia: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03740463.2017.1317918 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03740463.2017.1...
bradrn 4y ago
This is a problem with press coverage much more so than linguistics. As usual when they cover things they’re not familiar with, journalists often wildly exaggerate these claims to make them sound more interesting. By contrast, from what I’ve seen of the linguistic literature, actual linguists tend to be fairly measured in their assessments of languages, and generally support their arguments with evidence. For instance, we have more than enough evidence that Guugu Yimithirr really does only have absolute directions [0]; there are of course some subtleties in how they are applied, but either way it undoubtedly has no words corresponding to relative directions. This isn’t even too rare, either — e.g. many languages of Vanuatu are exactly the same [1]. Everett is the only case I can think of where there genuinely has been the sort of wild exaggeration more often found in the press. (Though even there, I suspect his critics have been looking rather more at the predictions of Chomskyan formal syntax than at what’s actually happening. It wouldn’t be the first time.) [0] Haviland 2008, Guugu Yimithirr Cardinal Directions: https://doi.org/10.1525/eth.1998.26.1.25 https://doi.org/10.1525/eth.1998.26.1.25 [1] François 2005, The ins and outs of up and down: Disentangling the nine geocentric space systems of Torres and Banks languages: http://alex.francois.online.fr/data/AlexFrancois_2015_North-Vanuatu-space-directionals.pdf http://alex.francois.online.fr/data/AlexFrancois_2015_North-...
deleted 4y ago
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Tainnor 4y ago

Nobody knows anything about Everett's claims, because they're so outlandish and nobody has been able to verify them. But the absolute directions in GY are well-established, and not really all that unusual cross-linguistically. Relative directions also play a minor role in a number of other smaller languages.

macleginn 4y ago

The second claim is much less radical than the first one. In many small communities, absolute directions (often based on local landmarks rather than abstract cardinal directions) are perfectly reasonable, but these systems have to be recalibrated when speakers migrate. Viking migrations and their interaction with speakers of Greenlandic Inuit is an interesting case outside Australia: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03740463.2017.1317918 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03740463.2017.1...

bradrn 4y ago

This is a problem with press coverage much more so than linguistics. As usual when they cover things they’re not familiar with, journalists often wildly exaggerate these claims to make them sound more interesting. By contrast, from what I’ve seen of the linguistic literature, actual linguists tend to be fairly measured in their assessments of languages, and generally support their arguments with evidence. For instance, we have more than enough evidence that Guugu Yimithirr really does only have absolute directions [0]; there are of course some subtleties in how they are applied, but either way it undoubtedly has no words corresponding to relative directions. This isn’t even too rare, either — e.g. many languages of Vanuatu are exactly the same [1]. Everett is the only case I can think of where there genuinely has been the sort of wild exaggeration more often found in the press. (Though even there, I suspect his critics have been looking rather more at the predictions of Chomskyan formal syntax than at what’s actually happening. It wouldn’t be the first time.) [0] Haviland 2008, Guugu Yimithirr Cardinal Directions: https://doi.org/10.1525/eth.1998.26.1.25 https://doi.org/10.1525/eth.1998.26.1.25 [1] François 2005, The ins and outs of up and down: Disentangling the nine geocentric space systems of Torres and Banks languages: http://alex.francois.online.fr/data/AlexFrancois_2015_North-Vanuatu-space-directionals.pdf http://alex.francois.online.fr/data/AlexFrancois_2015_North-...

deleted 4y ago

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