/lit/ - Literature

>>16116742
Because a single inbred tribes lacks some basic elements found in allmost all humans, you think this is an argument of some sort.

>>16116765
An exception to the rule of universal grammar has been found so the theory is null and void. There is no way around this.

>>16116742
they know how to paddle. have you ever even paddled subhuman?

>>16116742
Daniel Everett is a hack who is lying about half the neat stuff he makes up about Piraha. It's like when a teenager tries to pass their conlang off as a real uncontacted language.

>>16116742
Based Pirahãs BTFO Chomsky. When will he ever recover??

>>16116787
Prove it.

>>16116786
I paddle these nuts

WHAT THE FUCK

>Dr. Dave: What about homosexuality?

>Everett: There’s a lot of sexual play that’s obvious between men; and it
goes beyond just horsing around sometimes. Although they are kind of
private, I talk about this in the book – seeing my daughter who was twelve at
the time, she is in her 30s now, but she was watching two men on the floor
right in front of her with their pants down, and they weren’t having actual
sexual relations but they were coming pretty close to it, and laughing and
giggling and weren’t being modest at all, but by and large that doesn’t
happen. Sexual relations aren’t obvious in public, so how much
homosexuality there is – as I talk to the men I get evidence that most of them
are bisexual – but it’s not something that’s normally done openly in the
group. There’s a couple of guys who are fairly openly gay – every man has
to have a spouse and children – but the women have a slightly different
dialect from the men, and this one man in particular talks in the women’s
dialect.

>>16116742
why dat baby got no dick?

>>16116811
Haha wot

>>16116742
Quoting from pic related:

More to the point, it isn’t really surprising that people do not have terms for something their culture does not care about—i.e., that observation would not have sparked a whole school of thought the way Whorf’s did.

In the same way, the Pirahã tribe of the Amazon have attracted media attention as a people whose language has no words for colors, numbers, or quantification (e.g., all, every), and does not even have relative or subordinate clauses—for That’s the guy who built my house one can only say That guy—he built my house. The Pirahã prove incapable of performing even elementary mathematical tasks, and the media first jumped on this, predictably, as proof of the old-fashioned language-makes-thought notion: because the Pirahã language has no numbers, the people are rendered incapable of doing math. Again, however, this puts the cart before the horse. The Pirahã are hunter-gatherers who subsist on their own. Their lives therefore afford them no reason to manipulate precise numerical concepts, such as for trade or constructing elaborate architectural monuments. In addition, the Pirahã are an unusually incurious people (no, really, they are—consult the source in the Notes on Sources), which makes them especially uninterested in fine-grained manipulation of numerals.

A natural outcome, then, would be that their language would have no words for numbers. The magical idea that language is the issue—i.e., that they would be doing algebra if only it weren’t for the mysterious happenstance that their language has no numbers—may have more visceral oomph, but little else. The Pirahã’s chronicler, Dan Everett, concurs, despite the media’s occasionally making it seem otherwise—it’s what the Pirahã are like that shapes what their language is like, not the other way around. I’m not sure how truly interesting that, in itself, is, despite how interesting the Pirahã are themselves, as well as their language—albeit for reasons other than their grammar purportedly channeling its speakers’ thought patterns.

>>16116779
Not really, if the existence of a couple of million animal species doesnt disprove whatever that theory is, then neither does an indian tribe

>>16116742
> doesn't know about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
double-digit IQ detected

>>16116742
Imma need an ethnographic study plox. This sounds fascinating

>>16117194
whites good, shitskins bad. end of study.

>>16116742
Not being able to observe seasonal change coinciding with the changes in the stars really fucks up development, huh?

>>16117235
yeah its totally the fucking lack of snow that makes these people retarded and not their retarded shitskin genes or anything.

>>16116742
They are enlightened.

>>16116795
Chomsky blew himself the fuck out. No primitive tribe needed.

>>16116742
When westerners nuke each other, these niggas will inherit the earth. They know how to live off the land without unnecessary pampering.

>>16117164
So you're saying these people are like another species? Not of the human race?

Wasnt this "piraha people" thing a huge hoax?

>>16116742
Chomskyhonks probably have some half assed explanation for them
Universal Grammar is a LIFESTYLE for them

>>16116807
You paddle your own nuts? Impressive.

>>16116742
Even if you have a language with no names (akin to Quine's functorese or the language in Borges' Tlon) you will still need avalent predicates. One thing I personally never understood is why we should think avalent verbs are any different than names in their grammatical category. And even if you could eliminate them, you will still have predicates of predicates, which (I feel) suggests that the first predicates are playing the role of input values to Montague functions, and I personally see that as closely tied to the role of being an object. In philosophy of language Quine himself resisted second-order predication and quantification over predicates because he thought it would make them ontological. And in set theory itself, if you allow such second-order predication and quantification, you introduce these entities (sets) that behave essentially as singular entities the same as individuals do. Point being: do the Piraha really escape sharing something fundamentally in common with the rest of us just by lacking names? I think Donald Davidson's point holds: if we meet a society that genuinely can't translate our concepts into it or whose concepts we can't translate into our language, then why think they speak a language? If there are conceptual schemes there is just one, and the notion of mutually incommensurable conceptual schemes is nonsense. Davidson in this way indirectly makes space again for Chomsky's UG.

This could be such an interesting discussion, but I just can not see it happening here, OP did not even bother to mention Chomsky's or any of the other UG's responses regarding this challenge. Low effort as always, not looking to explore the idea, just wanting to start an argument.

>>16117670
This your first day here?

>>16116742
They sound fucking retarded

>>16117670
Not by a long shot. Old fag who has gone into "get off my lawn" mode.

>>16117178
Sapir-Whorf and linguistic relativity are synonyms you massive brainlet.

Let us be honest, most Africans check these boxes.

>>16117320
>Universal Grammar is a LIFESTYLE for them
It ties into their all humans are 100% the same rhetoric which is demonstrably false but if you even insinuate otherwise you're immediately labeled an evil raysis.

I hold no malice towards the Pirahã people and actually admire them on a personal level. I'm not calling them stupid when I say they don't have numbers, just that Pirahã is inadequate for the abstraction mathematics requires. Their culture has no need for counting exact quantities so they never developed counting. Pirahã is perfectly adapted to its specific niche.

>>16116742
is anyone else from CA or the southwest?
spent any significant amount of time with mexicans?
every single day I work as the only other white guy in a staff of two dozen. and it just blows my mind how backwards and low brow they are.
I mean beyond people who dont read books. beyond being illiterate.
they really just dont have the capacity for critical thought. they dont understand finite resources or anything outside their own immediate half hour of existence.
like these jungle monkeys are really gonna be the downfall of north america. it fucking blows my mind they all still believe in magic and borderline voodoo pyramid schemes.

I mean OP's image could be a picture from 2 days ago at a rio grande crossing.

>>16116742
Everything you said is either dubious or outright false, but as it happens that's totally irrelevant to UG. Because UG describes *capacity* not *actualisation of that capacity*
They easily learn other languages
Therefore their faculty is at least roughly as good as any other population's
If you started with the Greeks you wouldn't be this retarded

>>16117895
>They easily learn other languages
They literally refuse to learn Portuguese or any other languages you fucking retard.

>>16117928
You mean that they still speak their own language amongst themselves? Sure. But again, beside the point - several Piraha men have learned Portuguese to the point of fluency, therefore they have a similar faculty of language

>>16116742
You know what they REALLY didn't have? A proper anthropologist to investigate them.

>>16117942
If by "learned Portuguese" you mean adopted a handful of loanwords relating to trade like bikagogia from mercadoria, maybe.

>>16117832
Not American, but a fellow shitskin. I feel you, fucking sand monkeys, I can understand the education system is in the shitter, but even high-status Mexicans I've met have been fucking brain dead. And yes, Mexicans are quite fucking superstitious, apparently, people killed black cats. Meh could be worse, the country is not entirely braindead.

so many butthurt Chomsky dickriders in this thread

>>16117957
Everett does seem like a tard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNajfMZGnuo

>>16116883

>Again, however, this puts the cart before the horse. The Pirahã are hunter-gatherers who subsist on their own. Their lives therefore afford them no reason to manipulate precise numerical concepts, such as for trade or constructing elaborate architectural monuments.

This seems contradictory to his intent. Essentially he's saying that the culture of the Piraha people shapes their use (or lack thereof) of language. This seems to be more in-line with a functional linguist's perspective which stands in opposition to the generative linguist's.

For UG to be true and always true, then the Piraha would be able to conceive of and utilize these structural rules regardless of the way they live their lives.

>>16117976
its the corruption that gets me
central america is afghanistan/somalia level of corrupt failed state
and then I found out the jews run honduras and organize migrant caravans

>>16117832
You will find such people in every nation. Like, my country has comfortably above 100 IQ of average intelligence, but I've met people who are just unable to understand a spoken language. I once engaged in some argument with one, I stated my point and he said "that's not true, it's this way: " and he just reproduced my position with his own words..

>>16116811
>but the women have a slightly different
>dialect from the men, and this one man in particular talks in the women’s dialect.

amazing parallel

>>16118000
The moment he started talking about christianity he lost me. "Hurr durr no one alive right now ever saw Jesus, so it must all be nonsense and irrelevant" lmao what a shit take.

>>16118304
That's probably the most coherent thing he ever said.

RVTVRN TV MVNKV

>>16118209
okay but you dont have a 100 million jungle monkeys who cant speak english ruining your nation

>>16116786
Fucking based. Canoe or die