#piraha

[drlinguo]

Source

[languagefeatures]

Suffixes of Frustration

From Language The Cultural Tool by Daniel L. Everett (p. 148)

A Pirahã verb, for instance, is composed of multiple verbs put together and a series of as many as sixteen suffixes. The suffixes include things that English and Portuguese speakers would find unusual, like '-ábai,' 'frustration of an event near its end' and '-ábagaí,' 'frustration of an event at its beginning.' To illustrate these, because they are so foreign to us, consider this situation: a Pirahã man pulls back his bow; just before he releases his arrow, the bow string breaks. He would say, "I shot-ábagaí it,' meaning 'I was about to shoot it but something prevented me from shooting.' Or if he shot but missed he would say, 'I shot-ábai it.'

[linguisten]

Wisdom from Strangers | Daniel Everett | TEDxPenn For eight of the last thirty years, Daniel Everett immersed himself in the Pirahã culture, which has no counting system, no fixed terms for color, no concept of war, and no personal property. He works with the Piraha and other Amazonian people to uncover how language began, how it has evolved, and how it continues to impact our daily lives. A famed linguist, Daniel Everett is a professor of global studies and the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Bentley University in Waltham, MA. He has been the subject of a feature story in the New Yorker, a cover story in Harper’s Magazine, a Smithsonian documentary, and one of eight “masters” in Robert Greene’s NYT bestseller “Mastery.” His 2008 bestseller, Don't Sleep There are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle, has sold over 100,000 copies and been translated into 12 different languages. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx

[dsm-wannabe-linguist]

no one:

linguists analysing the pirahã phoneme inventory:

[marysocontrary1]

Pariah on Argo? 

Maybe. I noticed that the building where Alura met Lois and Clark with baby Jonathan looked familiar. That’s because of a scene with Pariah standing in front of it in one of the trailers.So I’m wondering, if after leaving Lois and Clark once baby Jon’s pod was launched, Alura ran into Pariah and she grabbed hold of him wondering what he was doing there since Argo was about to be destroyed. And just as he said I know, they both ended up disappearing from Argo. Maybe, just maybe Alura survived and is in a pocket dimension for now. 

[professorgoogoo]

I’m going to upload a series of comics that I wrote for the student newspaper

[kephas-rolling]

Talking about Untranslatability and linguistic relativity

I recently read a post entitled Untranslatability and Language Death, and I’d like to open a debate and talk about a few things that I thought were worth discussing. I would like to discuss the claim that all languages are adequately suited to express the same concepts. 

(Most of my arguments are inspired by those made by French linguist Nicolas Tournadre in his 2014 book, entitled Le Prisme des Langues, section “De la prétendue égalité des langues”.)

No language is inherently weaker than another language, and to believe that e.g. English is more suitable for scientific debates than say a near-extinct language in the Great Western Australian Desert is to misunderstand the way language functions in the first place.

This is theoretically true; a same idea can be expressed in two different languages. But not all languages are equally equipped to talk about the same things. I believe the word “weaker” used here closes the debate too early and hinders discussion. Indeed, a language is never weaker than another; the concept of linguistic weakness is baseless and preposterous. However, it would be false to claim that all languages can do the same thing as any other.

For instance, the concept of numbers is not universally spread around the globe. To take an example from Indigenous Australian languages, Warlpiri does not have the words for things that are more numerous than four. The Pirahã language possesses quantifiers for diverse quantity but has no words for exact numbers like one, two or three.  

This does not mean that speakers of these languages are unable to perceive the concept of five or are unable to have a mental representation of five people. It just means that there is a need for periphrases; “as many people as there are fingers on the hand”. As N. Tournadre makes clear (2014:191) : “[...] but in certain cases, it would require so many periphrases to translate a text, be it a short one, that the translation would turn out to be too disjointed and hardly understandable.” *

There are ways to express something even when a language lacks the words; nevertheless these languages are at a clear disadvantage to talk about numbers. A language of the Great Western Australian Desert might be as good as English for debate but Warlpiri and Pirahã are wildly ineffective when it comes to talking about a maths treaty. One has to take into account the fact that not all languages have the same depth of vocabulary. There is a fundamental lexical disparity between languages. 

As the author of the post underlines, “Ayoreo-Totobiegosode, a language spoken by some 340 people in Paraguay is as capable of adapting to changing circumstances as say English.” However, change in language can be slow. Adaption takes time. Warlpiri and Pirahã might be able to adapt to new circumstances as well as German, Japanese or Hebrew but it would actually take decades for such languages to fundamentally change their numerical system. Any language can make up for linguistic shortcomings but some adaptations might be too big to fully process.

Imagine; this would require these languages to come up with names for new numbers, decimals and ways to express numbers beyond ten if they were to follow a Base-10 approach to counting. This is a massive task that would take very long time to accomplish and even longer for speakers to start using them on a daily basis. This is what N. Tournadre (2014:191) explains “Creation and assimilation of numerous neologisms to refer to unknown concepts are however theoretically possible but could take generations. Furthermore, one must remember that numerous concerned languages are close to extinction in the near future”.

“it is important to realise that no language is better suited than another to express a certain idea.” In theory, this statement might be true but not all languages have the same way of working. A language that belongs to a relatively isolated culture, where the social organisation differs greatly from most countries today, will have problems discussing political organisation or political views. Languages are dependent on their culture to express ideas and if these cultures have not developed certain practices, it is therefore hardly possible to debate in a language that lacks the word and a culture that lacks the concepts.

Let’s go back to a maths treaty; how is the Amazonian tribe supposed to understand multiplications, divisions, squared or cubed numbers, square roots or Pi when their language does not possess any other words than quantifiers to talk about quantities? It is almost impossible for a language like Pirahã to express these ideas because they do not have the concept formulated into words. Nicolas Tournadre (2014:190) also takes the example of famous authors whose works would be very difficult to make sense of in a translation in such languages: “[...] languages have such lexical disparity and their lexical fields are so different that it would be strictly impossible to translate Proust, Dostoevsky or Marx in “small tribal languages” simply because numerous concepts do not exist.” 

So the author is fundamentally right to say that no language is worse than another to express an idea and that language have adapted, still are and always will, but certain changes require a tremendous amount of time because it touches on some of the most basic characteristics of a language. It would rewrite the linguistic DNA of these tongues. All languages are equally good to articulate ideas one after another (building arguments and showing examples, contradiction, concession) but not all ideas have words in all languages. It just means that each culture has a different experience of the world and has developed vocabulary fitting their needs. 

The issue with saying that “all languages are equal when it comes to express certain ideas” is that it is a blanket statement that falls short of accounting the wide array of specificities particular to each language. Unfortunately, I also feel like it is almost a dangerous claim to make because saying that all languages can do the same is disregarding what makes some of them special. As the author of the post suggests, untranslability is rooted in English imperialism and self-centredness but I have the feeling that this counter-argument is as equally inadequate as the initial one. The fact that languages have not developed part of their lexicon and the speakers are still able to get by every day of their life whereas, for us, it would seem impossible to live without these concepts is what makes the whole situation beautiful.

Feel free to jump in and tell me I’m wrong, I am merely opening a debate.

* I made the translations myself.

Le Prisme des Langues, Tournadre, Nicolas (2014), L’Asiathèque.

[linguisten]