In the late 1970s, the anthropologist Daniel Everett was dispatched to an Amazonian tribe
with about 350 members, intending to learn their language and convert them to Christianity.
But what he realized about this language was something quite unique:
it had no words for numbers.
This tribe, because of their language, had no way of counting.
The Pirahã are the only remaining tribe of the Mura people, and have had contact
with others in Brazil for about 200 years, but they're still a mostly monolingual community.
Their language is the only one left of its family, and it's known for its strange features -
it can be whistled, cried or used in muffled "eating-speech" because of its tonality;
it has no abstract color words;
it has an inventory including some pretty wild phones;
but perhaps strangest of all is its lack of numbers.
In 1980, scared that they were being cheated when trading with outsiders,
the Pirahã insisted that Everett and his wife teach them how to count.
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Alright... now let's check in on the Pirahã, eight months later.
So, every evening in that time, Everett's entire family have been teaching the men and women of
the tribe to count in Portuguese - and - well... they've given up.
Despite showing enthusiasm and enjoyment of the lessons,
the Pirahã ultimately decided that the material was impossible for them to learn,
as still, not a single one could count to ten, or even add one plus one.
So it does seem kind of like because the Pirahã don't have numbers in their language,
this fundamentally changes their ability to grasp the concept of numbers at all...
And yes, this is sounding a lot like a theory which
predates Everett's work by nearly 40 years...
Let's talk about THAT GUY. Whorf.
In 1936, Benjamin Lee Whorf wrote his famous paper "An American Indian Model
of the Universe", in which he discusses the relationship of the Hopi tribe to time.
In popular culture, his idea has often been simplified to the catchphrase "the
Hopi have no concept of time", although he never really claims this in the paper.
It's kind of difficult to pick out what he DOES claim, actually... Whorf is kind of a bad writer.
But he does clearly believe that the Hopi experience time in a fundamentally
different way to the speaker of the "Standard Average European" language,
and he claims that the Hopi language "contains no reference to time, either explicit or implicit".
This was the basis of his theory of linguistic relativity, where from an
individual's perspective, the world is different based on the language they are experiencing it in.
Now, of course, the big problem with this theory is that it's... I mean it's just not true is it.
Enter Ekkehart Malotki, whose 600-page book "Hopi Time" lays out the Hopi concept of time,
from their calendar systems to the grammatical constructions they use
to express temporal relations in their language.
But just while Malotki was laying the myth of the "timeless Hopi" to rest, Everett was
finding what could be seen as new evidence for linguistic relativity, among the Pirahã.
But Everett's claims are not quite the same as Whorf's. The theory of linguistic relativity
claims that a person's understanding of the world changes based on the language they
speak - but the case of the Pirahã inability to count is one of expressive capabilities.
As Everett writes, "[he is] not [...] making a claim about Pirahã conceptual abilities,
but about their expression of certain concepts linguistically, and this is a crucial difference".
And lab experiments suggest that the Pirahã do have a concept of amount,
being able to match exact quantities laid before them... but lack the
system of abstractions necessary to gain counting or numeracy skills.
So does language change the way you think?
Yes, in some ways it does.
The way you experience the world?
Not as far as Everett and the Pirahã are concerned anyway.
This hasn't stopped Everett from being pretty heavily criticised though... because,
at a glance, it feels a little bit like Whorf, doesn't it.
An outside academic coming in and studying an "indigenous culture", writing about how
different THEY are from US in papers steeped in mystification and... racist vibes.
Whorf has racist vibes, I don't know how else to put it.
Everett isn't as extreme, is a much better writer,
is more careful with his words... but ultimately, is he just coming
to a Eurocentric misunderstanding of how the Pirahã express quantities?
Well, maybe? But just shouting "Eurocentric" at something isn't actually an argument.
Sure, it's a bias to be aware of - but it does
nothing to prove Everett and Frank's studies and lab experiments wrong.
The real problem here is that Everett is THE guy who knows anything about the Pirahã.
We need a greater range of opinions, more experts, more studies, more experiments...
and Everett himself wants academics to go to the Amazon basin and test his theories.
So is it possible that in 40 years' time, Everett will get his own Malotki,
who comes along with his 600-page book of how his life's work was a waste of time?
Yes, it's possible. But I still think it's pretty lazy and anti-intellectual
to respond to Everett as, say, Steven Pinker did, by saying:
"by framing his observations as an anti-Chomsky discovery rather than
at an un-PC Eurocentric condescension, Everett was able to get away with claims
that would have aroused the fury of anthropologists in any other context."
This doesn't respond to any of Everett's work, it just kind of dances around the issue? Like,
this would be an explanation as to WHY Everett would hypothetically be wrong,
but it doesn't show in any capacity that he IS.
As Everett responded when asked about Pinker's harsh words: "shame on him".
Wait, hang on, what was that Pinker said?
Chomsky? What does Chomsky have to do with anything?
Wait, woah, Chomsky hates Everett man - what's up with that? What... what happened here?