by Daniel Everett
(Thanks, Milt)
Wow! What a great read! There is no way to categorize this story of a Christian missionary's linguistic adventures in the Amazon jungle. What started off as another journey to bring God to the natives ended up challenging Chomsky's key theory of language. It reminded me of Barbara Kingsolver's novel, The Poisonwood Bible. (also an excellent read)
I was recommended this book by a fellow "SASer" because the author served as Academic Dean on a Semester at Sea voyage. That means, in some really distant way, I am connected to the author through the mutual experience of sailing with SAS. Speaking of...if you're interested, here is a pictorial summary of my voyage this summer. (Way to go, Melanie!)
In 1977, Daniel Everett moved his family: wife, plus 3 kids to live with a tribe in the Amazon. His goal was to understand the language so that he could translate the Bible. What ensued was a 30 year commitment to the small, forgotten tribes in the Amazon, particularly the Pirahã Indians. It is an amazing story, not to mention a familiar one myself of going to 'convert' others and in the end, you yourself are the one forever converted. (In the end, he becomes an atheist!)
The Pirahã Indians are a very peculiar people. They number fewer than 400 and have no myths, rituals or history. Their language is unrelated to any other living tongue. It can be whistled, sung, hummed or spoken. It has no words for numbers, colors, left or right, brother or sister. Understandably so, it is one of the least understood languages in the world.
The Pirahã never sleep for more than a couple of hours and talk through much of the night. They live as hunter-gatherers in villages along 50 miles of the Maici River deep in the Amazon forest. They have plenty of contact with river traders and other outsiders but display no inclination to change their ways. Everett's 30 year span with these people is beautifully captured in the book with awe-inspiring details such as his wife and daughter's battle with malaria and the night the village decided to kill him. There is so much to the story that he tells; it's excellent!
If that were the extent of the book, it would amount to an interesting travelogue, another tale of a presumptuous Westerner finding enlightenment in the depths of primitive society. The difference here is that Everett, an academic linguist, also presents a radical challenge to Noam Chomsky's theory of universal grammar, which has dominated linguistics for half a century.
Everett's findings from the tribe amount to the discovery that the language does not include recursion, the process by which relative clauses are embedded in sentences to produce an infinite set of possibilities. It's this fundamental trait, Chomsky says, that distinguishes human from animal communication. For example, instead of saying, 'The man, who was tall, came into the house,' Pirahãs say, 'The man came into the house. He was tall.' The fact that Pirahã has no recursion, Everett argues, means that there is no universal grammar, as linguists have believed for decades.
Coming from an anthropology background, I found the book to be overly fascinating and extremely well-written as an ethnography of these people. But, the inclusion of the linguistic slant took it to a new level. I've already written my 2 linguist friends and strongly recommended the book. I learned so much! I wish I had known about it in Grad. School when I was critiquing ethnography style for my own research...
Very much recommended.
You are quite the literary critic and I can't keep up with your list!
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