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For example, in the previously mentioned case of creoles, Pinker seems to be relying on Bickerton's work which is not by any means established fact. Some linguists (such as Dell Hymes) think that the grammar of creoles are basically derived from one of the parent languages and not, as seems to be suggested, created by child native speakers of creole.
The little I know about this is from an old issue of Spektrum der Wissenschaft where there was an article about comparison of syntax in various creole languages, and the point was that all creole languages have the same syntax, and it does not matter which language is the mother language; it could be English, Spanish, Portuguese, or even Chinese (if I remember correctly).
I might be able to locate the issue, if pressed, but not right away!
That's a good question. In Deutscher's Through the Language Glass he suggests maybe, but evidence is not really available for it. Most of these things are pretty conjectural, but Deutscher argues that whereas, say, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is almost certainly bunk - i.e the idea that our language determines what we think - Deutscher comes up with something he calls the Boaz-Jakobson Hypothesis which he says is what our languages essentially force us to say. The example he gave from Roman Jakobson is to do with translation, so whereas in one language if I said, "I had dinner with my neighbour", he needn't say whether his neighbour is male or female. But in other languages this is not possible. For translators this kind of thing can cause a few problems in terms of how to deliberately retain some wanted ambiguity or else to deliberately suggest some associations which are lost if translating from one language to another.
In some languages, I think he says Matses - a South American language - when someone is asked how many wives they have they are constrained by their language to say something like "Two, last time I checked" if the two wives are not around. Apparently! (I must admit I find some of this a little hard to swallow.) But Deutscher seems to believe from this that perhaps a particular language could influence habits of mind if the question of evidence is at all times present in the language as perhaps it prevents vagueness of expression or forces the speaker to explain at all times why they think what they do. Again, I would imagine that there must be ways around this, but maybe...maybe...
Everett seems to suggest that part of the reason he couldn't convert the Piraha to Christianity, when he was a missionary, and one of the reasons for him also losing his own faith was that the Piraha could see absolutely no evidentiary basis for believing in Jesus. Not necessarily because they were thinking more skeptically as such but because there was no plausible way of putting the idea across.
Anyway, this seems to be what he is saying in this video clip:
I love it! If they have to make these distinctions in every statement, I cannot think how this cannot affect their world view. Maybe not in the way I would like, but at least they put things out in the open that we tend to leave out.
Everett seems to suggest that part of the reason he couldn't convert the Piraha to Christianity, when he was a missionary, and one of the reasons for him also losing his own faith was that the Piraha could see absolutely no evidentiary basis for believing in Jesus. Not necessarily because they were thinking more skeptically as such but because there was no plausible way of putting the idea across.
Anyway, this seems to be what he is saying in this video clip:
I think I also read that they had no actual past tense, and it was very difficult for them to express things in the past. In the example he gives about Jesus, it is clear that the Pirahã do not think further back than close relatives and friends. This alone makes it difficult to produce evidence on ancient hearsay.
I think I also read that they had no actual past tense, and it was very difficult for them to express things in the past. In the example he gives about Jesus, it is clear that the Pirahã do not think further back than close relatives and friends. This alone makes it difficult to produce evidence on ancient hearsay.
Well, I would be a bit careful of attributing too much to what people can think about the past based on what tenses the language has. English has no future tense, in my opinion, but it doesn't mean that English speakers cannot talk about the future. In my own view it would probably make more sense to say that much of the ancient past is pretty much irrelevant to speech communities that have no written history and who may not need to talk about anything going back more than a few generations.
From what I remember, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis was largely based on some rather dubious (or even outright false) assumptions about how, say, the Hopi tribes think about time based on their language.
So, what I mean is that the culture probably affects the language rather than the other way around.
ETA: It looks like a full video of Everett's talk is available on Fora TV. I haven't watched it yet, but it seems from the chapter headings to be mostly about the Piraha language, although the wider context is endangered languages.
In some languages, I think he says Matses - a South American language - when someone is asked how many wives they have they are constrained by their language to say something like "Two, last time I checked" if the two wives are not around. Apparently!
I suppose that if the wives aren't around there's no way to be certain that one of them hasn't just died from a snakebite or something since the last time you saw them, so they can't know for a fact that they still have two wives.
I just found a Q&A session about the documentary "Grammar of Happiness" with Daniel Everett taking questions about the Pirahã, their language and the broader "controversy" on recursion and universal grammar.
He suggests that the reasons for him being blocked access to the Pirahã people comes down to corruption in the Brazilian government.
Some of the questions he gets from the audience are a bit snarky, I think, but he deals with them well.
I haven't seen the documentary, but I have read the book which is pretty interesting, if a little repetitive. Sometimes whole paragraphs seem to be repeated in the book, even paragraph-long quotes from others, such as the definition of culture, are repeated, but it is an interesting overview of the argument he is having with UG proponents, and he makes a good case for saying that the concept is probably unnecessary.
He also points out here, and in the book, that a heavy focus on sentence-level analysis of language is one of the main flaws of a lot of linguistics.
Originally Posted by angrysoba
I think that the best place for the linguistics stuff is on the thread that is linked to in the OP, but thanks for the link to the article. <snip>
I agree, but for my part, I see no productive way to discuss these matters without agreement on a theory of syntax and extensive rules for interpretation and proper eliciting of field data from competent informants, which amounts to little more than native speakers' fallible intuitions. So, in my experience such arcane debates about linguistic universals, while lots of fun, cannot be scientific, as no one yet has come up with a proper theory of syntactic structure of natural language.
The linked paper by Everett is just a very loose series of linguistic examples, hardly a syntactic description, and cultural and personality based observations.
Perhaps I skimmed too lightly. I have no idea what the diacritics mean, where the morphological boundaries are, whether Pirahã is a tone language, what phonetic alphabet he uses, how the phonology interacts with morphology, nor what the phonemic inventory is, let alone how many competent informants he used. It's almost impossible to debate these sorts of theoretical claims absent much more information, and one must simply decide the plausibility on the basis of an opinion of what he has written.
I don't think that it is "impossible" for culture to shape grammar, according to universal grammar, from what I understand of it. In fact the specific grammar that a person speaks will almost be completely determined by the culture a person grows up in.
Yes, that confused me, too. Such a claim directly contradicts Chomsky's model: that an organic/biological 'universal' grammar is progressively suppressed by culturally learned grammar during early childhood. It sounds like the author of that piece has no idea what he's talking about... something's been lost in translation somewhere.
The hypothesis can't really be tested by comparing adults from culture to culture - scientists have to monitor changes in grammar as children learn different cultural languages. They're looking for signs of a 'shared infant language'.
With this in mind, it is possible that an outlier culture can even suppress innate time tenses or recursive sentence modification. I mean: why not?
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