from Hacker News

Brazil's Pirahã Tribe: Living Without Numbers or Time (2006)

by vytis on 12/19/14, 2:45 PM with 30 comments

• by ubernostrum on 12/19/14, 7:24 PM

  I keep seeing these types of articles.

  Then I keep seeing comments and links debunking them (example: http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/...) and saying that the claims about the Piraha tend to be wildly exaggerated based on whose agenda (read: radically pro- or anti-relativism) the claims would end up supporting.

  At this point I don't believe anything I read about the Piraha.

• by state on 12/19/14, 7:27 PM

  I love this story.

  This talk (by Everett) is a lot of fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNajfMZGnuo

• by kylebgorman on 12/19/14, 8:35 PM

  The absence of recursion would not actually "refute Chomsky" (whatever the hell that means; it's not like Chomsky only has one angle). "Universal grammar" just means "whatever linguists think all human languages have in common", it would just mean that clausal recursion is not one of these things.

• by ExpiredLink on 12/19/14, 8:56 PM

  > Are we only capable of creating thoughts for which words exist?

  "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." Wittgenstein