Li sobre o assunto, pela primeira vez, na Folha de Sao Paulo. Segue a materia do The New Yorker.

A Reporter at Large
The Interpreter
Has a remote Amazonian tribe upended our understanding of language?
by John Colapinto April 16, 2007
Keywords
Piraha;


Brazil
A REPORTER AT LARGE about Dan Everett’s research on the language of the Piraha tribe in the Amazon. One morning last July, in the rainforest of northwestern Brazil, the writer and Dan Everett, an American linguistics professor at Illinois State University, stepped onto a beach bordering the Maici River, where 30 members of the Piraha tribe responded to the sight of Everett with a greeting that sounded like a profusion of exotic songbirds, a melodic chattering scarcely discernible as human speech. Based on just 8 consonants and 3 vowels, Piraha has one of the simplest sound systems known. Speakers can dispense with vowels and consonants altogether and sing, hum, or whistle conversations. The language is so confounding to non-natives that until Everett and his wife, Keren, arrived among the Piraha, as Christian missionaries, in the 1970s, no outsider had succeeded in mastering it. The Piraha consider all forms of human discourse other than their own to be laughably inferior. Everett’s work on them remained relatively obscure until early 2005, when he posted an article on his Web site, which was published that fall in Cultural Anthropology. The Piraha, Everett wrote, have no numbers, no fixed color terms, no perfect tense, no deep memory, no tradition of art, and no common terms of quantification. His most explosive claim was that Piraha displays no evidence of recursion, the linguistic operation of embedding one phrase inside another. Noam Chomsky has argued that recursion is the cornerstone of a “universal grammar” shared by all languages. Steven Pinker calls Everett’s paper “a bomb thrown into the party.” Everett, once a devotee of Chomskyan linguistics, insists not only that Piraha counters Chomsky’s theory but that it’s not an isolated case. Mentions evolutionary biologist Tecumseh Fitch, who in 2002 co-authored an important paper with Chomsky on recursion. Fitch and his cousin Bill visited the Piraha village at the same time as the writer and Everett. Describes Everett’s background. In 1976, Everett enrolled with Keren in the Summer Institute of Linguistics (S.I.L.), an international evangelical organization. Mentions Columbia University linguist Peter Gordon. In 1978, around the same time that Everett discovered Chomsky’s theories, the Everetts moved to a Piraha village in Brazil. According to the best estimates, the Piraha arrived in the Amazon between 11,000 and 30,000 years ago. In 1983, Everett published a book on the Piraha language replete with Chomskyan linguistic diagrams. By the late 1980s, Everett was increasingly troubled by the idiosyncrasies of Piraha, none of which were addressed by Chomskyan linguistics. In the early 1990s, he began exploring the work of linguists who’d preceded Chomsky, including Edward Sapir. Everett became convinced that culture played a far greater role in linguistics than Chomsky’s theory accounted for. In the fall of 1999, he quit his job and moved back to Brazil, where he stayed until 2002. In 2005, he and Keren separated. Mentions Peter Gordon’s 2004 Science paper. Everett’s Cultural Anthropology article stresses that the Piraha do not think, or speak, in abstractions. Last April, Chomsky rejected Everett’s argument. Mentions David Pesetsky’s paper countering Everett’s claims. Chomsky has expressed little interest in language origins, and the Piraha may provide a snapshot of language at an earlier stage of development. Describes Tecumseh Fitch’s experiments with the Piraha, which are based on Chomsky’s grammar hierarchy. Mentions the movie “King Kong.” Keren Everett claims that the key to learning the Piraha language is the tribe’s singing, which provides a “prosody” that teaches the language to Piraha children