Амазония орманындағы Пираха тайпасы

Ethnic group in the Amazon Rainforest

The Pirahã (pronounced ) are an indigenous people of the Amazon Rainforest in Brazil. They are the sole surviving subgroup of the Mura people, and are hunter gatherers. They live mainly on the banks of the Maici River in Humaitá and Manicoré in the state of Amazonas. as of 2018, they number 800 individuals. The Pirahã people do not call themselves Pirahã but instead the Híaitíihi or Hiáitihí, roughly translated as "the straight ones." The Pirahã speak the Pirahã language. They call any other language "crooked head". Daniel Everett states that one of the strongest Pirahã values is no coercion; one does not tell other people what to do. However, on seeing a novelty such as an airplane, a child may make a model of it, which may be soon discarded. According to Everett, the Pirahã have no concept of a supreme spirit or god, and they lost interest in Jesus when they discovered that Everett had never seen him. They require evidence based on personal experience for every claim made. In addition to a formal school being introduced to the culture, the documentary also reported that the Brazilian government installed a modern medical clinic, electricity and television in the remote area.

Anthropological linguist Daniel Everett, who wrote the first Pirahã grammar, claims that there are related pairs of curiosities in their language and culture. After working with the language for 30 years, Everett states that it has no relative clauses or grammatical recursion. Everett points out that there is recursion of ideas: that in a story, there may be subordinate ideas inside other ideas. He also pointed out that different experts have different definitions of recursion. If the language lacks grammatical recursion, then it is proposed as a counterexample to the theory proposed by Chomsky, Hauser and Fitch (2002) that recursion is a feature which all human languages must have. Pirahã is perhaps second only to Rotokas in New Guinea for the distinction of having the fewest phonemes of any of the world's languages. Women sometimes pronounce s as h, reducing the inventory further still. the language has no cardinal or ordinal numbers. Some researchers, such as Peter Gordon of Columbia University, claim that the Pirahã are incapable of learning numeracy. His colleague, Daniel L. Everett, on the other hand, argues that the Pirahã are cognitively capable of counting; they simply choose not to do so. They believe that their culture is complete and does not need anything from outside cultures. Everett says, "The crucial thing is that the Pirahã have not borrowed any numbers—and they want to learn to count. They asked me to give them classes in Brazilian numbers, so for eight months I spent an hour every night trying to teach them how to count. And it never got anywhere, except for a few of the children. Some of the children learned to do reasonably well, but as soon as anybody started to perform well, they were sent away from the classes. It was just a fun time to eat popcorn and watch me write things on the board." It is suspected that the language's entire pronoun set was recently borrowed from one of the Tupí–Guaraní languages, and that before that the language may have had no pronouns whatsoever. Many linguists, however, find this claim questionable due to lack of evidence. However, if there had been pronouns at an earlier stage of Pirahã, this would not affect Everett's claim of the significance of the system's simplicity today. There are few Tupi–Guaraní loanwords in areas of the lexicon more susceptible to borrowing (such as nouns referring to cultural items, for instance).