Язык пираха: простота, особенности и влияние на мышление

Muran language

The Pirahã language is one of the phonologically simplest languages known, comparable to Rotokas (New Guinea) and the Lakes Plain languages such as Obokuitai. There is a claim that Pirahã has as few as ten phonemes, one fewer than Rotokas, or even as few as nine for women, but this requires analyzing as an underlying and having /h/ invariably substituted for /s/ in female speech. Although such a phenomenon is odd cross linguistically, Ian Maddieson has found in researching Pirahã data that does indeed exhibit an unusual distribution in the language. The "ten phoneme" claim also does not consider the tones of Pirahã, at least two of which are phonemic (marked by an acute accent and either unmarked or marked by a grave accent in Daniel Everett), bringing the number of phonemes to at least twelve. Sheldon (1988) claims three tones, high (¹), mid (²) and low (³).

When languages have inventories as small and allophonic variation as great as in Pirahã and Rotokas, different linguists may have very different ideas as to the nature of their phonological systems.

Pirahã has a few loan words, mainly from Portuguese. Pirahã kóópo ("cup") is from the Portuguese word copo, and bikagogia ("business") comes from Portuguese mercadoria ("merchandise").

Everett (2005) says that the Pirahã culture has the simplest known kinship system of any human culture.

There is also a claim that Pirahã lacks any unique color terminology, being one of the few cultures (mostly in the Amazon basin and New Guinea) that only have specific words for 'light' and 'dark' if that claim is true. Although the Pirahã glossary in Daniel Everett's Ph. D. thesis includes a list of color words (p. 354), Everett (2006) now says that the items listed in this glossary are not in fact words but descriptive phrases (such as "(like) blood" for "red").

The concept of linguistic relativity postulates a relationship between the language a person speaks and how that person understands the world. The conclusions about the significance of Pirahã numeracy and linguistic relativity in Frank et al. (2008) are quoted below. In short, in this study the Pirahã were – by and large – able to match exact quantities of objects set before them (even larger quantities), but had difficulty matching exact quantities when larger quantities were set before them and then hidden from view before they were asked to match them. A total lack of exact quantity language did not prevent the Pirahã from accurately performing a task which relied on the exact numerical equivalence of large sets. This evidence argues against the strong Whorfian claim that language for number creates the concept of exact quantity. [ ] Instead, the case of Pirahã suggests that languages that can express large, exact cardinalities have a more modest effect on the cognition of their speakers: They allow the speakers to remember and compare information about cardinalities accurately across space, time, and changes in modality. [ ] Thus, the Pirahã understand the concept of one (in spite of having no word for the concept). Additionally, they appear to understand that adding or subtracting one from a set will change the quantity of that set, though the generality of this knowledge is difficult to assess without the ability to label sets of arbitrary cardinality using number words. (emphasis added)

Being concerned that, because of this cultural gap, they were being cheated in trade, the Pirahã people asked Daniel Everett to teach them basic numeracy skills. After eight months of enthusiastic but fruitless daily study with Everett, the Pirahã concluded that they were incapable of learning the material and discontinued the lessons. Not a single Pirahã had learned to count up to ten or even to add 1 + 1. Everett argues that test subjects are unable to count for two cultural reasons and one formal linguistic reason. First, they are nomadic hunter gatherers with nothing to count and hence no need to practice doing so. Second, they have a cultural constraint against generalizing beyond the present, which eliminates number words. Third, since, according to some researchers, numerals and counting are based on recursion in the language, the absence of recursion in their language entails a lack of counting. That is, it is the lack of need that explains both the lack of counting ability and the lack of corresponding vocabulary. However, Everett does not claim that the Pirahãs are cognitively incapable of counting.

Everett states that most of the remaining Pirahã speakers are monolingual, knowing only a few words of Portuguese. The anthropologist Marco Antônio Gonçalves, who lived with the Pirahã for 18 months over several years, writes that "Most men understand Portuguese, though not all of them are able to express themselves in the language. Women have little understanding of Portuguese and never use it as a form of expression. The men developed a contact 'language' or pidgin that allowed them to communicate with regional populations, mixing words from Pirahã, Portuguese and the Amazonian Língua Geral known as Nheengatu." Everett states that the Pirahã use a very rudimentary Portuguese lexicon with Pirahã grammar when speaking Portuguese and that their Portuguese is so limited to very specific topics that they are rightly called monolingual, without contradicting Gonçalves (since they can communicate on a very narrow range of topics using a very restricted lexicon). Future research on developing bilingualism (Pirahã Portuguese) in the community, along the lines of Sakel and Gonçalves, will provide valuable data for the discussion on speakers' grammatical competence (e. g. regarding the effect of culture). Although Gonçalves quotes whole stories told by the Pirahã, Everett (2009) claims that the Portuguese in these stories is not a literal transcription of what was said, but a free translation from the pidgin Portuguese of the Pirahã. In a 2012 study, Jeanette Sakel studied the use of Portuguese by a group of Pirahã speakers and reported that, when speaking Portuguese, most Pirahã speakers employ simple syntactic constructions, but some more proficient speakers utilize constructions that could be analysed as complex constructions, such as subordinating conjunctions and complement clauses.