They’re apparently free and no strings attached, but each of them only archives the last 100 podcasts. There are nearly 400 and none of them reaches as far back as the Pirahã episodes at #104, 105.
I looked further on the Talk the Talk page, and found that more recent episodes are listenable right on the TtT page, with a normal podcast play button.
If there is any way to access those old Pirahã podcasts anywhere, they give no indication.
The article can be downloaded at https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/000411
This is what I’ve read, that the Pirahã culture lacks particular elements that seem to suggest it’s the survivor of some cataclysm that wiped out the adults and left only the knowledge of the children who were alive at the time. But I think it was more missing cultural knowledge (like any kind of world creation myth) than language features.
Embedding applied to immediacy of experience principle? It’s elementary. “The booger that I picked yesterday is still on my hammock!” Pirahã grammar doesn’t allow you to say that? You’d have to say “I picked a booger yesterday. (full stop) It’s still on my hammock!”
OK, but I bet you that in Pirahã you can still interrupt yourself with additional information, the way everyone does when their thoughts outrace their mouth. “That booger—I picked it yesterday—it’s still on my hammock!” Now this isn’t recursion—but it’s damn close. The only thing missing is to invent the relative pronoun. Funny, isn’t it, that in English and many other languages, relative pronouns are the same words as demonstrative pronouns? It’s like demonstrative pronouns got repurposed as relative ones when recursion appeared. In fact, Pirahã may just offer valuable insight into how recursion first developed in language. One sentence incorporating another… kind of how ancient cells incorporated bacteria and they turned into mitochondria. Wow.
The more I think about it, the less I can understand Everett’s theory that syntactical embedding has *anything *to do with “immediacy of experience principle.” It’s starting to look pretty inane.
That aside, I’ve been listening to Talk the Talk’s more recent stuff, anyway, and it’s pretty enjoyable. So thanks for that.
To riff on the bolded:
The article that linguisticslinguistics (welcome aboard!) linked gives lie to the “no color terms!” conceit. What Pirahã seems to lack is abstract color terms, semantically divorced from real-life objects. Apparently, they can describe the color of objects in their language just fine – but they will do it by making some nouns pull double-duty as adjectives.
“Which looks better on me? The blood-like dress or the hyacinth-macaw-like dress?”
This is not super-different from English speakers using “gold”, “silver”, and “turquoise” to describe colors.
I don’t understand this part, since in the OP link, it has this:
They are clearly using the word “two”
According to Wikipedia, Everett initially thought their number words were “one” and “two” but later determined that it was more like “few”, “several”, and “many”.
Ah ok. Thanks!
Lots of languages have a limited color vocabulary.
The Waali language of northern Ghana only has bright (kpienga), dark (sagane), and occasionally the word for blood (jii) is used for red. They mostly just don’t describe things in terms of color.
Come to think of it, Guy Deutscher’s book The Unfolding of Language tells of a time before subordinating conjunctions were invented. On p. 223 Deutscher presents a Hittite text from the 14th century BCE, a narrative, but it consists of nothing but flat, separate clauses in a monotonous sequence, because the subordination of clauses didn’t exist yet.
I wonder if there was a significant split back then between spoken and written language?
I can’t help wondering if there was ever some kid in Hittite language arts class who got an F for using subordinating conjunctions in his “What I Did Over the Summer” essay.
I wouldn’t be surprised. I’m pretty sure at that point in history, the ability to write was limited to a small number of scribes as it was laborious to learn. Written records would be business transactions, political commentaries and treaties, and religious hymns and rituals. I doubt there’s the equivalent of Samuel Pepys’ diary buried in any of the tels. So the language available for research is highly formal and probably not indicative of ‘street’ hittite. It does make me wonder how different a constructed version of English would look if historical linguists in the future only had access to some congressional records and the bible.
I think your scenario could actually be the case. Language must change, and change has to start somewhere. (Only nitpick is Hittite doesn’t have F, it would have been a cuneiform.)
For that matter, if the Pirahã language survives—and I think it will, it’s pretty healthy—I predict in the fullness of time it will develop recursion. Most likely as a result of contact with other languages. The kids will start doing it first, exasperating their elders.
Indeed Hittite (and the older Indo-European languages more generally) lacked subordinate clauses introduced by a subordinating conjunct (modern linguists use the term “complementizer”) similar to English “that” in “I think that it will rain”. But as far as I can tell from my reading (I’m not a Hittite expert), there was lots of clause subordination of other kinds, including infinitival subordinate clauses, if-clauses (If it rains, we will get wet), so-called “corelative clauses” (e.g. Whatever she did, we praised it) and more. I don’t know what exactly Deutscher claims in his book, but Hittite is definitely not said to have lacked subordination of clauses in general.
Here is the exact excerpt from Deutscher’s book (from Google Books review).
Thanks! A bit of contrary information here:
This is too funny. You’re unable to definitively refute my claim, but you continue to persist and ask people to unequivocally answer YOUR questions and doubts. :smack:
Anyway, have a Happy 2020 and beyond as you continue to bang your head against imaginary walls!
You didn’t make a claim, just cited a story.
Ah, thank you, that’s enlightening.
That being the page before the Hittite excerpt, GB cut off the actual text on page 223.