Pirahã language

The pirahã language (also spelled pirahá or pirahán, Portuguese: pirarrã, in pirahã xapaitíiso [ʔàpài̯ˈʧîːsò]) is spoken by the people of the same name (Hi&# 39;aiti'ihi' in their own language, "the upright ones"). They live in Brazil, along the Maici River, one of the tributaries of the Amazon River.

Pirahã is considered a language isolate by some and by others as a member of the same family as the Mura-Bohurá language, and the Yahahí language (Múra-Pirahã languages), both already extinct in relatively recent times. Therefore, it is technically a language isolate, with no connection to other current languages. Despite having only about 150 speakers in 2004, spread over eight villages along the banks of the Maici, it cannot be said to be in immediate danger of extinction, because the Pirahã community is predominantly monolingual.

Some of the features of the language are considered peculiar or unique, although there is controversy about it. The main source of information about this language comes from the grammar written by Daniel L. Everett in 1986 and the articles that he has continued to publish subsequently. Studies carried out by Professor Everett on the Pirahã language were intended to challenge Noam Chomsky's theory of universal grammar on human language, although this conclusion has been questioned by Chomsky himself.

History and distribution

Geographic distribution

It is spoken by nomadic hunter-gatherers along the Maici and Autazes rivers, tributaries of the Amazon River, between the Brazilian cities of Manaus and Porto Velho, in the municipality of Humaitá, belonging to the state of Amazonas.

History

The known history of the mura-pirahã is tumultuous. During the 18th century they used a guerrilla tactic with the Portuguese colonizers reaching a peace agreement in 1748, but continuing sporadically with actions against the colonists. Sources estimate their number during the 19th century to have been between 30,000 and 40,000.

The history of the language is not known because it is an unwritten language and it is also an isolated language, so linguistic paleontology cannot provide much information about its origin and past history. The speakers do not even produce drawings, except for some very primitive stick figures to represent the spirit world, which they say they have experienced directly.

There is also no written or oral literature. The pirahã do not even have creation myths. His texts are almost always descriptions of immediate experiences or interpretations of those experiences. There are some stories about the past, but they extend only to two generations in the past. In general, there is no individual or collective memory beyond the two generations mentioned.

Linguistic description

Phonology

The pirahã consists of eight consonants and three vowels; it is phonologically the simplest language known, having only ten phonemes, one less than the Rotokas language.

The phonemes are:

^[1] it is believed that the /k/ sound is a /h/e /i/'s "baul sound".

^[2] /s/ is only used by men; women substitute it for /h/.

There are, however, many alophones of these fonemas. For example /b/ has as alophones a nasal bilabial (equivalent to Spanish /m/) and a sound bilabial trine (such as a /r/ bilabial).

The sound /g/ has a very unusual double flap that is only found in this language (according to current linguistic knowledge).

There are two tones: high and low.

The equivalents of the phonemes in the international phonetic alphabet are: /p t k madrid b g h a i o/

The language uses five channels for its speech: information can be spoken (usual way), whistled, hummed, shouted or encoded in music. Whistle languages are rare, which makes Pirahã a very interesting study object to determine the importance of tone and quantity/intensity in oral communication.

Grammar

It is an agglutinative language that uses many affixes to express different meanings. Even many verbs are affixes, especially verbs of existence or equivalence. For example, the phrase "there is a bale there" use only two words:

káixihíxao.xaagá gáihí

paca.exist/be there

It also uses suffixes that convey evidentiality, a part of speech that European languages do not have. The suffix / -xáagahá / means that the speaker is completely sure of the information from her:

hoagaxóai hi paxai kaopáp.i.sai.xáagah

H. he fish-species fishing.EPEN.NOMIN.certeza

Exceptionality of Pirahã

The language has some characteristics that make it unique:

• In addition to having no grammatical number, it is one of the few languages where there are neither numerals nor the concept of counting (there are other cases among the Aboriginal languages of Australia, such as warlpiri).^{[chuckles]required]} There are only two concepts of number that can be translated as "small/small" and "much/great", although Peter Gordon did grammatical tests that led him to think that those words designated numbers one and two. Daniel L. Everett discovered the confusion and said that there is no grammatical number: there is no distinction between singular and plural. It distinguishes little between number (contable objects) and quantity (uncountable objects) and it is impossible to distinguish between, for example, "a big fish" and "many small fish". People themselves don't know the concept of counting. They only use approximate measures and in tests they are unable to distinguish accurately between a group of four objects and another placed in a similar way of five objects. When asked to duplicate a group of objects, they double the correct number of objects in half, but they almost never close the exact number to the first.

Due to (well-founded) concern that they were being cheated in trade, the Pirahã asked a linguist who was studying them to teach them some basics of mathematics. After eight months of enthusiastic but fruitless daily study, the lessons were discontinued.

• It is the only language known without words to express the colors; although this point is still discussed.
• It is the only known language that does not have recursive structures. It is not possible to flush one sentence into another or a nominal syntagma within another. The complexity that can be expressed, despite being very large, is limited. For example, it is possible to indicate ownership of an object mentioned as "the son of John", but it cannot be indicated two levels of possession as "the daughter of the son of John".
• It has the simplest known pronominal system and there is evidence that the whole system has been taken from another language.
• There is no form of past.
• It has the simplest parentage system that has been documented.

It seems they don't take into account kinship beyond biological siblings. Inbreeding is very common.

• There are no quantification terms, such as "all", "everything", "someone/s", "much/s", etc.

Vocabulary

It has few loanwords and these have been taken mainly from Portuguese. The word "kóópo" ("copa") comes from the Portuguese "copo" and "bikagogia" ("commerce") comes from the Portuguese "mercadoria".

Examples

Text "Killing the panther" (Collected, translated, analyzed and transcribed by Daniel L. Everett)