Locomotoring

I don’t remember how I tumbled onto the Pirahã people and their language. But now I can’t get them out of my head. Daniel Everett, a missionary turned atheist turned linguist, is the primary source of our knowledge of Pirahã. He spent 30 years with Pirahã people, trying to convert them. In his words, his colonial adventure managed to convert only one person, himself, from a believer to an atheist. In finding Pirahã, he also found a massive breach in Noam Chomsky’s “universal grammar” theory, Dan had found a language that doesn’t have recursion, the purported “universal grammar”.

Pirahã is an oral language like many. It was a lovely surprise that the language is also spoken via humming sounds, what to my ears sound like bird calls. It didn’t matter that the language didn’t have words for colors like red and black. If I could communicate via bird like calls, I would be totally OK without words for colors! Besides, the paint companies would have me covered. I learned that they don’t have words for numbers except “a few”, ” a bit more”, and “a pile”. That made me wonder how isolated they had been. I hail from a place where there is no isolation, ever. We have voting stations in the remotest of our remote villages. Apparently in 2024 elections, the Government officials traveled for seven hours to the remote Himalayan village, Warshi, 110 miles from Leh, to seek vote from three voters (link).

Then I learned that the Pirahã people didn’t have the concept of past and future. They live in the present, something the rest of us are all trying to do frantically and failing miserably. MIT researchers described them as world’s happiest people – they laughed and smiled a lot, the scientific marker of happy people. That had felt curious until I learned something that made me pause – their observed lack of folklore. Pirahã only tell stories that they, the protagonist, experienced. By the same definition, they do not have the concept of fiction. Apparently, their response to Dan speaking about God went as follows – “Pirahã” Did you speak to God? Dan: No. Pirahã: Did your dad speak to God? Dan: No. Pirahã: Then why are you talking about him?”

In every other way, the Pirahã are like any indigenous people. This hunter-gatherer community lives spread out in four “villages” along Maici River. They can spear river fish standing up in skinny canoes. They talk in bird songs when they go hunting in the forest so their communication blends in with the background noises. They know the life cycle of a thousand species intimately, those that surround them. If you want to learn more about Pirahã, check out “Inside the Pirahã World: Deciphering the Amazon’s Most Enigmatic Language (link)”

What does it mean to not have folklore? Art of living in the moment (e.g. Stoicism) doesn’t naturally lead to lack of folklore (e.g. Roman mythologies). The physicist training has kicked in. I love anomalies. I remember my graduate study advisor, if he ever saw a data point that was an outlier, he would either suggest it was a bug or suggest that the hypothesis needed adaptation. I believe that the linguistic community now accepts that Pirahã language defies the previously accepted “universal grammar” hypothesis. In summary, Pirahã is unique which means the “universal grammar” needs adaptation and Dan has a new hypothesis, a simpler one (link).

Is lack of a folklore another unique data point or is it really saying something? Searching the internet isn’t a way to look for the unique. We have an estimated 7000 languages today (link), the internet is dominated by 10 languages of which I understand only one. Nearly 3000 of these languages are endangered (link), we are losing two languages every month. In this expanse of loss and gaps, I can’t find another example of a culture that doesn’t have folklore.