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Topic: Pirah language

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	Múra-Pirahã language - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		The language is unusual in having no numerals, although this was much more common in the world's languages before the spread of modern trade and technology.
		The Pirahã language is one of the phonologically simplest languages known, claimed to have as few as ten phonemes, one fewer than Rotokas.
		Pirahã is agglutinative, using a large number of affixes to communicate grammatical meaning.
	www.wikipedia.org /wiki/Piraha_language (1477 words)

	Encyclopedia: MÃºra-PirahÃ£ language (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)
		The Pirahã language appears to have no embedding; that is, it is not possible to embed one sentence within another, or one noun phrase within another.
		The Pirahã language is phonologically the simplest language known, having just ten phonemes, one fewer than in Rotokas.
		For instance, the Pirahã sentence "there is a paca there" uses just two words: An agglutinative language is a language in which the words are formed by joining morphemes together.
	www.nationmaster.com /encyclopedia/M%FAra_Pirah%E3-language (1426 words)

	Phoneme Online Research :: Information about Phoneme (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)
		Languages where a given symbol represents only one phoneme and every phoneme is represented only by one symbol are known by the layman as "phonetic languages", which might be better described as "phonemically written".
		In French language, rules to predict pronunciation from spelling are quite simple and with few exceptions (as long as there are some clues such as context or part of speech), but guessing spelling from pronunciation is quite difficult, especially because of the many silent letters.
		Hindi language, a descendant of Sanskrit language, is an example of "phonetic" language written with a non-Roman Alphabet.
	www.carolinamaps.net /search/Phoneme.html (2906 words)

	phonetics - Article and Reference from OnPedia.com
		Languages can contain from 2 (Abkhaz) to 55 (Sedang) vowels and 6 (Rotokas) to 117 (!Xu) consonants.
		The total number of phonemes in languages varies from as few as 10 in the Pirah language, 11 in Rotokas (spoken in Papua New Guinea), 12 in Hawaiian and 30 in Serbian to as many as 141 in !Xu (spoken in southern Africa, in the Kalahari desert).
		The English language has about 13 vowel and 24 consonant phonemes (depending upon dialect), which have multiple allophones.
	www.onpedia.com /encyclopedia/phonetics (510 words)

	Information on Alphabet (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)
		However, languages often evolve independently of their writing systems, and writing systems have been borrowed for languages they were not designed for, so the degree to which letters of an alphabet correspond to phonemes of a language varies greatly from one language to another and even within a single language.
		However, with international languages with wide variations in its dialects, such as English language, it would be impossible to represent the language in all its variations with a single phonetic alphabet.
		French language, with its Silent letter and its heavy use of Nasal vowel and Elision, may seem to lack much correspondence between spelling and pronunciation, but its rules on pronunciation are actually consistent and predictable with a fair degree of accuracy.
	www.information-resource.net /search/Alphabet.html (2220 words)

	Hawaiian language - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Hawaiian, along with English, is an official language of the State of Hawaii.
		Hawaiian is a member of the Austronesian language family, most closely related to Polynesian languages like Marquesan, Tahitian, Sāmoan, Māori, and Rapanui (i.e., the language of Easter Island), as well as to other languages in the Pacific, like Fijian, and more distantly to Indonesian, Malagasy, and the indigenous languages of Taiwan and the Philippines.
		Hawaiian language "immersion" schools are now open to children whose families want to retain (or introduce) Hawaiian language into the next generation.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Hawaiian_language (1009 words)

	Science Fair Projects - Múra-Pirahã language
		The Pirahã language appears to have no embedding ; that is, it is not possible to embed one sentence within another, or one noun phrase within another.
		This and other surprising features of the language are examined in Daniel Everett 's paper Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã: Another Look at the Design Features of Human Language.
		Interestingly, Pirahã uses five discourse channels ; information may be spoken (the default), whistled, hummed, yelled or encoded in music.
	www.all-science-fair-projects.com /science_fair_projects_encyclopedia/M%FAra-Pirah%E3_language (915 words)

	Pirahã language - InfoSearchPoint.com (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)
		The Pirahã language is spoken by the people of the same name.
		The Pirahã language is phonologically the simplest language known, having just ten phonemes, one less than in Rotokas.
		Pirahã also uses suffixes which communicate evidentiality, a category of grammar which English totally lacks.
	www.infosearchpoint.com /display/Pirah%E3_language (390 words)

	Language Log: The Straight Ones: Dan Everett on the Pirahã
		There have of course been anthropological hoaxes in the past; think of the Tasaday, thought to be an isolated group of stone-age survivals until their language was shown to share 85% of its vocabulary with Cotabato Manobo and its members were discovered to have been manipulated into play-acting by a Filipino official.
		My own view then is that the case of Pirahã illustrates, perhaps as well as any example ever discussed in the literature, the kind of bi-directional causal relationship between language and culture that Boas and Sapir would have expected us to find.
		And for some pictures of Pirahã efforts at drawing and writing (they really do seem to be utter beginners at both), take a look at this drawing of a cat and this drawing of a tapir (with a few numerals added; they seem to be for decoration).
	itre.cis.upenn.edu /~myl/languagelog/archives/001387.html (1270 words)

	Encyclopedia: PirahÃ£ language (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)
		As with any complex, emergent concept, language is somewhat resistant to definition.
		Sentence, derived from Latin sententia (perception, in the subjective sense of how one feels reality is), has three common meanings: Sentence (linguistics) Sentence (mathematical logic) Open sentence (a term that mathematics teachers attempted to introduce, but not used by mathematicians) Sentence (law) Sentence (music) This is a disambiguation page — a...
		Portuguese (português) is a Romance language predominantly spoken in Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, and East Timor.
	www.nationmaster.com /encyclopedia/Pirah%E3-language (1500 words)

	Pedantry: Pirah? and the art of mathematics
		Via Language Log and Crooked Timber, I take note of a Reuters dispatch over here and a brief in the Science section of the WaPo here.
		Speakers' categories of thought reflect the way they interact with the world and how you interact with the world may vary a lot depending on who you are and what context you live in.
		Language is not an arbitrary protocol, it is the concrete manifestation of the worldview of the culture that supports it.
	pedantry.fistfulofeuros.net /archives/000775.html (545 words)

	Citations: Synthesising the origins of language and meaning using co-evolution - Steels (ResearchIndex) (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)
		Steels considers language as the result of a process of mainly cultural evolution, while the universal tendencies of language can be explained as the results of self organisation under constraints of perception and production.
		Steels considers language to be a distributed, complex dynamic system; in which self organization in the representation of the individual and in the dynamics of the language community is responsible for stable states.
		Language is learnt by actively making hypotheses about the form of the language and by testing these in linguistic interactions, which he calls language games.
	citeseer.lcs.mit.edu /context/52963/95911 (3351 words)

	Idioma pirahã - Wikipedia
		El pirahã es el último superviviente de la familia múra de lenguas.
		El pirahã es fonológicamente la lengua mas simple conocida, poseyendo unicamente diez fonemas, uno menos que la lengua rotokas.
		Las lenguas silbadas son escasas, lo que hace del pirahã un objeto de estudio muy interesante para delimitar la importancia del tono y de la cantidad/intensidad en la comunicación oral.
	es.wikipedia.org /wiki/Idioma_pirah%E3 (979 words)

	Information on Trill consonant (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)
		A Retroflex trill found in Toda language has been transcribed [É½] (that is, the same as the Retroflex flap), but might be less ambiguously written [É½Í¡r].
		Epiglottal consonant are often Allophone trilled, and in some languages the trill is the primary realization of the consonant.
		The Chapacura-Wanham languages language Wari language and the Muran languages language Pirah language have a very unusual trilled phoneme, a Voiceless dental bilabially trilled affricate [tÌªÍ¡ÊÌ¥].
	www.information-resource.net /search/Trill_consonant.html (415 words)

	List of languages article - List of languages Language families languages 639 List languages writing system - ... (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)
		Ethnologue lists about 6,800 main languages in its language name index (see the external link) and distinguishes about 41,000 alternate language names and dialects.
		This list deals with particular languages, and includes only natural and constructed languages spoken by humans.
		See List of spoken and sign languages beginning with the letter Z for about 50 more.
	www.what-means.com /encyclopedia/Languages (191 words)

	Pirahã language (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)
		Whistled languages are rare, making Pirahã an interestingstudy in the strength of tone and stress in communication.
		Only about 150 people speak Pirahã, in eight villages along the Maici; however, most of these people are monolingual, knowingonly a few words of Portuguese.
		It is the belief of the Pirahã people that their language is the best one to speak, so thereseems to be no immediate danger of Pirahã dying out.
	www.therfcc.org /pirah%E3-language-8495.html (390 words)

	Citations: Ethnologue --- Languages of the World - Grimes (ResearchIndex) (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)
		The Niger Congo language family is the largest and by far the most important group as far as tone is concerned.
		The NigerCongo language family is the largest and by far the most important group as far as tone is concerned.
		The considerable interest in the language has focussed almost solely on tone, stemming from work by Hyman Tadadjeu (1976) However, the language is also interesting for its syllable structure.
	citeseer.ist.psu.edu /context/158248/0 (1304 words)

	Pirahã - Unipedia (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)
		The Pirahã speak the Pirahã language, which is very important to their culture and to their group identity.
		As far as the Pirahã have related to researchers, their culture is concerned solely with matters that fall within direct personal experience, and thus there is no history beyond living memory.
		It is suspected that the language's entire pronoun set, which is the simplest of any known language, was recently borrowed from one of the Tupi-Guarani languages, and that prior to that the language had no pronouns whatsoever.
	www.unipedia.info /Piraha.html (682 words)

	[conlang] Digest Number 4344
		Their language was also almost devoid o= f >abstractions, and they showed an inability to calculate, as well, i.e., to >think in abstractions.
		In some languages which have a contrast between short, long and extralong vowels, the raised dot represents the mean in that spectrum.
		Their language was also almost devoid of > abstractions, and they showed an inability to calculate, as well, i.e., to > think in abstractions.
	www.mail-archive.com /conlang@yahoogroups.com/msg00255.html (4881 words)

	Encyclopedia: Rotokas alphabet (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)
		The Rotokas alphabet used in writing the Rotokas language is a subset of the Latin alphabet consisting of only the eleven letters: A E I K O P R S T U V, and is arguably the smallest alphabet of any known language, save the Pirahã language.
		The S is sometimes written G, and the V is sometimes written B. Rotokas is a language spoken in Bougainville, an island to the east of New Guinea, part of Papua New Guinea.
		An alphabet is a complete standardized set of letters—basic written symbols—each of which roughly represents a phoneme of a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it may have been in the past.
	www.nationmaster.com /encyclopedia/Rotokas-alphabet (360 words)

	LookSmart's Furl - The vi9ay Language Archive
		Language may shape human thought 013 suggests a counting study in a Brazilian tribe whose language does not define numbers above two.
		Hunter-gatherers from the Pirah� tribe, whose language only contains words for the numbers one and two, were unable to reliably tell the difference between four objects placed in a row and five in the same configuration, revealed the study.
		A study of when new words became common during the past century has had some surprising findings, such as the word "celebs" being used in 1913, the word "sex" meaning sexual intercourse being first used in 1929, and "mobile phone" dating from 1945.
	www.furl.net /members/vi9ay/Language (277 words)

	LINGUISTIX&LOGIK, Tony Marmo's blog
		The model is built by enriching the language of standard modal logic with a quantificational apparatus that is "substitutional" rather than "objectual", and by obtaining from the language so enriched another language in which constants for such predicates apply to singular terms that stand for propositions.
		We use the type system and our treatment of generalized quantifiers in natural language to construct a type-theoretic approach to pronominal anaphora that avoids some of the difficulties that undermine previous type-theoretic analyses of this phenomenon.
		Throughout the study of what have come to be known as first-, second-, and higher-order languages, what has been primarily overlooked is that these languages are abstractions.
	tonymarmo.tripod.com /linguistix-logik/index.blog?end=1092700861 (3261 words)

	Piraha Language \| Antimoon Forum (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)
		I'm sure that many people are familiar with the fact that people are incapable of learning their first language beyond a certain age.
		I read that humans have an innate ability to recognize the number of items in a group where the number of items is three or less (I may have read this in that article).
		Semetic languages (such as Hebrew and Arabic) usually have verb conjugations for singular, dual, and multiple, although the "dual" conjugations have fallen out of use in at least some of the languages.
	www.antimoon.com /forum/posts/6182.htm (800 words)

	[No title] (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)
		tribe, whose language only contains words for the numbers one and two, were unable to reliably tell the difference between four objects placed in a row and five in the same configuration, revealed the study.
		¡°Whether language actually allows you to have new thoughts is a very controversial issue.¡± Peter Gordon, the psychologist at Columbia University in New York City who carried out the experiment, does not claim that his finding holds for all kinds of thought.
		Babies and animals Gordon says this is the first convincing evidence that a language lacking words for certain concepts could actually prevent speakers of the language from understanding those concepts.
	www.asu.edu /educ/epsl/LPRU/newsarchive/Art4413.txt (592 words)

	LINGUIST List 13.1642: Consonant Harmony
		This is what is so prevalent in child language (although other types do occur as well) and at the same time seems to be unattested in adult language.
		The most obvious and most common type, of course, is coronal harmony (typically sibilant harmony, but many other varieties exist), but there are also several cases of "dorsal harmony", where uvulars and velars are involved in long-distance assimilation (as before, without intervening segments being affected).
		Nevertheless, I point out in the dissertation that a great number of languages have MSCs that are usually stated as laryngeal dissimilation, but which could equally well be expressed as a matter of place assimilation/harmony (parasitic on laryngeal features).
	www.ling.ed.ac.uk /linguist/issues/13/13-1642.html (927 words)

	Syllabic Phonology (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)
		English permits a wide range of structures, but in other languages the options may be limited to a single type.
		It is important to distinguish between tautosyllabic clusters (i.e., both consonants are in the same syllable as in [limp] ) and heterosyllabic sequences of consonants (i.e.
		The types of consonant clusters which are permitted in the onset and coda are mostly governed by the Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP) which states that the sonority of the segments in a syllable increases towards the nucleus and declines away from it.
	mails.fju.edu.tw /~phono/Syllabic%20Phonology1.htm (765 words)

	Interealms - The Ranger's Glade - Tribe without names for numbers cannot count beyond two (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-08)
		On a broader level, the study also addresses a long standing and controversial hypothesis developed by Benjamin Lee Whorf in the late 1930s: that language can determine the way we think or what we are able to think.
		But Gordon's study is one of the best examples in which language allows people to think something completely new, says cognitive psychologist Lisa Feigenson of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
		In this case, a lack of language seems to prevent the Pirahу from thinking about larger numbers, she says.
	forums.interealms.com /ranger/printthread.php?threadid=39922 (954 words)

	LINGUIST List 15.2237: Re: Comments on things no language does
		In an otherwise excellent article Geoffrey P. Smith states that "The Macro-Ge language (sic!) of Brazil is the single case of a language reported to have number words only for 'one' and 'many'" (p.
		Another genetically unrelated Amazonian language is conjectured by Aikhenvald and Dixon as "It is likely that Jabutï¿½ originally had no numbers.
		On the other, as Rischel puts it "He was clearly very much inclined to conclude that phenomena about which he had failed to retrieve information did not exist in the culture, and that the Mlabri were not capable of reasoning about matters unless he could persuade them to communicate such thoughts to him" (p.
	www.ling.ed.ac.uk /linguist/issues/15/15-2237.html (1050 words)

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