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Topic: Piraha language

	Mura languages. Who is Mura languages? What is Mura languages? Where is Mura languages? Definition of Mura languages. ...
		The Mura language family is a language family of Brazil.
		Linguistically, the Mura family is typified by agglutinativity, by paucity of phonemes (Pirahã has just 11 compared to English's 40-odd), and by grammatical tone.
		The Mura language is the eponymous member of this language family; however, most Mura languages have died due to the usage of Portuguese in Brazil, mainly because they were spoken by so few people anyway: the Pirahã language is now spoken by just 150 people in eight villages.
	www.knowledgerush.com /kr/encyclopedia/Mura_languages (112 words)

	Múra-Pirahã language - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		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.
		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.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language (1477 words)

	Bambooweb: Phoneme
		The English language itself uses a rather large set of 13 vowels, though its 27 consonants are pretty close to average.
		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".
		At the other extreme, languages such as Serbian have systems that represent the educated spoken language perfectly, but the same system is valid for all accents within the language, despite not representing their peculiarities, and is therefore conventional.
	www.bambooweb.com /articles/P/h/Phoneme.html (1218 words)

	Language Log: The Straight Ones: Dan Everett on the Pirahã
		I was co-editor of the volume in which the first full description of the Pirahand#227; language appeared (Desmond C. Derbyshire and Geoffrey K. Pullum, eds., Handbook of Amazonian Languages, Volume 1, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, 1986).
		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.
		I worried about this when I first published on their unusual stress system in Linguistic Inquiry in 1984, a squib which resulted in letters from well-known phonologists to me, a new PhD, to the effect that I was likely incompetent and telling me what stress meant.
	itre.cis.upenn.edu /~myl/languagelog/archives/001387.html (1270 words)

	Indymedia Scotland: Airdreimheas ‘supreme authority, supremacy’ (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		When a language is lost, all of us lose the knowledge contained in that language's words and grammar, knowledge that can never be recovered if the language has not been studied or recorded.
		It is encoded in the Banawás' language in the terms for plants and procedures that are in danger of being lost, as the last seventy remaining Banawá speakers gradually switch to Portuguese.
		Language politics is not about propping up dying cultures, it’s about embracing difference and change.
	scotland.indymedia.org /newswire/display/385/index.php (2645 words)

	Mura Piraha Language (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		The Pirahã; language is a language spoken by the people of the same name.
		The Pirahã; language is phonologically the simplest language known, having just ten phonemes, one fewer than in Rotokas.
		Whistled languages are rare, making Pirahã; an interesting study in the strength of tone and stress in communication.
	mura-piraha-language.wikiverse.org (393 words)

	Pirahã Study
		Hunter-gatherers from the Pirahã 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.
		The language, Pirahã, is known as a “one, two, many” language because it only contains words for “one” and “two”—for all other numbers, a single word for “many” is used.
		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.paulgraham.com /piraha.html (600 words)

	Múra-Pirahã language (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		The Pirahã language is a language spoken by the people of the same name.
		The Pirahã language is phonologically the simplest language known, having just ten phonemes, one fewer than in Rotokas.
		The total number of phonemes is just eleven if /k/ is counted as a phoneme; if not, then men use 10 phonemes, and women just nine (English, by comparison, has about forty to forty-five, depending on dialect).
	www.sciencedaily.com /encyclopedia/mura_piraha_language (441 words)

	one-ish, two-ish, lots \| MetaFilter (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		In sociology I remember hearing over and over that “language is the lens through which we view the world.” That is the case with the Piraha people; without a lens for understanding math and a culture that is self-consciously unique they are unable (as adults) to solve counting problems (according to this study).
		The Piraha have a culture without writing or drawing and probably without a single crayon or writing utensil, plus they have a cultural memory too short to remember art that is their own, and look down on nonindigenous elements.
		Everett posits that there are then constraints on abstract concepts, and that this constraint is evident in their language, that the language itself, in fact, may function in a way that disallows abstractions-- yet the Piraha also claim to have a close contact with a spirit world.
	www.metafilter.com /mefi/35108 (6185 words)

	Brazilian Tribe Lacks Ability to Count (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		Piraha tribe lacks words for most numbers; cannot draw straight lines or distinguish 'one' from 'a few': Nevertheless, we are all equal.
		The fact that Piraha children (though not adults, apparently) can be taught to count beyond three is not a vindication of the "linguistic determinism" nonsense: It merely indicates that, even given the basic intelligence to understand something, some races lack the mentality to pursue or even conceptualize it -- a necessary first step.
		Pirahas will not be qualified for top-level jobs at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory anytime soon, though if the 't' in 'Jet' were changed to another letter, they would certainly be hired anyway.
	www.nationalvanguard.org /story.php?id=3735 (540 words)

	Linguistic Resources Shape Reality
		When given numerical tasks by Gordon in which they were asked to match small sets of objects in varying configurations, adult members of the tribe responded accurately with up to two or three items, but their performance declined when challenged with eight to 10 items, and dropped to zero with larger sets of objects.
		Their skill levels were similar to those in pre-linguistic infants, monkeys, birds and rodents, and appeared to correlate to recent brain imaging studies indicating a different sort of numerical competence that seems to be immune to numerical language deprivation.
		In the study, they also used their fingers in addition to their verbal statement of quantity, but this practice, too, was found to be highly inaccurate even for small numbers less than five.
	www.scienceagogo.com /news/20040722234924data_trunc_sys.shtml (1110 words)

	Linguistics professor discovers new language in Brazilian rain forest
		The language, called "Oro Win" (pronounced OR-oh WEEN), is spoken by only about a half-dozen of the 40-50 members of the tribe of the same name.
		Since then, he has visited the rain forest annually to continue his studies with the tribesmen, mainly the Piraha, whose language has only seven consonants and three vowels (the smallest number of sounds of any documented language) and can be whistled as well as spoken.
		Everett theorizes that the two languages share the "tp~" sound because, according to the Piraha, some Indians who spoke the now-extinct Tora language -- which is related to Wari -- intermarried with the Piraha.
	www.pitt.edu /utimes/issues/27/101394/16.html (783 words)

	Messages from the Ether: Language and thought (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		This is a controversial conclusion, first expressed as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in the first half of the 20th century, and is still very much open to debate.
		Language typology describes the grammatical features of a languages.
		Agglutinative describes Piraha's location in a continuum of language types from those that isolate all parts of speech into separate words (analytic languages such as Chinese) to those that bundle all parts together into one word per sentence (polysynthetic languages such as those spoken by some American Indians).
	www.scottdstrader.com /blog/ether_archives/000214.html (265 words)

	Pirahã - Unipedia (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		The Pirahã speak the Pirahã language, which is very important to their culture and to their group identity.
		The language is claimed to have no relative clauses or grammatical recursion, but this is not clear.
		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 (680 words)

	Language Log: One, two, many -- or 'small size', 'large size', 'cause to come together'?
		The first small problem with the Reuters article is that the usual spelling for the language is "Pirahã;", with a tilde over the final /a/, indicating that the vowel is nasalized.
		At the same time, their language does have a distinction between count and mass nouns, so that there is the equivalent of the English difference between "{many/much foreigners}" and "{many/much manioc meal".
		You don't reference this article in your latest Language Log: http://lings.ln.man.ac.uk/info/staff/DE/cultgram.pdf Everett discusses not just numerosity but other astonishing claims about Piraha language/culture: no embedding, no quantification, no creation legends, no fiction, no deep memory, no colour terms, pronouns borrowed, simplest kinship system, no relativization, no perfect.
	itre.cis.upenn.edu /~myl/languagelog/archives/001364.html (1283 words)

	entangledbank: Pirahã
		Mark Liberman in Language Log assures me Everett is pretty sound as a linguist.
		Language Hat points out it also contains a completely new sound, despite having the simplest phoneme inventory known.
		And Everett thinks they didn't use it in front of him for many years before because they knew it was strange and didn't want to be laughed at.
	www.livejournal.com /users/entangledbank/51571.html (638 words)

	World Atlas of Language Structures: List of Sources
		This bibliography first lists the sources for languages in the 100-language sample, followed by a list of sources for languages in the 200-language sample that are not in the 100-language sample.
		Studies in Chinantec Languages 2 Summer Institute of Linguistics and the University of Texas at Arlington.
		Beaton, A. A Grammar of the Fur Language.
	linguistics.buffalo.edu /people/faculty/dryer/dryer/atlas.bib (2246 words)

	languagehat.com: PIRAHA UPDATE.
		Now here is a language, with only 7 vowels and 3 vowels, and open syllables, and no consonant cluster, in which "head" can be indifferently 'apapaí, kapapaí, papapaí, 'a'a'aí, kakakaí.
		I recently wrote an article discussing whistled languages (email me if you want a copy, although I still have some editing yet to go), and tonal languages tend to eliminate all articulatory gestures and simply use the tone itself to communicate when whistling.
		If a language can be simplified simply to tone, then some free variation in phonology, while implausible to this extent, is not impossible, either.
	www.languagehat.com /archives/001524.php (1590 words)

	yourDictionary.com • Endangered Language Initiative• From Threatened Languages to Threatened Lives
		Many languages spoken in the past have ceased to exist and many languages not yet 'born' will come into being in the future.
		This is why many linguists say that the total number of actual languages spoken in the world at a given moment of human history is but an small fragment of the perhaps infinitely large total number of possible human languages.
		But the answer seems to be related to their sense of fragility and smallness as a people, the idea that their language, culture, and values cannot compete with those from the outside.
	www.yourdictionary.com /elr/everett.html (983 words)

	Fuzzy math
		However, other researchers paint a slightly different picture--one where humans, and some animals, are born with the ability to perceive numbers and even predict the result of simple mathematical operations such as addition and subtraction.
		In fact, while language can advance people's concept of number, infants and even some animals appear to be born with an innate understanding of numbers.
		And it suggests that people are born with an internal representation system for numbers that operates regardless of language.
	www.apa.org /monitor/feb05/fuzzy.html (1048 words)

	American Renaissance News: Language May Shape Human Thought
		Language may shape human thought—suggests a counting study in a Brazilian tribe whose language does not define numbers above two.
		The languages of Europe and Asia are vast, comprehensive, and beautiful.
		The way out of the impasse is to see the evolution of language as a system founded on, reflecting and expressing the pre-existing complexities of the perceptual and motor systems of the brain.
	www.amren.com /mtnews/archives/2004/08/language_may_sh.php (1442 words)

	ICT [2004/09/24] Living in a world of ones and twos: A tribe without numbers
		In his book "Language, Thought and Reality," Whorf wrote that "all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe." Whorf said we divide and organize the natural world into concepts that are based on the words and patterns of our language.
		Gordon concludes that the Piraha people have difficulties recognizing specific quantities greater than five because of what's missing from the grammar and syntax of their language.
		Whistle tones are the "code talk" of the Piraha, used on jungle expeditions when they don't want their voices to alert animals or be understood by humans outside their group.
	www.indiancountry.com /content.cfm?id=1096036544 (982 words)

	languagehat.com: PIRAHA AND WHORF.
		The Piraha view language as a defining characteristic of group identity in a strong sense— you speak the language of your group.
		Americans in their opinion are identified partially by their ability to speak other languages (since the only Americans they know are the only people they know that speak more than one language).
		It should not be surprising to learn that the Piraha also believe that they are incapable of ever speaking any language other than their own, and remain to this day a predominantly monolingual community.
	www.languagehat.com /archives/001506.php (1370 words)

	Piraha Language \| Antimoon Forum (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		Brennus: The Piraha believe in a "spirit realm" that they claim to have seen themselves, and have words for describing spirits; so they're definitely not atheists.
		It's possible that the Piraha really were capable of learning to count, but chose not to for some reason, however.
		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/2004/6182.htm (800 words)

	Study of obscure Amazon tribe sheds new light on how language affects perception (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-20)
		During the late 1930s, amateur linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf posed the theory that language can determine the nature and content of thought.
		The Pirahã language has no word for "number," and pronouns do not designate number--"he" and "they" are the same word.
		Yet, the word they use for "many," which in that language was derived from a form ob the verb meaning "to bring together," is distinct from a word that means something like "much."
	www.medicalnewstoday.com /medicalnews.php?newsid=12363 (742 words)

	one-ish, two-ish, lots \| MetaFilter
		Linguists and anthropologists who have seen both the Everett and Gordon studies are flabbergasted by the tribe's strangeness, particularly since the Piraha have not lived in total isolation.
		The same could be true for the Piraha with regards to drawing.
		It is presented as a strong form of language determinism and relativism, and that's false.
	www.metafilter.com /comments.mefi/35108 (6185 words)

	Billy's blog: Linguablogging Archives
		Numbers of students taking a language as part of their degree are falling but a lot of them want to learn a language outside their degree programmes.
		It’s mentioned by Chomsky (Knowledge of Language 1986) and the question is whether it’s grammatical if the referent of his is the same as the referent of husband and the referent of wife is the same as the referent of her
		I guess what language teachers really need right now is a story about how boring their lessons are.
	blogs.pumpernickle.net /billy/linguablogging/index.html (4642 words)

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