The second section is about the Piraha language. Even though the author, Everett, is a linguist and even though he makes reference to linguistic concepts throughout this section, he's writing for a general audience, so anyone should be able to follow this section just fine. His writing style is refreshingly free from jargon and academic buzz words, and his explanatory style is clear and easy to follow. That being said, this section is rich and fascinating for linguists who may have heard of the controversy surrounding recursion in Piraha.

Grammars can be shaped by cultures; there are finite grammars in nonfinite languages [ clarification needed] Vivid…. The book is fascinating…. May serve to bring the furor of linguistics and language research to readers who otherwise never catch sight of it.”— Science I think this is a key and quite fun quote in the book. A theme that runs throughout the book is the idea of the inexplicable ties between language and culture, and that you can’t understand one without the other. Initially, it seems to the reader and to Everett himself that him wanting to eat a salad is completely separate from the fact that he doesn’t quite get the language yet. But as he goes on to discover, speaking the language is living the language. Languages have a vocabulary that goes with their culture, and as an American he doesn’t really “grok” some of the big ideas. As an example, a Piraha wouldn’t have a word for internet or television. These just aren’t things they have. But that means they would miss out on American English if they had no concept of the internet or television. They could parse the sentences but they wouldn’t get the references without them. Similarly, Dan can’t get the references — he’s not part of the in-crowd — if his behavior is so different than the Piraha. And that is why the salad he is eating is symbolic of his poor ability at the language. To speak the language well he must understand the culture and context for the Piraha, and there is no reason they would eat a salad. The Pirahas have shown me that there is dignity and deep satisfaction in facing life and death without the comfort of heaven or the fear of hell and in sailing toward the great abyss with a smile. I have learned these things from the Pirahas, and I will be grateful to them as long as I live.The women wore the same sleeveless, collarless, midlength dresses they worked and slept in, stained a dark brown from dirt and smoke. The men wore gym shorts or loincloths. None of the men were carrying their bows and arrows. That was a relief. Prepubescent children were naked, their skin leathery from exposure to the elements. The babies' bottoms were calloused from scooting across the ground, a mode of locomotion that for some reason they prefer to crawling. Everyone was streaked from ashes and dust accumulated by sleeping and sitting on the ground near the fire. Immensely interesting and deeply moving…. One of the best books I have read.”—Lucy Dodwell,New Scientist

The second of the three books is a highly technical, scholarly paper on linguistics. I admit I got lost in his descriptions of the correlation between grammar and culture. I was bored by the long arguments with (what is apparently) commonly held beliefs among scholars about language, syntax and grammar. Perhaps if I were a linguist, I would have enjoyed it more. This belonged (and probably is already) in something with a title like Journal of Linguistic Research. How's it working out for them? Well they're not exactly growing in size and they basically only survive because the Brazilian government protects their land, but apart from those minor concerns, they are quite happy. So much that, based on the frequency of smiling and laughter among the Piraha, some psychologists believe they are among the happiest people in the world.But I forgive Everett everything because anyone who says Chomsky is wrong and manages to undermine his whole silly theory is a friend of mine. Book Summary: Indigenous Cultures in an… Indigenous Cultures in an Interconnected World is a book that explores the history, culture, and current state of indigenous peoples around the world. Written by Claire Smith and Graeme K.… Language, Culture, and Being Human', lecture recorded at the London School of Economics, 22 March 2012. Book Summary: Write Your Book in a Flash by Dan Janal Are you struggling to write your book? Do you feel overwhelmed by the thought of starting from scratch? Fear not, for Dan Janal’s “Write Your Book in a Flash” is… I was now completely conscious, awakened by the noise and shouts of Pirahas. I sat up and looked around. A crowd was gathering about twenty feet from my bed on the high bank of the Maici, and all were energetically gesticulating and yelling. Everyone was focused on the beach just across the river from my house. I got out of bed to get a better look — and because there was no way to sleep through the noise.

in the Bible, Christ or, indeed, any abstract philosophy or experience that they could not themselves witness. He also discovered that he no longer believed in God. we cannot study languages effectively apart from their cultural context, especially languages whose cultures differ radically from the culture of the researcher. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2012-06-28 21:32:43 Bookplateleaf 0004 Boxid IA139901 Boxid_2 CH129925 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York Containerid_2 X0008 Donor Everyone continued to look toward the beach. I heard Kristene, my six-year-old daughter, at my side.This is where the real story begins. Everett came to the tribe as a disciple both of Christ and Noam Chomsky's Universal Grammar, but gradually he realized that this tribe, the Pirahas, didn't have numerous attributes that Chomsky said should be in every grammar, such as conjunctions and recursions. When discussing how this tribe may upend our entire theory of language, it seems like every paragraph he writes sets off new fireworks. He talks about how the Piraha's concern for the immediacy of experience prevents them from generalizing about even such simple things as color, number, or time. But, he knows, if such cultural concerns can influence grammar and language then the whole linguistic system of a-cultural grammar (elaborated by people like Pinker in the Language Instinct and McWhorter in The Tower of Babel) has to be overthrown. A language may tell us much more about a culture than we ever admitted possible. For instance, another language researcher found that tribes with fatalistic heros in their myths tended to use passive voice, while those with more active heros used active voice. Voice wasn't just a way for organizing information in a sentence, a la Chomsky, it was an everyday expression of belief. This is both the more common sense and perhaps more exciting view. There's so much more we can learn from languages that we ever thought possible before. At age 18, Everett married the daughter of these missionaries, Keren Graham. He completed a diploma in Foreign Missions from the Moody Bible Institute of Chicago in 1975. Daniel and Keren Everett subsequently enrolled in the Summer Institute of Linguistics (now SIL International), which trains missionaries in field linguistics so that they can translate the Bible into various world languages. The Piraha's focus on the present has other interesting effects on their culture and language. They don't have a counting system, they don't have creation myths since they aren't interested in stories of things that happened more than two eyewitnesses removed from themselves, they maintain only a bare minimum of physical possessions and they seem to eschew the idea of accumulating even items such as tools and food they'll inevitably need to use later.