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people who speak together frequently and form a culture group together.
“This is why you don’t speak our language well. We Pirahãs speak our language well and we don’t eat leaves.”
🤣
Language is the product of synergism between values of a society, communication theory, biology, physiology,
physics (of the inherent limitations of our brains as well as our phonetics), and human thought. I believe this is also true of the engine of language, grammar.
Sapir even goes so far as to claim that our view of the world is constructed by our languages, and that there is no “real
Maybe
world” that we can actually perceive without the filter of language telling us what we are seeing and what it means.
the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests research questions for investigating how our languages cause us to think differently about the world.
Very much I think
We need to map out some of the different relationships between grammar, cognition, and culture that have been proposed
some theories can have gaps where other theories might have robust explanatory mechanisms. In this sense both theories and cultures shape our minds’ ability to perceive the world, sometimes positively and sometimes not so
Instead, we might be better served by looking at syntax, along
with the other components of language, as one part of the solution to the problem of communication, that is, the need to communicate appropriately in a specific environment.
exoteric communication where more complex information is the rule, such
need to study a language in its cultural context. I could study a language outside of its cultural context of course, and still discover many interesting things. But fundamental pieces to the puzzle of its grammar would be missing.
This problem is found in science and in our professional and personal lives, between husbands and wives, parents and children, bosses and employees. We often think we know what
our interlocutor is talking about, only to discover when we examine our conversation more closely that we misunderstood a great deal of it.
Sometimes, though, as we study these cultures, the lessons we learn range far beyond our scientific objectives. I was learning something about my own spirituality from the Pirahãs that was to change my life forever.
“Well, Dan, how do you have his words if you have never heard him or seen him?”
would have learned that missionaries had been trying to convert them for over two hundred years. From the first record of contact with the Pirahãs and the Muras, a closely related people, in the eighteenth century,
The immediacy of experience principle means that
And they were in effect telling me to peddle my goods elsewhere. They were telling me that
The view of this book is that every language and culture pair shows us something unique about the way that one subset of our species has evolved to deal with the world around
have never heard a Pirahã say that he or she is worried. In fact, so far as I can tell, the Pirahãs have no word for worry in their language.
Pirahãs are happier, fitter, and better adjusted to their environment than any Christian or other religious person I have ever known.
