[Music] good evening I'm Laura Walter from the long now foundation I'm the director of the Rosetta project and as some of you may know this summer we finished our first prototype rows at a disc after eight years of work and and so now five copies of that disc are out there in the world that is the very long-term archive of the Rosetta project which is uh as you know is a collection of the world's languages and when we made that available and over the past several years we've had many many requests for a version that wouldn't cost $25,000 and and that we could distribute it very widely so I'm very pleased to announce that we have now made a version that can be distributed very widely and this is a digital fully browsable version of the disc which is available now on DVD and today we've made it available on the Rosetta project website for anybody to go and interact with and so this is what it looks like so now if you go to Rosetta project org this is what you see and this gives you the virtual experience of looking at the Rose at a disk through a microscope except you were browsing it on your computer and so what you see here is the what we call the human eye readable side so this is the part that starts with languages at a scale that the human eye can see and that tells you this is an archive of the world's languages and then this the the text spirals down and gets progressively smaller and smaller and inside those radiating spokes our lists are a list of languages that have information on the other side of the disk so I'll show you what this looks like you can browse all the way in the languages are arranged by geographic region and so you can see I'm zooming in on the Americas and getting closer closer and here you can see we have documentation in the Rosetta project on the piraha language that dan Everett is going to be talking about tonight so there's more appear aha which is the very small language grouping that Peter hot belongs to and you can also look at the other side of the disc this is the archive side so this side has about 14,000 pages of documentation about 1,500 languages there's about 7,000 languages in the world so this is a good chunk of them and you can also zoom all the way in on this one so now we're zooming into the region that has documentation on languages of the Americas and getting closer and closer and closer aha turns out we have information on Peter hot by Daniel Everett so you're very welcome to to go browse the site at your leisure you can also buy DVD versions of of this disc so it is now my very great pleasure to introduce the speaker for tonight Dan Everett a linguist who's worked for many many years with an endangered language the a group of people called the piraha along the Amazon River and in the 70s as he's going to tell you much more about he equipped as a missionary went with his entire family to work with epi aha and he had his missionary tools and beliefs he had his linguistic tools and beliefs and he went there and what he learned from this very small group of people shook actually rocked both of those sets of beliefs and changed his worldview in a very fundamental way and also changed the way that he looked at language and now his research and his writings on language are changing the way all of us think about language works and how it's encoded in the human mind let me introduce and welcome Dan Everett great good to be here this evening have you ever imagined that you were god that's something that I think about once in a while and when I do I think maybe the Tower of Babel could have been different than it was the story was originally told maybe God actually liked the results of humans creating some Tower and he decided to take out of this one language and make many and send people around the world to solve problems as it were creating thousands of other atoms to name and not atom Aton but atom adam2 create and name other creatures and learn about the world around them and languages have spread around the globe we don't really know where the first language started but we have ideas about how long ago it might have been and we do know that languages thrive and that the general principle that makes languages alike or different is very simple you talk like who you talk with so if you talk with somebody all the time you'll talk like them and if you don't talk with them eventually you won't talk like them at all so languages live like bread and love and by being shared with others but languages die also and languages die in one of two ways first way is that the speakers actually die and so if the speakers of a language died out the language is is going to die and the pita ha almost died out in the early 60s they got down to 80 or 90 because of a measles epidemic and event eventually have come back up to 350 people but that's still a very small number another reason languages die die is because the speaker stops speaking them the speakers live but they shift to another language so the languages that are gone usually won't come back so the language of Squanto the the Indian fellow you all remember from your history books who helped the pilgrims make it through the first winter the tupinambá who occupied the coast of Brazil in the 1500s and were eventually wiped out by a combination of factors mainly the the activities of Jesuit priests and another language that might be dying out is Irish and and we don't know how much longer that will last there are almost 7,000 or more than 7,000 languages spoken in the world and all the red regions that you see are the areas of highest concentration of languages so if you look very carefully at the world map you'll see that the highest concentration of languages in the world is Papua New Guinea in Brazil there are about a hundred and eighty-eight languages still spoken probably half the number that were spoken in the 1500s and a population of less than 200,000 people what's the scale of language loss in the world what I want to do this evening is talk to you about the general issues of language loss and what that means to us when when languages die but also very specifically look at a case study the peat aha people that I've spent the last 30 years working with and and the lessons that they have for us both scientifically and how to live lives as human beings on planet earth there are six thousand nine hundred and twelve to seven thousand languages nobody knows exactly how many but around that number 3,500 languages are spoken by 0.2 percent of the world's population so almost half the world's languages or half the world's languages are spoken by only 0.2% of the population forty percent of the languages in the world are endangered some estimates go as high as one language every two weeks going becoming extinct that's much higher than mammals only eighteen percent or five percent of fish or eight percent of plants according to a new book that I highly recommend by David Harrison on when languages die so what is lost the late Ken Hale linguist at MIT was one of the greatest field workers who ever lived said that when a single language is lost it's worse than a bomb dropped on the Louvre it's a museum it's a repository of knowledge that can't be replaced it's not written most of these languages and written at all linguists have to go there and develop writing systems that are not written there's no way to recover the knowledge once it's gone once these languages are lost we lose ways of life and records of ways of life we lose solutions to problems we lose classifications of plants and animals and folk knowledge of the world we lose myths folk tales lullaby songs poetry and literature talk in codes ways of life one of the groups that I've worked on in the Amazon are the what II who were until about 1962 cannibals and they practice EXO and endo cannibalism EXO cannibalism eat your enemies endo cannibalism eat your own dead and the reason that they ate their dead which was a very elaborate set of rituals was to among other things to give the dead immortality they live on through us as we eat them and consume our beloved and the first people to have to consume the dead we're the immediate family to be able to give them eternal life through us the wadi discourse about death and immortality is fascinating and and teaches us a lot about how to face death and how to live lives unafraid of death in the world and that's going as the what a language is more and more endangered almost 50% some people say fifty five percent of the foods consumed in the world today come from the Americas cassava manioc chiles coca coffee tobacco corn some people have claimed that corn might be the greatest invention in human history it does seem to have been invented by the Mayas or predecessors to the Mayas from husbandry of different kinds of grasses and it's certainly one of the most widely consumed foods in the world but as these languages have died the question that arises for us is what else have we lost and the answer is we will never know how many cures for diseases how many other foods how many other great stories and philosophies have we lost because these people have gone we lose information when these languages died about classifications and taxonomy z' of the world so the ymp indians of brazil's speakers of a tupi guarani language classify birds every bird in their environment is carefully classified but they don't classify them just like we do so for example someone noticed a colleague of mine in Brazil Alan Jensen when he did his dissertation on them that one type of hawk is classified in the two cons why would they classify a hawk among the two cons surely they can see the difference the reason is their classification system follows the foods they eat and certain kinds of behavior and this Hawk as we got to know more about it actually eats what to cleanse eat and and has a behavior similar to theirs we lose this kind of knowledge this folk knowledge that is vital to us understanding the way the world works especially in these local environments when I ask the word for dog in PETA ha I got two words Neal PI and niai bye and I asked them why are there two words now that's the way it is and then I saw them bring in two jungle animals that according to my book of mammals in the tropics were both extinct and they were called jungle dogs and it said they haven't been seen in the wild for over fifty years and here the PETA ha had to they were keeping his pets in the village and knew all about their behavior all about the things they eat and the places they stay things that biologists would love to know and we lose this as these languages begin to die out we know for example that 2p Indians in Brazil have heavily influenced Brazilian literature from the legends that were written down by Catholic priests we learn things about calendars and the way time is kept so the notches indians of louisiana in the united states keep their calendar according to crops that grow at certain times and and by knowing how their language works and how they keep time we learned something about crops and how different kinds of crops have entered it the area historically when languages die it's like to me a great disturbance in the force there's something about human humanity and the unity of all humans and the things that we all depend on the knowledge that we've been we spread around the world to share with one another is is lost so I want to talk to you first about a small group that I've worked with called the bona wah and then I'll spend most of my time talking with you about the peat aha the bada wah are now only 79 people they are members of a family called the Arawa family and there are only seven languages left in this family and the biggest one is about 1,500 people spoken in Peru and recently was accused of being cannibals and this is a very highly charged accusation in South America because if you can find that a group is cannibals the idea is they don't deserve any land or anything it's completely false that they're cannibals there's no evidence whatsoever for this that any group anymore practices cannibalism not that I would care but the population of the Bona Y's is 79 as of 2005 the last time I was there and one type of special knowledge that the Bona hua have is how to make poison so they hunt with long blow guns and poison darts and these this is really fascinating technology to know how to make poison according to ethno botanist mark Plotkin in his book the shaman's apprentice is is really to sit at the top of knowledge about the uses of of the plants around you and and the knowledge of how different poisons affect what kinds of ingredients do you put in the poison i remember going with a bona hua man to collect poison one time and film the entire process and here he is getting poison it doesn't look like poison doesn't just look like a tree but actually it's a vine that grows up high and in the trees of the jungly has to climb up cut the vine to vine Falls it's full of strychnine in the bark and so I didn't know that so I walked over this guy's cutting I just picked it up and said what's this and he said he looked at my hands to make sure there were no cuts in everything he said you shouldn't have done that wash your hands as soon as we get back to the village and don't put them in your eyes or your mouth on the way back they take strychnine from the bark and they use this to make a very potent poison that goes on darts and and the first sample of this poison was taken in the 1800's and taken to the Smithsonian Institution and a hundred years later they tested the poison and it was still just as lethal as when they had originally collected it so they know how to make very good poisons and they make blow guns to hunt with I remember bringing quite a few of their darts and and guns to the States for the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh had him in a long PVC pipe of just I didn't occur to me that that pipe could break and those darts could get so don't tell anybody that I brought this up here but we were going through customs and the guy said open the pipe and I tried to open and it wouldn't open it was hard he said I'll just go on through and my son who was about eight then said who we could have brought cocaine endangered languages in danger science and the reason for that is there are many different areas of science many different Sciences that want to know where language came from how does it relate to the evolution of our species is there anything like it in other species what is language like what's the essence of language how does it relate to the mind how does it relate to culture what's the connection between the things we believe and the values that we share and the way we talk is there any connection we can't know this until we get a wide variety of languages to study so I'm going to talk to you about people that are called in the literature the Pete AHA's but who don't even know what that word means themselves they call themselves the he idea and they talk something like this oh hell I saw high up by Tears so here hearty ABBA I go which means don't speak with a crooked head to me speak with a straight head and their language is called a straight head and you guessed what our language is called a crooked head they call themselves the straight ones they're found in Brazil if you took out all of the country boundaries of South America the pita ha would be right in the heart of the Amazon jungle right in the heart of South America as a confident these are the kinds of sounds you go to sleep with at night the pita ha have a great expression when you go to bed at night and if that is I thought I saw a tick I tick don't sleep there are snakes if they know you're afraid of something else though they might say hi hi oh we don't sleep there are tarantulas they're not they you know whatever makes you the most afraid but they say this to themselves and they don't sleep solidly all night long fields research and figuring out these languages takes a certain amount of time the reason this photo is in there is the little boy standing by me is now in his second year as an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Miami and when I first went to the PETA he was 9 months old [Music] now if you notice when one starts singing the others are about a syllable behind him and the reason for that is they haven't sung this song before he's telling them about an experience that he had that day and they are just following along about a syllable behind singing with him and when you analyze the singing it turns out that it's nothing more than their language it's not an invented melody the tones of their words and the stress patterns of their words in the length of their syllables produce the singing effect and they accent those things to produce music but it's just part of their normal speed that's the spirit speaking the pita ha only believe and we'll talk about this in in more detail the pita how believed and what they can see or what someone who has seen tells them about so how do they believe in spirits well they believe they've seen them they think I am one still I mean just last year when I thought we were great friends and there was no mysteries between us they one of them said hey Dan what do Americans died and I said yeah but I didn't want any research conducted I said yes we do die and they said well you know you're really old and you're not dead yet so I told him about wars and this sort of thing which was a fascinating conversation to tell them that groups of people would go out and kill other groups of people and I think there was a German researcher with me at the time and I talked to them about you know world war two as best as I could explain that in in pita ha and they just found it fascinating that we killed each other but at least it let them know that we did die my name when I first went to the pita how they don't use foreign names so my first name was oldie I I was just named after someone else in the village my next night name was I big I which just means strong but I don't think that was really a compliment and I don't know exactly what they meant by that but it wasn't a compliment from the way they used it and then finally I was in the village camping out it was late at night and I'd been traveling at night I was sort of lost on the river and I found this village and I got my tent up put my tent up in the in the middle of the village the fires were going and I was really tired and one of the the pita Hawk came said I want to talk to you and I said I'd really rather sleep I'm tired he said just let me talk to you and I came out and he said your name is I big guy but you know you really that's not a good name for you anymore I said why he says because now you're really old and so I'm gonna name you after my father who died and so my name now is pow I see it's because I'm old this fellow's old his name is joy boy but as you can see he's very fit his skin is tough as leather he's still a very good hunter and Fisher and you can see how long their arrows are and how big their bows are there are fascinating people they're also interesting because the canoe is such a vital part of their lives and they don't make them they prefer to steal them I taught them how to make canoes once I brought a Brazilian in who made canoes and we worked on it together for days and after we got a great canoe going the Brazilian left and then they came in we'd like another canoe like that I said well I've got the tools you know how to make it Oh Peter how to make canoes why not that's hard work so what do the pita has have to teach us what does this small group of 350 people scattered along the myci River in in the center center of the Amazon rainforest have to teach us if anything and and in fact I think they have a lot to teach us from the perspective of science they have things to teach us about the relationship between language and culture about the origin of language about the role and nature of language whether language is an instinct or a tool I think they have things to say about all of these important scientific topics but as human beings they have perhaps even more to teach us about their happiness and their way of life recently a team of three MIT cyclo linguists went with me to to check out some of the claims that I've made that have been controversial to people and when we got there after we'd been there for a few days they both the team said these seem like the happiest people we've ever seen well how would you evaluate happiness as good psychologists they said we just measure the time they spend smiling and laughing and compare that to the time that Americans for example spend smiling in the laughing and I bet you there come out ahead the PETA ha have a very interesting concept among all Amazonian tribes that as far as I can tell one important value that is shared is called a media sea of experienced Amazonian tribes are very interested in what's going on now and they tend not to value so much the deep past or the distant future but to focus on now and many anthropologist have commented on that but I don't know of any other group that has a concept which the PETA ha call ebay peel and a BPO is a fascinating concept when you're out there they don't speak Portuguese by the way so when I first went there in December of 1977 and got off the plane airsick and looking for the first place to throw up they started talking to me and I didn't understand anything they said so concept like a BPO these kinds of concepts are really difficult to figure out when there's no language in common so I remember once a fellow walked into the jungle and they said he a BPO left and then somebody else came out of the jungle and they said he a BPO arrived well maybe it means he just left he just arrived then I saw someone go around the bend in a canoe and they said he if appeal left he came back he bit peel left Plains they would say EBIT peel and then one night I find my candles and I just had a match and my flashlight batteries were dead and I had this can of this match lit and it was flickering and they said the match is a bit peeling they used it as a verb and I couldn't figure out what on earth would this mean well it means to go in and out of the boundaries of experience if you want to use a technical term you can say that refers to experiential liminality but it simply means to go in and out of experience this is so important to them you know not we do this when we're children you know peekaboo that's sort of the equivalent to if appeal and in our vocabulary it is it is the excitement of seeing something go in and out of experience and the pita have codified that and made it a very important part of their language and an important part of their culture and one thing I noticed was that their verb structure so English has how many verb forms well it's got about five seeing saying some singing sings Spanish or Portuguese might have 40 different verb forms well Pete aha like many American Indian languages has a very complex verbal system so Pete AHA has sixteen different suffixes that can go at the end of a verb that gives two to the 16th power possible verb forms and and that's a lot that's more than 40 and of those things three suffixes are very important and those tell you how you got your evidence so every verb has to have on it the source of the evidence did you hear about it did you see it with your own eyes or did you deduce it from the local evidence so if I say did John go fishing they can say John went fishing he I which means I heard that he did or they can say John went fishing Sibugay and that means I deduced that he did or they can say John went fishing ha and that means I saw it he went in some respects they're the ultimate empiricists or like people from Missouri the show-me-state part of this cultural value of the pinna ha immediacy of experience reflected in this word if appeal produces a value to keep information slow and to keep it verifiable and it must be witnessed so as a Christian missionary which I no longer M if you read the book you'll find out what they did to me they actually demanded evidence for what I believed and I realized I couldn't give it as well as they wanted me to give it so this changed me profoundly but I remember telling them about Jesus one time and they said so then Jesus is he brown like us or is he white like you I don't know I haven't seen him well what did your dad say cuz your dad must have seen him no he never saw him well what did your friends say who saw him well I didn't have nobody I don't know anybody who saw him why are you telling us about him then why would you talk about something you don't have evidence for of course we do that all the time Peter ha talk about a fish now I shouldn't make them sound like Saints because one of the great functions of this suffix and say I saw it with my own eyes is to lie so it worked they do lie and and I remember once taking a story about how they killed their babies infanticide and I took this I was really getting into this I was taking this whole story down infanticide and they all started laughing I said what are you laughing for who would kill her babies [Applause] difficulties of being an anthropologist than the now one of the interesting things about peat aha in fact it's extremely interesting is that they don't have any numbers they don't even have the word for one and they don't have even the concept of County now it took me a long time to work up the courage to make this claim they have a couple of words that might be like numbers one of them is win which I originally translated is one and another one is winged which I translated as two and then there's another one bagi so which I translated as mini so one too many there are Australian languages that have one too many systems or other languages like this but then I realized that if I had if I had if I had two three fish of the same size and two of them were in one pile and one was in another then they would in fact use the word I thought meant one for the one fish and the word I thought meant two for the two fish but if the fish were different sizes so that there was one large fish into very small fish then they used the word that I thought meant one for the two very small fish and the word that I thought meant two for the very large fish and I began to and then I realized that that was the same word that was appearing as a suffix on the noun for man to refer to a little boy a little boy baby so it means a little amount but it doesn't mean a number well when I made this claim a lot of people didn't believe me and so psychology psychologists from MIT came down and we published a paper in cognition eventually which last year won the you know was named by Discover Magazine as one of the most 100 top science stories of the year but why would Discover Magazine what would anybody find that particularly interesting because it's been claimed that number is innate to human beings there are many people who believe that number is an innate as part of the innate endowment of human beings but we all have numbers of some sort if you show a group that doesn't have any numbers or any concept of counting what does that mean well one thing it does not mean is that they're it doesn't mean that they're stupid I've seen PETA who have been kidnapped and raised outside the village as Brazilians who handle all the numbers just I met a young girl once about 13 years old behind a counter in a store in a village of Brazilians not far from the pita high reservation if you look very familiar and I was staring at her and a guy said oh you think she looks like the pita ha and I said actually I do well that's because she is a pita how we took her when she was a little girl and she kept store and made all the change and pita had children when when exposed when we tried to teach them numbers in portuguese lu learn these fairly quickly but they do not have in their language a word for any number now one of the ways that we showed that was to get them first - we would put objects in front of them one at a time and asked them to name the quantities as we went up you know what's the size of this so when we put one spool of thread they would say when one if we put two spools of thread they would say Hawaii - and then once we got up to higher numbers sometimes by three but certainly by ten we got boggy so but I had already figured out that boggy so meant to cause to touch to pile things up it really wasn't a number but when we started with say ten items on the page or ten items on the board in front of us and and started taking them away what you find is that they start with the same so that the right end of both charts looks pretty much the same but once you start getting down to even six some of the Peter higher you are using the word I thought meant one way so how on earth could they call six one and when you get to three if you're counting down they all say one what I thought was one and the reason is the the relative smallness of that quantity is what's in focus for them and so they use the word that means relatively small in the appropriate context but it's not a number and if that's not a number what does that mean what does that mean for the ability to count so we have a research proposal in now to go down and look at the Pina ha from the perspective of of Education one would be the best time to introduce math what happens if people haven't had math for a long time there are a lot of proposals that have been based on the idea that all humans have math that it's innate and that it mature certain ages but here's a tribe that doesn't have it at all another thing about the pita ha I won't have time to mention all the great things about them especially there's their sense of humor I've alluded to it but is they have no creation stories they don't believe they don't just demand evidence for my God the God that I used to have they demand evidence for any God so they don't have one they don't believe in God they don't believe the world was ever created they just you asked them and you can finally get the idea across it's hard enough to get the idea of something they don't even believe in across they say well it's just the way it always was this is the way the world is what do you what do you mean I said what was the world like before there was water before there was water that's a stupid question and there always has been water there's always there have always been trees they have no creation stories they don't believe in heaven they don't believe in hell they take life very much as it comes they don't want to die but when they see death is coming they don't fear it they don't they certainly have sorrow when the death of a loved one dies or a dog they love dogs tremendously and so I've seen women cry all night long and I thought somebody died and I went over and I said what's she crying about they get embarrassed oh I don't know what she's crying for well but what is she crying for Oh her dog died and and they definitely have sorrow about these things but they they get over very quickly they realize that the death is part of life and they don't create any legends to make themselves feel better about any myths to make themselves feel better in the absence of life they have the simplest kinship system known so there's a word for me there's a word for anybody of my generation regardless of gender there's a word for the generation above me there's a word for the generation a below me and then there's a word from my biological son and/or my biological daughter and that's it that's exhaust their kinship system and if you know much about kinship systems and marriage rules like we have here you can't marry your first cousin the more elaborate the kinship system usually the more elaborate the marriage rules so the less elaborate the kinship system so I've seen half sisters and half brothers married I've never seen full siblings married but there's no difference between brother and son anyone else of your generation it just is a huggie one of the things have frustrated me when I was one of the many things when I was starting to work with a PETA howl was trying to find the words for left and right so I would say this is my left hand so I would say in Portuguese which means nothing to them cuz they don't speak Portuguese but I had to say something mom we scared them and they would say okay hand okay that's my right hand hand that's your other hand so after a while you know I couldn't get this and I thought I must be a terrible English I can't even get left hand or right hand and then one of them said you know that hands up river in this hand is downriver and I said you know what are they introducing this irrelevant stuff I'm trying to get left hand or right hand here and so we went out to the jungle and I said okay now I'll find it they'll tell this guy to turn left or turn right so so they said hey turn up River we're in the middle of the jungle and he turns up river and they said turn down River turn towards the center of the jungle turn towards the water I realized that and this turns out not to be unique to the peat AHA many other groups have this they use systems of absolute direction it's as though we only use north south east and west rather than left or right and we know that left or right are really not the best way to give directions because if I stand up here and tell you to turn left and use my left that you're right but if I tell you to turn upriver where's the closest river well if you were a pita high you would know that if you were a PETA ha you would have a map of your local environment in your head when I walk with the PETA house in the jungle and I asked them what's this tree they give me a name and I write it down what's this tree they're always different they know the name of every species so they ask me what do you call these in your language what's that tree what's that tree you just have one word that's all I know but there's some people that know more but I don't the PETA ha don't even have words for yesterday or tomorrow and I found this very strange as a word for other day there's a word for now there's a word for Big Time a word for a little time but they don't have and there's a word for a son as big meaning noon or the moon is big meaning full moon but they don't have yesterday or tomorrow for example why wouldn't they have that well one of the interesting discoveries about the piraha is that their time their view of time is that it's concentric you take the moment of speech and it's things are a certain distance from that if they're close by they use one word which means literally other day if they're a little bit farther away they use another word big time which could be future or past so they conceive of time differently than we do at least in this superficial way I mean I haven't done detailed studies to get the peterhof philosophy of time and they would probably tell me to go find something else to do but it's something to think about in any case the concentric circle view of time as opposed to the linear view of time is is a new way to conceive of time and and comparing how different cultures talk about even something as much a part of our daily experience as time can open up new vistas now you have to be probably a linguist to appreciate this but I'll try to give you some of the excitement about it so one of the greatest sources of hate mail that I've ever had is the claim that the pita ha language lacks recursion that there's their grammar lacks recursion now what is recursion and who cares anyway so let me tell you what it is and then why it's important and why the pita are important for the study of it recursion is any rule or any opera raishin that applies to itself that sounds simple right so so take the act of looking at yourself in a mirror or looking at a reflection now if you if you just look at yourself in the mirror that's one exemplar of reflection but if you hold a mirror up to another mirror what do you get you get one mirror inside another mirror inside another mirror inside another mirror that's recursive whatever it is it's the recursion of visual images reappearing now I used to play in bands in fact my first experience with San Francisco was when I was growing up in Imperial Valley California I got arrested trying to come up here in the 60s trying to get to Haight Ashbury I was only 15 and my dad didn't like the idea that I was coming up here to live because I played in bands and one of the of course like everybody in the 60s admired the innovation of Jimi Hendrix and one of the most amazing things that he did was to really take advantage of auditory recursion called feedback holding up a guitar and letting an amplifier pick up its own output and do it apply to its own output over and over again now that makes the different definition of recursion and it produces feedback which to some people can sound like noise but in the hands of Jimi Hendrix was beautiful music now in a recent paper in 2002 Noam Chomsky and mark Hauser biologists at Harvard University Noam Chomsky's a linguist at MIT also known for other writings and to come to Fitch who's a biologist at the st. Andrews University in Scotland proposed that the fundamental property of human language in the sense that it is the only unique part of the only unique characteristic that language is built on that distinguishes us from other species is recursion so how does this work in language and why do they think it's important well think of a sentence like the boy was fishing that's one sentence but I've what if I take whatever rule made that sentence and apply it to itself then I can say the boy who was fishing owned the dog so I have a sentence inside a sentence or the dog the boy who was fishing owned the farmer or the farmer the dog the boy who was fishing owned bit got the gun at some point lose track of one of my favorite examples as oysters oysters eat eat oysters so that's actually a grammatical sentence but I it's really hard to understand I'll let you think about it recursion is supposed to be very important so you get it in words truck driver it's a truck inside drive and you get this other word truck driver it was a kick the bucket moment whatever that means but kick the bucket is a series of words used inside another word and this is recursion human languages what's the longest sentence in English who knows the idea is that it might be infinite and the only way we can do that with brains the size of grapefruits is to have some device that allows us to produce sentences that get that big without actually having to memorize the sentences so that's supposed to be the role of recursion so they claimed this was unique to humans this is the they don't like it when I characterize it this way but I think it's right so I'll just say it anyway the essence of human language recursion now it turns out that Peter ha doesn't have that and I don't think it's the only language like that but how would you say I want the hammock that bill sold okay that's recursion that's the sentence inside another sentence how would you say that Peter hi you say I want the sentence I want the sentence we could say that too perhaps I went to hammock bill sold the hammock and then I interpret that together in various ways and one of the ways is I want the hammock bill sold the reason this is important is because if the piraha don't have recursion my explanation is first of all it's important if they don't have recursion whatever the explanation is because if you claim that it's the essence of human language and you don't find it in a human language that's a problem now some people have said well this just like finding a in fact Chomsky said this about me recently in it in a newspaper interview he says well let's say that Peter ha is just the way Dan didn't say Dan actually says something else but he says this person describes it and that this is more or less equivalent to the idea of finding a group of people that just crawls when they could walk what does that have to tell us about human biology nothing okay well that's a difficult position to hold because if the language could be as I said it was and he admits that it could be then it's possible for that language not to be like it was predicted to be and it's also possible for a third of the languages in the world not to be that way ultimately it's possible that no language has it and if no language has it then no language can support or refute the idea so some philosophers if an idea can't be supported or refuted it's not a particularly useful idea so maybe it's wrong and if that if that idea is wrong then it means that language is different than it was proposed by these three eminent researchers and if it is different what might it be it might simply be the result of a number of kinds of constraints on how it is we talk to each other controlled by cultural values and if cultural values can can affect language then this means that language probably is not the innate instinct that say Steven Pinker and others say that it is and this leads to fascinating research so a lot of people are testing what I'm saying there's a lot of discussion of this and and I do get a lot of hate mail as a result of saying that PETA ha don't have recursion but that's all right I can take it culture is very important by learning the ways that language combined with culture we learn lessons about the environment so I remember going with the pita ha upriver one time and I saw some bubbles in the water and I said what's that and I wanted to get the word for bubbles but they didn't tell me the word for bubbles they told me the word for a species of fish those that's not a fish that's a bubble so I tried to get it across them they said no it's that species of fish they do they eat this kind of thing down below the water and it reduces it releases bubbles who would have known that there very few people would have known that if they didn't grow up around those around those fish and know those fish walking in the jungle see a branch Swain now to me I don't know if the branch is Swain because of of wind that's usually what I figure it is although the Pina Homme will point out to me that no other branch is swaying and if it were when maybe the other branches would be swinging and it turns out to be a certain species of monkey and they know that it inhabits that kind of tree and that it has this kind of behavior and it operates at this time of day not at night I've been walking with them many times and they tell me to stop because I'm about to step on a snake or you see that I remember going hunting with him one time and and we had gone out a couple of miles from the village and they said hey Dan what you're making a lot of noise well I just trying to you know I had my canteen and my machete and and they just were barefoot with and they said you just stay here and we'll come back and get you when we're done so I stood there by the tree for probably four hours hoping that there were no Jaguars in the area assuming that they wouldn't have left me if there were not knowing that they would have expected me to be able to take care of myself because no idiot would go out into the jungle without knowing how to take care of themselves learning about their relationship to the environment and their knowledge of those animals animals that many people I don't know I think I've eaten three species of extinct mammals in the Phaedo ha and I didn't make them go extinct they were just claimed to be extinct in the peat aha not only know that they're not extinct they know all about them these are the kinds of things that we lose and since the languages aren't written you can't find this knowledge on the internet what is lost when we lose a language we lose everything that one society has ever thought enough of to encode in their language there's no chance to recover from it except of a bit of the form so one of the few examples of a language that has been revived is Hebrew but we know that the Hebrew that's spoken in Israel today is not the Hebrew that was spoken 2,000 years ago and there's a lot of information now that's been encoded since its native it has a native speakers again but it's not the same information that was encoded before it was lost fortunately Hebrew was written so one of the legacies is religion and we we certainly know what that was because it was written we lose all the work of 10,000 atoms of the 10,000 naming societies that have gone out and learned and mastered their environment and and have all these things to teach us this is not knowledge that will ever be available on the internet this is knowledge that will be lost forever unless we do something about it what can we do well one other thing I want to say before I get to some suggestions is what is so important there's a fancy sociological term called Altera T which just means other nests getting to know people who are different recently the BBC asked me to come up with a 60 second idea to change the world so in 60 seconds I came up with my 60 second I didn't think it very seriously but people got really liked the idea because it was something that did affect me which is that everyone should live a week with strangers everyone should live a week with people that are very unlike them in many ways this concept of other nests has been very profound in my life coming from a small farming community in Holtville California and and winding up in in the middle of the Amazon there's something that is unappealing about everything being homogeneous around us about never experiencing different foods different ways of life different points of view these can be threatening but when we the more that we lose in terms of diversity of world's languages and cultures the more opportunities to solve problems the more different perspectives we lose that we can never recover the full range of the etic and the comfort of the emic let me just tell you those two words these are really nice words the etic means to have a perspective of a culture from someone who's outside the culture just looking at what they do just random behaviors it looks like to us but if you're inside the culture you interpret these things very differently that's the emic perspective the perspective of the insider and the more we get to know cultures through individual friends or through travels through experiences of living abroad the more we adopt other people's emic perspective other people's insider perspective on cultures and as these cultures and languages disappear people like the pita ha we lose this perspective my entire view of God and religion was altered forever my entire view of language was altered forever by the pita ha and it's not because I've gone native because frankly I'd prefer to be in San Francisco than in the Amazon many times I mean I do enjoy the Amazon but I take a lot of reading material for the for the nights and and I'm a terrible hunter I'm you know people think well you must be you must be this great outdoorsman no I can take all this stuff but I'm no good at it and I don't particularly enjoy it a lot but it is the experience that has changed me dramatically not because I've gone native but because I have seen profound examples of people who live differently think differently and have achieved more success in many respects than I have in in their lives so what do we do we can't just watch indifferently as languages disappear there's a partial solution one we need to help these people get land rights we need to help their state of health try to get the governments of the world to provide better health care for these people so that they don't lose their language because they all die the second partial solution is to document and describe these languages we need more field researchers the problem is you can't be what some Australian Ling was called fifo linguists fly-in fly-out you can't figure out these languages in a weekend's worth of study it takes a long time it takes a long time to figure out one of these languages even reasonably well a number another possible solution is to give one of the one of the organization's is called the foundation for endangered languages and here's its website but there are lots of other organizations that are interested in this but documenting endangered languages is not just butterfly collecting it is teaching us things and preserving knowledge that we will never ever have a chance to preserve again and then in the mean time those of us who aren't going to be involved directly in this read and learn about other cultures and about these other peoples thank you [Applause] thank you Dan sounds like Noam Chomsky is not persuaded yet are other people who have formally been persuaded by Chomsky about the essentialness of recursiveness now being persuaded by your experience they're taking it more seriously the major journal of linguistics language is dedicating about half of its June issue to this discussion is it turning up in any other tribes or languages yes there are some others in which people are starting to re-examine the evidence and think well maybe I was too hasty and saying it did have recursion after all that's what my thesis adviser said but maybe maybe that's not the way it was here's a question from Rolf looks like wooden felt oh yeah somewhere out here have you ever been tempted to bring someone from the piraha tribe back out of there to the world out there was that thirteen year old girl you ran into today right yes I've taken pita ha out of the village to Brazilian cities for medical work and it's it is quite interesting to take them out they take it all in stride they're better anthropologists than I am they watch and they behave like the people around them then good Terrace is there any in your view now universal property of language that's not recursion what do you got the social need to communicate would be the one single Universal of language in my opinion now I gather you're drawing your dissent saying culture comes first and language comes from that is that I'm saying that they emerged together symbiosis and you can't say that one is prior to the other but that that you learn to talk about things you believe in and you believe in things you talk about they reinforce one another as they emerge axel says to the piraha use the verb to be if so how often do they use metaphors metaphors sound recursively maybe they have metaphors once in a while so to go fast is too hit the ground with a Bigfoot and they have the verb to be so for something to be temporarily like estar and Spanish is agha and for something to be as an inherent quality as ser in Spanish is Agha was just a tonal difference how do you we were with you at the airport throwing up in 1977 these guys come up to you and start carrying on and that you don't have you know Portuguese and they don't how do you learn a language from total scratch like that started off with picking up a stick and I pointed to it and I said stick which but they said oh yeah now it could mean all sorts of different but I bet it meant stick so then I took stick and I let it fall and and I said stick falls to the ground they said he make it collie and I said I wrote down this probably means stick falls to the ground and from there we went lots of false starts and lots of mistakes and I learned that if they start ribbing each other in grinning when I'm talking probably didn't learn it right now you were there with very young children and typically kids pick up language pretty quickly did that happen to your family yes when we went there my son was nine months old my middle daughter was three and my oldest daughter was five and they they started learning the language much better than I did much faster than I did and they would go off with the pita hot children and spend their entire day playing were they learning it from other children permanently yes so my middle daughter for example since tapes to the pita home with me but she still sounds like a little girl because she left so long are there different forms of the language for males and females yes the men have eleven sounds eleven phonemes three vowels eight consonants the women have three vowels seven consonants and and the way they pronounce words is quite a bit different from them in which I think they've heard while you're talking before the during the day the men are off doing something with other men and women are off doing something with other women it's very common to that the women very often go and collect fruits and things while the men go off and and fish and hunt and like in most societies the women are usually the only ones who find anything to eat but they often go off as families as well and do things as families you mentioned they're humorous a whole lot of how humor works is in language so do they do puns I have never heard a peanut hot pun but I have they do like to joke about things that happen and so they spend a lot of time laughing it's a fairly low sort of slapstick humor exactly like mine so we get along very well is there any of the humor that is in the language I mean they could tell you a story about killing babies and that's a I mean lots of anthropology informants but the clue isn't presumably in the language of them telling the story the clue is in that and the why it's funny to them is it's an absurd story they're told that's right that's right they told the story beautifully so I told the story back to them I found a cartoon of a dog hunting and they can't read two-dimensional objects very well so drawings and because they're not exposed to them so drawings and pictures look the same so I showed them a dog hunting with a gun and they said where does I didn't told him a whole story about dogs that hunt with guns and and they were fascinated and I said dogs don't hunt with guns so I they realized that I had gotten them back for the story about the baby [Laughter] yes politely or were they really amused well they first they were upset they said you you lied to us I said yes and you lied to me and we are laughing in it so it goes you were telling Kevin Kelly a while ago that basically they work about four hours a day right and they don't have television so what's going on the rest of the time sit around talking of gossiping and talking about what they're gonna do tomorrow and just wasting time like most of us would like to do if we had the time to waste gossiping with only this limited level of generation and family must be I mean do they get any on the mother-in-law weirdness and stuff like that no they talk about who's a bad hunter and and who is who's going to go where tomorrow and what are you gonna do tomorrow and then they tell lots of sexual jokes about each other's wives and things so they I mean English people love to for some reason and analyze each other's personalities a lot so two teenagers and does that go on or people sort of very alert to each other's characters and personalities and the difference and that becomes part of the bye plate yes they definitely understand they they have an idea about how every member of their society works and functions and they really have knowledge about all the people in their society but there's not a great distinction between adults teenagers and children because everyone in a harsh environment has to take responsibility for themselves very early so you know if you're a rebellious teenager and you don't want to do anything that they fine you just won't eat and so as long as you're willing to pay the consequences for your own action nobody's going to tell you what to do that's actually an important PETA high value is not telling other people what to do bring it on what are the rituals of you know puberty or of marriage or coming apart or things go on around death no there aren't any rituals except for a dance that they do when the full moon and it's debatable whether you would want to call that a ritual or not and it gets into technical anthropological discussion but for example to get married to people go off and live with one another and I've seen eight-year-old children go off and live with each other for a while because the guy already knows how to fish and she knows how to clean fish so they pretend to be then they go back to their parents but it's at some point they stay with each other but there's no particular ritual for that or puberty or or any typical rite of passage from Luigi if there's no past or future can there be spoken consequences rewards punishments outcomes how does learning occur in this sort of timeless frame they do have a knowledge of past and future and they do think about the past and future but not the past that hasn't been experienced the past in their own lives the past they have seen and of course we've seen the entire history of our lives and they can think about they can think about anything they want to think about but they talk about only the immediate future so you can talk about what somebody did yesterday and why that has consequences today that's not a problem and why you ought not to do this tomorrow but you won't say something like you know by in fifty years from now the Brazilians would have taken over this part of the jungle Kyle Elliot has a question what is the piraha concept of love do they have one since it cannot be seen they can see the effects of it they see the effects of being with someone and so they definitely are very affectionate with one another and they use a verb for love which is is like Spanish and other languages is to want someone very much is is to love them and I remember one of the most moving experiences I had I was getting ready to leave the village and the pita ha man who's if anyone seen the picture of me when my head coming up out of the river and this guy in the canoe that guy said to me when I was leaving he said we really want you I really love you and and I thought that was really great I was really moved by that and he said nobody else gives us coffee [Laughter] so you're from outside do they have contact with other tribes occasionally there's there's a group of two P speaking people that are within a two day walk of the pto village and sometimes each group walks a day away from the village to hunt so they do encounter each other in the jungle and the peat aha think of them as these kinds of jungle entities I mean they know that they speak another language they know where their villages are but they don't like them and they're afraid of them and the pattern change change this other people for different reasons are afraid of the peat aha who do they steal the canoes from Brazilian river boats that are in that go by neighboring rivers to look for Brazil nuts the Pina ha paddle up at night and take as many canoes as they can off the ends of the boats and I guess nobody had any knowledge of what they used to do before the river boats were there so it's amiss they make a bark canoe called caca Hawaii which they just take the bark off a certain kind of tree and they put mud at both ends and that's a canoe and but that doesn't carry much weight and it doesn't last very long most of their culture is disposable they make a basket and they throw it away as soon as they're done carrying things and make it very crudely and just throw it away the only permanent tools that they there are very few permanent tools and the most obvious one is the bow and arrow how primitive is that it will last a good bow will last for years and and the bowstring and the arrow these are the most elaborate cultural artifacts they create and presumably there's a lot of maintenance with those keeping the arrow straight and things like that yeah you have to put them in the fire and straighten the mouth and and make sure the feathers are twisted right so that they'll twirl right in the air and and there's a hole holes science to that and but every child learns it from their parents so they see it happen it's not illiterate there's no literature oral literature about this is how you make a bow and arrow this is the kinds of things you don't need to talk about it's like telling someone have a literature about how to get lots of water so you told several stories about their intense observational and certain knowledge qualities they're embedded in the language and even more on their behaviors so they know you know that there's a shaking tree they know what kind of treat it is what kind of monkey it is and probably if they could shoot it with an arrow a lot of stuff like that or they more observa t'v in that sense than other tribal groups or that just the way it is when you're that close other tribal groups that have limited contact with the outside tend to be roughly comparable I've worked with over 20 different groups in the Amazon the groups that are learning Portuguese and moving away from their language lose skills with that they lose some of that knowledge so that I actually recorded the bond awha that I talked about briefly imitating animal sounds and I took that to the pita ha and played it for them and they all laughed they recognized every animal and they said these guys know their animals and I recorded the PETA han took them to the Bono and they all recognized them but the Bono ah are losing their language and so it's only the older men who can make those sounds like the pita ha any PETA ha can make those sounds and who know all about the animals and their behavior now one of the remarkable things you did with the sound here was we were hearing what sounded like singing and sort of blending into speaking and you're saying they're basically the same I'm sorry more about that they they can the pita ha don't even though they only have three vowels and eight consonants often speak without using them at all because they can whistle their language they can hum their language so if you see for example a mother and a child most of the time she won't be talking to that child with consonants and vowels she'll be saying things like and just humming but that's a they can carry on a full conversation doing that because of all the rich information that's in the tones in the length of the words in the divisions of the words that are even made in the the syllables made with the hum speech or the whistle speech or the yell speech there are various different kinds of communication that they use that are unavailable to to to us in English for because we don't have tones language even now we can use it to some degree another fascinating thing about the pieter hoff whistle speech is that only men whistle women don't whistle and if you look at whistles around the world in almost every society that has whistle speech and there are several only men whistle and even in English up until a few years ago if anybody was going to do whistling at another person it tended to be men so why that is nobody really knows that's probably profound okay here's a good Rosetta type question you mentioned nearly 7,000 documented languages out there how many of those are written how many can we put on the disk oh the ones that are written are probably around 3,000 probably yes and again it's very difficult to say because to even get an idea of these things writing is a is a very significant invention in human history it's only been invented about four or five times in the history of is less than agriculture that's amazing and and so it was invented in the Americas by Sequoia the Cherokee chief and that's an amazing accomplishment it was invented by the Phoenicians it was invented by the Chinese but it's been invented very few times so most languages unless someone's gone there a linguist and used the international phonetic alphabet to begin to develop a writing system for them the language is not written so more than half the languages of the world are not written now one of the big things of missionary endeavor all over the world as near as I can tell is often to go into a unwritten language group and then for the missionaries to start creating a written form what happens when that goes on they when they write the language and the people begin to learn to read and write it then you see the language change in several ways because some of the the oral style is lost because they start to use the written style begins to take more of an influence the sentences often become longer because you write them down and you can remember them longer it affects a lot of things we tried to teach the pita ha how to read and write at first and after several weeks of trying they read the word McGee and they all started laughing and I said why are you laughing and they said that sounds just like our word for ground and I said it is your word for ground and they said no it isn't we don't write our language Aysen and so then they stopped coming to the classes question forum stewart robinson how do you distinguish between the lack of a word and the lack of a concept that's a that's a profound question and it's a very difficult question to determine but you can you can get at the absence of a concept in in various ways do they talk about this thing roundabout in their stories can you do psychological experiments to see if they have this concept it's not transparent it's not a very easy thing to do but there are ways at getting at whether they have a word whether they have a concept but lack the word what do you tell from lists or storm eyes from all this about language is being born or language is being born now or is it just purely a tale of loss there are always languages coming into being from nothing or sort of forking off as dialects and then become languages well the one type of language that comes pretty much from nothing is the creole language and we find these Creole languages arising in different parts of the world and those are fascinating in themselves they've been taken as some of the greatest evidence for the language instinct I don't think they are but it's a long story but you do also find languages coming into being when people stop talking with one another so you find the greatest divisions of languages where there are the greatest geographical obstacles and where people who used to speak the same language and no longer speak to one another on a regular basis their languages change and they become mutually unintelligible languages well I wonder about that because Papua New Guinea that sort of makes sense chopped-up landscape but here in california with this big valley in its coastal connection and so on we had what 26 26 or so language groups is that right actually they're more even today they're almost 55 languages spoken in California okay what's going on well those languages are now dying out but at the time one of the highest concentrations of languages in the world used to be and still is to a large extent the northwestern United States southwestern Canada so Northern California Oregon Washington up to British Columbia is a very high concentration of diverse indigenous languages and and so there are various reasons people don't talk to one another they don't talk to one another sometimes because of geography but they may not talk to one another because of tribal boundaries they may not talk to one another because of religious beliefs they may not talk to one another whatever the reason are that people stop talking to one another that failure to communicate will eventually lead over generations to separate languages that's something I saw in East Africa when I was there as 10-year olds who had mastered six or seven languages three of them European you know English French German and and all of the nearby tribal languages and of course Swahili is this sort of unique situation of post-colonial connectivity or normal in the world it's fairly normal in the world for people who have to use languages various languages to master them and it turns out that the human brain is sufficiently plastic that when we need to learn other languages we can it becomes harder when our needs are less but you often find people who are polyglots in various parts of the world whether it's in Africa or Holland so I'm thinking also I mean part of the I have very limited knowledge of California drives but some and and things like hand game over where it very widely played among many different tribes and often between tribes I've seen hand game played between Paiutes I do completely different forms of playing the game one tribe really one even though it's supposedly a game of chance and we find artifacts so that most of the Obsidian the people who are using for arrowheads and so on came from Mono Lake and had to go from one place to another in order to get all the tribes that needed arrowheads and yet these language divisions persist so what moves across then and does it take bilingual people to do that or is it sign language or what very often languages represent cultural values as well and people have theories or beliefs whatever you want to call them about how their languages reflect who they are and they may not want to learn another language even if people that they have to come into contact with so either there could be someone special designated to learn the language and represent the tribe they could use a sign language as the sign language of the American Indians of the plains there there are lots of different ways to get around this issue and in globalization we're regularly dealing with people that the average American doesn't speak Japanese but we have a lot of contact in trade with the Japanese with some I mean some tribes steel women from other tribes and do they presumably get some bilingual bilingual capabilities with that yes that's very common fact there's a part of northern Brazil which practices something called linguistic exogamy they have to marry a woman who speaks a different language and so there are various people in the area so what you find is that the children grow up speaking the mother's tongue and then if they're a boy they they switch to their father's tongue when they when they get past puberty but this kind of linguistic complication is is common in that particular situation is not common but but linguistic intermarriage is common is that also happening with the piraha where the the children are basically speaking the woman's language until they get to a certain age and are going off for the men hunting or yes transition that happens I mean you find boys in fact because of all the hum speech that takes place hmm they tend to use a sound like a glottal stop if you hear a glottal stop is a sound that's that's you find it in English but we don't use it very importantly so that's a glottal stop that breaks up the flow of air discussed issues yes but you find that the the piraha children will often instead of saying alligator or or let's see head op op I very very often they will say I children especially do that you see use glottal stops because they haven't really learned the consonants that well yet because of hum speech with their mothers so that we're talking about the same language one question from Carmen Olson is do the para have a sign language and if there is deafness how do they deal with it there's no sign language they gesture presumably yeah they use gestures gestures are very important in all human cultures and they reveal a lot about the mind in fact you can't really study a language without looking at gestures as well because that's a very important part of the communication system there are no deaf Pete AHA that I'm aware of any time there are handicapped people they take good care of them in another tribe of Brazil the the auto boo Kippur there's a high incidence of deafness and they have learned sign language and if there's one deaf person present in the entire village everyone only uses sign language until that person is gone then they switch to speaking yeah I've run into versions of that with American Indians people teaching American in completely American Indian classes often have a problem that nobody is allowed to Excel and so that they stay at the level of the you know least interested student and so that can be a serious problem in terms of people connecting with the world Mike Finney you gave an example numbers of the concept the piraha can't understand are the things they can't understand because they can't use recursion I haven't found anything but if you don't talk about I mean actually recursion is something that people have made a big deal of but there's nothing you can say with recursion that you can't say without it so some people have told me well how do they have if you say John said that builds a bad boy bills a bad boy as a sentence within the sentence John said that you can't talk about things that people said without recursion in fact you can think about this sentence I threw up that's what John said anyway those are two separate sentences and that doesn't involve recursion and and you can communicate these things just fine without and they use workarounds like that yes yeah and and in fact it just means that the context plays a much greater role recursion turns out to be a very useful device for manipulating the flow of information when in in cultures where we're talking about things that not everyone knows but in a culture Society of intimates in which everybody pretty much knows what everybody else is going to talk about in terms of the topics they don't need that kind of information management tool they can have sentences uttered side by side and there's a lot of contextual information and cultural information to get exactly the right interpretation every time so that totals shared immersion gives these kinds of capabilities and it also it sounds like would lead to absolute directions so toward the ocean and away from the ocean right rather than the stage left and stage right actually the same thing we just did it the shared miss what allows what I miss hearing is that a very intimate group can have this kind of rather to us limited language but it only works in a limited situation like that and and so the thirteen-year-old piraha girl who was out and works in a shop she's going to take on numbers she's got the skill and in order to get the job she needed this Gil so it's a moving out from that intimacy then leads into these other things that language like numbers and recursion is on that's right and it's predicted independently by a lot of linguistic research done and recently some people call it esoteric communication you're talking about always the same kinds of topics others refer to it as the Society of intimates but this has a lot to do with new views this is quite related to new views on the evolution of language coming out of these narrow groups these small groups into larger groups so human intelligence didn't change but the complexity of language changes complexion the complexity of the syntax the grammar because of the wider society and the greater range of experiences and the information had to be managed differently so as you go from a very small hunter-gatherer group to a larger sort of chieftainship or something like that to a federation you're gonna have that reflected in the language you could there's the the the thing is it's not required you could have very small groups with very complex language and large groups with simple languages but the general tendency is for the complexity of the grammar to - to fit the society in which it's found there's a lot more research that has to be done on these things but the one thing we have to be careful of is not to assume that if it's a small group they have a very simple grammar and if it's a large group they were very complicated grammar because they we can they can be just the opposite this relates to a question from Kevin Kelly Kenna language like parihar continued outside the environment that is if I mean lots of diasporas maintain their language and using it over the internet and on their cell phones and so on do you think piraha if there were a a an exodus would they maintain the language as it is well you maintain the form of the language you maintain the meaning of most of the words but you begin to lose that connection with the culture and the local environment that gives the language to speak metaphorically it's sold it really gives the language the special content that makes it unusual so so I've told a lot of linguists think they can do field work in Los Angeles for example on just about any language in the world so you find linguists that apply for assistant professorship that list field work on their on their Vita because they they work with some speakers in Los Angeles so if I'm right you have to do field work in the local community where the culture will still practice you can look at these other languages there are other things you can find outside the cultural community but if you really want to write a grammar in a dictionary and figure out how this language works you need it to be connected to the local community where the cultures is still vibrant so I guess I'm starting to get a question in my mind about second languages and trade languages like Swahili like Latin for a while like French for a while like English now which is sort of the global language of science entertainment and various other things does having a shared second language help preserve primary languages or does it erode them it it really depends on the local values in other words you can learn another language and the children can begin to shift away to that language very quickly it depends in globalization often depends on what the economic rewards are or the or any other kind of rewards are for continuing to speak your language in most cases the economic rewards are speaking the second language began to overwhelm all the values that reward speaking the first language so you see language shift in dramatic numbers it sounds like with the piraha there are almost no economic events going on they're not interested in goods from the outside world there I've been with so many Amazonian groups for example who are like if you offer a really good knife they're not interested oh they'll take it they're curious about it they'll take it they'll use it but they don't protect it they don't save it I mean you my find it laying out in the grass a couple of days later they have a few tools but they're not worried about them they're just not there's a value for the pita ha is to keep yourself simple to not you take any not acquire any more than you can walk off with and very quickly to not consume more than you need is this because they see or experience the failure to do that it's just a value not to they want to be mobile I mean they have a nomadic mindset they travel around a lot they want the whole village travels or individuals individuals and families travel and and they they want to be mobile and they want to be what they call hard jiggy sigh and to be hard means to not to be in control of your body and to not eat too much to not sleep too much to to hard bodies yeah hard bodies the straight ones does that suggest a concept of crooked ones serve them yes we are crooked ones we are correct yeah all of us are bent away which is any kind of thing that's bent so in the sense that are they saying to you well we're not used at what straight ones means or who are they saying straight ones - they're better better ones chosen there's right and worth their language is to speak with a straight head and and to speak any other language is to speak with a crooked head that's it what do you think they're referring to with crookedness there's that wood protrusion is and no it's just it's just unattractive ugly I mean I've taken them I've taken pita home with me to visit other Indian villages when I had to go there for a couple of hours to for a medical reason or something like that and I had a PITA how was with me independently and and I said what did you think about them they're ugly what about their water their water stinks they really have a very high opinion as I said why do you think I'm here this is the best place in the world they don't say the best place in the world but they say this is a very very good place they don't have a concept of world they have a concept of luck in that you were a lucky person to be there are their luck and bad luck and bad medicine and they don't talk about luck somebody told me about the pita ha as far as they're concerned somebody told me about them I I knew that the river had lots of fish and that the place is beautiful and that it doesn't get cold and that's why I went there question from Laura would you call them short-term thinkers and here were these long-term thinkers they would be short-term thinkers and and for long-term thinkers the value of that is to is to is to not devalue our immediate experience to think about the future to plan for tomorrow and for many tomorrow's in advance but to learn to be satisfied with the day as it is you know one of the Bible verses that I thought the pita high exemplified better than any other is sufficient to the day is the evil thereof take care of today and and tomorrow will take care of itself but it grows out of a confidence of their ability to take care of themselves that they don't have to worry about tomorrow because they're confident they show themselves that each day they're able to take care of their needs and and that is a is a solid way to think about the future not out of fear but out of confidence of being able to take care of your daily needs so in their presence you went from a faith based approach to things to an evidence based it sounds like to some degree that's true I mean I think there are a lot of linguists that would say that I'm still faith-based in my linguistics but I think I've gone to a more evidence-based approach a question from Carolyn will make it the last one do you talk to the women as well as the man and as a man were the women treating you speaking with you sort of as a man or just as this weird alien being a speaking dog or something and there's a the question involves what are the general relationships and you have a sense of there's a recursive question how your presence there had effect on their culture or language well clearly my presence there affects them because it just as they show me other ways of being I show them other ways of being and so they see the things that I do and and one of they were talking once how did Dan learn our language so fast nobody else has ever learned our language and they said he just sits on his butt all day and looks at paper and that's the way you learn languages but it made them think for the first time about how you could learn another language and so they started asking me how to say things in English and Portuguese and so you know what is that called Meza and then they said yeah but that's ugly so we don't want to talk to it sounds like their culture is not going to be thrown far off track by the likes of you there are very resilient culture they I I would say that over the last thirty years my effect on them has been minimal and their effect on me has been maximal and it's finished with the gender thing cos and this is of interest to all of us who've been you know fighting hard to get the genders equal and communicating and equal pay and the rest of it here's a situation where the genders have almost different worlds to some extent different language to some extent and you're coming in were you a man speaking into the women do you speak to the women how are you treated in that well ears before the women would say a word to me because they first don't talk to outsiders and second they don't but after a few years when I could speak the language pretty well I started telling jokes around the women and they would try not to laugh but they would start laughing and then they just now they talk to me normally and and so they talk to me like they would any PETA ha man so they do talk it's they do have spheres of labor and and and specialty but the women and men get along very well and it's sometimes a man will stay home with the children while the woman goes out fishing and and he might stay home while she goes to look for Brazil nuts so so they and they take I don't notice a great difference in the sense of status between men and women in the society well I've heard it said that in most tribal groups are the women of the botanists and the men of the zoologists and that the case here yeah I would say that the men are the ones that tell the stories about the big one that got away and the women are the ones that bring the food in period on thank you so much [Applause] [Music] you [Music]
