(13) Pirahas start their days early, usually about five o’clock, though for a people who sleep very little during the night, it isn’t clear if it’s better to say that they start their day or simply never end it. Brazilians used to tell me when I was learning Portuguese, “Americans say ‘thank you’ too much.” Even in Western societies, there is considerable variation in how much we use phatic communication. The way to express penitence is not by words but by actions. They can say, “I was bad,” or some such, but do so rarely. The same goes when someone has done something offensive or hurtful. If you give someone something, they might say, “that’s alright,” or “It is OK,” but they use these to mean something more like ‘transaction acknowledged,” rather than “thank you.” The expression of gratitude can come later, with a reciprocal gift, or some unexpected act of kindness, such as helping you carry something. When a Piraha arrives in the village, he or she might say, “I have arrived.” But by and large, no one says anything. And they stare suspiciously at me when I say that the Pirahas have no such forms of communication. Anytime someone visits the Pirahas with me, they ask how to say these things. I have become used to this over the years and forget most of the time how surprising this can be to outsiders. There are no words for thanks, I’m sorry, and so on. Piranha sentences are either requests for information (questions), assertions of new information (declarations), or commands, by and large. The Piraha culture does not require this kind of communication. Expressions like hello, goodbye, how are you?, I”m sorry, you’re welcome, and thank you don’t express or elicit new information about the world so much as they maintain goodwill and mutual respect. (11) One of the things about Piraha language that immediately fascinated me was the lack of what linguists call “phatic” communication - communication that primarily functions to maintain social and interpersonal channels, to recognize, or stroke, as some refer to it, one’s interlocutor. (8) The basic organization of Piraha sentences is SOV (subject object verb) - the most common ordering among the world’s languages. Rarely have I heard the village completely quiet at night or noticed someone sleeping for several hours straight. (xvii) The Pirahas laugh and talk a good part of the night. After living the authentic lives of nature based peoples, it is perhaps more remarkable that we don’t hear about this kind of “reverse-conversion” more often. In this way, the missionary himself got missionized. What makes his story particularly remarkable is that he ended up renouncing his religious faith, his devotion to Christianity, which subsequently contributed to leaving his wife and three and children. Daniel Everett went there in the late 1970s as a missionary and linguist to translate the Bible into Piraha language and to study their unique language. They also uniquely seem to have no creation myths (therefore no “religion” or “ritual” as these ideas are generally accepted), no counting system, and no communal history beyond one generation…a sort of primitive “living in the now.” They are known as having a language which challenges long held Chomskyan “universal grammar” principles (mainly the concept of recursion - sentences within sentences). The Piraha (pronounced pee-da-HAN) live along the Maici River in the Amazon Rainforest.
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