Subject: Re: [Piraha] Re: I'll swap you...
From: Jacques Guy <[email-masked]>
To: Jorge Stolfi <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 14 Mar 2005 13:39:28 +1000

13/03/2005 8:53:59 PM, "Jorge Stolfi" <[email-masked]> wrote:

>Curiouser and curiouser, as Alice said

....

>  Americans in their opinion are identified partially by
>  their ability to speak other languages (since the only Americans
>  they know are the only people they know that speak more than one
>  language). Even so, it is difficult for them to grasp the fact that
>  I can speak their language.

I was told the same story about the Japanese 40 years ago!
It is true that, in those days, Japanese people did not
expect you to speak Japanese at all. But the Japanese
businessmen and engineers I met in Paris then (and who could
speak no French and very minimal English, if any) were
absolutely delighted to have a local who could speak Japanese.

>  They will often have conversations about
>  me in front of me and then look astounded when I enter into the
>  conversation 

*snicker* more probably, they are astounded at how godawful the
speech of the gringo is

>  They
>  eventually answer us

after they have painfully pieced together what the Professor's
gibberish might perhaps, just perhaps, mean.

> but the experience is clearly unsettling for
>  them. 

Eu você muy bem falar-com-lhe-ei, asím? 

(Yes, I _know_ that it is not muy, but muito, I did it
on purpose!)

I imagine that that is how Everett's Piraha sounds to
the Piraha speakers. You likee brazileiro belong me?
Wouldn't the experience be unsettling to you if I were
a "linguist" from a vastly more technologically advanced
civilization (and unbelievably richer)?

>Now I do not know what to think of it.  It seems unlikely that pirahã
>is a complete fabrication.  

I don't think it is either. If Everett had fabricated it, I would
expect him to have made it more consistent. As it stands his 
Piraha shouts at you, with lights flashing: BULLSHIT BULLSHIT
BULLSHIT

>If I had to pass judgement at this point,
>I would guess that Everett has only a very, very poor understanding of
>Pirahã, just enough for simple sentences; a very limited vocabulary,
>and very poor pronunciation.  His grammar is probably good enough
>to pass simple tests by casual visitors, but parts of it may be faked
>or incorrect, and many "features" of pirahã may be in fact attempts by
>Everett to hide the gaping holes.

Yes.

>Thus pirahã may have embedding, but Everett never mastered it.  Or the
>indians learned that, when speaking to that dumb gringo, they had better
>use only the simplest phrases, like speaking to a toddler.

True. Very common. It took the Sakao people a while to realize that
I wanted them to talk to me in proper Sakao, not in the ridiculous
baby talk used by the Presbyterian missionaries 50 years before.

> So does the confusion of the pirahã when
>asked (by the Everetts, presumably) to do Gordon's counting exercises,
>and their failure to learn counting in spite of intensive efforts by the
>Everetts.

If they had had Madame Pennec, my teacher when I entered primary school
(I never went to kindergarten), they would count to twenty within a
fortnight. I could not count when I went to primary school. Not even
to two! I might have been able to distinguish between one and several
but beyond that, nothing.

>At first I found it hard to believe that someone could progress through an
>university career while standing on such a fraud.  But then I recalled
>Eric Thompson, the greatest authority on Maya script, who did not know the
>Maya language...

Well, take Thomas Barthel. The useful work, the tracings of the rongorongo
corpus, was done by research assistants. The rest is complete garbage,
from the inept transcription system to the bogus decipherments. And, in
his later years, he insisted on being called "Sir Thomas Barthel". "Sir"
mon cul.