Subject: Piraha: it has to be a gigantic hoax
From: Jacques Guy <[email-masked]>
To: Jorge Stolfi <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 17 Mar 2005 22:17:51 +1000

Look at what Everett write in his article
"Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition 
in Pirahã"

Note 24 p.65: "Martius's error is not as difficult to understand 
as it might first appear, i.e. that anyone could think that Pirahã 
vocabulary is/was Tupian. In my first visit to the Pirahã, they
tended to give Tupian (Nheengatu) words as answers to my attempts 
to elicit vocabulary in their language. I might not have spotted this 
for a while, since this was my first field experience except that 
my wife, Keren Everett, speaks a Tupi language, Sateré, and told
me that those words could not be Pirahã unless Pirahã was Tupian.

However, right at the beginning, in the abstract:

"the fact that the Pirahã are monolingual after more than 200 years 
of regular contact with Brazilians and the Tupi-Guarani-speaking 
Kawahiv..."

So at first they spoke Tupian to Everett, and at the
same time they are monolingual! Well, those two pieces
of information being 64 pages apart, I wonder who else
will notice.

p.38 he quotes himself like this:

"Consider the following example of what Everett (1985) calls the 
'sloppy phoneme effect' :
(6) tí píai ~ kí píai ~ kí kíai ~ pí píai ~ 'í píai ~ 'í 'íai ~ 
    tí píai, etc. (*tí tíai, * gí gíai, *bí bíai) 'me too'
(7) 'apapaí ~kapapaí ~papapaí ~'a'a'aí ~kakakaí ~(*tapapaí, *tatataí, 
    *bababaí, *gagagaí) 'head'
(8) 'ísiihoái ~kísiihoái ~písiihoái ~píhiihoái ~kíhiihoái ~ 
    (alternations with /t/s or involving different values for [continuant] 
    or [voicing] are unattested) 'liquid fuel'"

So "head" is indifferently  xapapai, kapapai, papapai, 
xaxaxai, or kakakai? No language can work like that and 
remain functional.

He give the secret away p.62: "The absence of formal 
fiction, myths, etc. does not mean that they do not 
or cannot joke or lie, both of which they particularly 
enjoy doing at my expense, always good-naturedly."

Those Pirahã probably speak some Tupi dialect when
Everett is out of earshot