This is a story on the Pirahãs, a very unique indigenous tribe living in the Amazon forest, in Brazil. It came out on an issue of VEJA, a renowned weekly Brazilian magazine, and it is originally written in Portuguese. To see a scanned version of the original article, click here. Its contents, of course, do not necessarily comply with my own views on the subject.

VEJA
2004th edition, 40th year, #15
April 18th, 2007

Translated by Haggen Kennedy.

The Pirahã Mystery
Amazon tribe does not understand the concept of numbers and defies language formation theory.

The Pirahã tribe, made up of about 350 indigenous people living by the Maici River in the Amazon, has become a challenge in the eyes of science. Like many other tribes in the region, the Pirahãs are hunters and fishers. However, they possess unique characteristics regarding their communicational system. Their language defies any theory that may try to explain how human language developed in different cultures. According to the current, most widely accepted theory, created by linguists like the American Noam Chomsky, language formation is based on some sort of universal grammar with common rules. The human being is endowed with innate assets in order to use these rules. This allows children to understand the meanings of words and sentences, and, little by little, to expand their vocabulary. This universal grammar causes all languages to present dependent clauses, which would be the basis for complex reasonings: “After I finish eating, I’ll go to your place.” The Pirahã tongue is the only language ever acknowledged in the world to show no dependent clauses, going against the universal grammar concept.

Pirahãs have no words to describe color. They do not use grammatical tenses indicating actions performed in the past. The oral tradition of telling stories does not exist among them. Everything is said in the present tense. Written language does not exist. Pirahãs do not draw or paint, nor do they know any type of art. They constitute the only society in the world, according to anthropologists, portraying no myth of creation to explain their origin. To make matters worse, Pirahãs do not use numbers and do not know how to count – they have but a single word, “Hói”, meaning one, or small. The absence of arithmetic abstraction among the Pirahãs was studied recently by the American linguist Peter Gordon. He tried, patiently, to teach the natives how to count from one to ten, explaining to them the concept of numbers and how useful they are in one’s everyday life. He failed. Gordon’s research confirmed the theory of American linguist Benjamin Whorf which states that language anchors thought. In the 30s, Whorf purported that the human being can only formulate thoughts from elements finding a correspondence in words. Since Pirahãs have no words to make them come close to understanding the concept of numbers, it is impossible for them to grasp their meaning.

In the last decades, besides Gordon, half a dozen researchers penetrated the Amazon jungle in order to study the Pirahãs’ language and culture. The first of these researchers – and the most assiduous among them – is the British ethnologist Daniel Everett, from Machester University, who lived with the said tribe for seven years since the 70s. It was his studies that called the attention of the academic world to the tribe’s peculiarities and to the challenges that the Pirahãs represent to science. “The universal grammar theory is inadequate to explain the Pirahã language”, says Everett. “Its grammar comes from its culture, which is absolutely unique”, he complements.