Excursion in Recursion: Language & Cognition in the Piraha

In the May 2006 Der Spiegel, Rafaela von Bredow profiles the Piraha people of Brazil. Over three decades ago, linguist Daniel Everett stumbled across an anomaly in the Brazilian forests: a band of around 350 tribal people known as the Piraha. He kept his “find” to himself because as he puts it “I simply didn’t trust myself.” What he didn’t trust was his initial analysis of their language. He admits that their language is “tremendously difficult to learn.” Given the well-known errors of linguistic anthropologist of days gone by who are all but too eager to plant their academic “flag” on a new discovery only to have their work debunked by the next generation, caution is a good sign. Fellow linguist and Piraha scholar, Peter Gordon, is "concerned the Piraha will simply become one more scientific oddity, to be exploited and analyzed right down to their feces."
An example of academic overconfidence involves the Eskimo language. Yes, I know that there is no such thing as an Eskimo; indigenous people of the Arctic are Inuit and Yupik, if they are found in our hemisphere. Although many social science textbooks still state otherwise, it is not the case that they have 50, 100 or even 500+ words for “snow.” The truth is that their languages are what linguists term agglutinative. This means that they can string morpheme after morpheme together in a seemingly endless line and call it a word. In other words, anthropologists might hear “snow-that-fell-the-night-before-when-the-moon-was-full” and call it a new “word” for snow. (German is also known to be an agglutinative language, but I will bow to our native speaker to expound on that.)
I started to question whether von Bredow's confident assertion that the Piraha "have no history, no descriptive words, and no subordinate clauses." I “Wikied”--I know that Wikipedia isn't proper in formal research, but thought it would be okay for blog purposes--the Piraha, and discovered that their language is, indeed, agglutinative. To an English speaker like me, those agglutinated words might as well be subordinate clauses, because that is how I perceive their function. I also discovered that males and females have different languages. This is not uncommon in cultures with strict gender-defined roles. Another aspect of their language that may prove difficult for the native English speaker is the tonal element. Everett notes two tones that are meaning-laden. Other linguists claim three or more. Since they don’t agree, they are not hearing the same thing that the Piraha are. This makes me wonder what else they might not understand.
So although I question their lack of recursion and also question von Bredow's arguments on that score, some of her points were, indeed, valid. Whorf has been resurrected from mid last century in order to explain their lack of a counting system. The Whorf-Sapir hypothesis that states that words help us think our thoughts. This idea dates back to the dawn of linguistics in the writings of classical Indian scholars Pingala and Patanjali, but it took the British 2,000+ years to "discover" it, and plant their own flag. Yes, in fact, proving that words matter!
I don't doubt the influence of language on thought, but I am not convinced that Whorf's theory is the operative agent in the phenomenon that is the inability of the Piraha to count to ten.
All sources agree that the Piraha are intelligent people. They are genetically related to neighboring tribes that do have counting words in their vocabulary. Their language is an isolate, a remnant from a group that is extinct but for their branch. It is documented decisively that they are counting impaired. What other conclusion could be reached?
At least, two things bother me about this picture. First, it is also stated that they have two color words that indicate light and dark. Sounds strange to us, but this is more common that you may think. It also indicates a classic linguistic progression. Their language would have the next color word added indicating red. Does this mean that they are color-blind? No. Linguistically, orange would not be a "color" word in English because it has a juicy, citrus fruit as its primary referent. Second, I posit Piaget, Montessori, and Steiner pedagogies of learning numbers may be more relevant in exploring the Piraha deficiency. If number concepts were so hard-wired into our human brains, would we spend so much preschool time exposing them to our own children? If language acquisition has windows of opportunity, perhaps, counting has an even more rigid time frame.
If it does hold true that these tribal peoples are without past or future and that they live absolutely in the present, then they will be of interest not only to the academics of the world, but also the Zen monks who strive for decades to achieve what the Piraha have as a birth right: Present Mind. My fears run along with Peter Gordon, that the tribal people may have more to suspect from the "friendly academics" than they do the ethically-suspect traders from "civilized" Brazil. The perils are too numerous to count.