Daniel L. Everett, Don't Sleep, There are Snakes ** 1/2

In 1980, Dan Everett moved with his wife and three young children to a remote village in the Amazon. They were missionaries whose intent was to learn the language of the Pirahas and translate the gospels into that language. Over the decades that he spent (on and off) with the Pirahas, he came to believe that their language belied certain central tenets of modern linguistics. He also came to lose his faith, a subject I wish he had elaborated on more.

When Dan writes about the challenges of adjusting to the jungle and the culture shock — which he does for the first 70 pages and in short bursts thereafter — the book is a riveting adventure. When he turns his attention to anthropology and linguistics, on the other hand, the book sounds surprisingly sophomoric.

I assume that Dr Everett, the Chair of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Illinois State University, knows what he is talking about. However, the anthropological descriptions sound like they come from a student paper. ("There is no official coercion in Piraha society–no police, courts, or chiefs. But it exists nonetheless. The principal forms I have observed are ostracism and spirits." [pg 111]) The linguistic analysis seems suspect to me. He claims to have discovered a language that violates proposed language universals in not just one way but in phonology, semantics, and (a complete lack of) syntax. The examples in the book don't compel the conclusions he makes from them. In some cases I think he has counterexamples: for example, he claims that the Piraha cannot talk about events that no one present witnessed (the "immediacy of experience" principle), but he also claims to have produced a translation of the Gospel of Mark and shows the Piraha talking about spirits. Everett is rightly intrigued by the differences in our cultural worldviews and the resulting differences in language. I think he has translated his lack of interest in the universal aspects of language into a belief in the non-existence of those universal aspects.


On the other hand, Everett is a trained linguist, and he has submitted his claims to independent confirmation. Perhaps the more technical literature depends less on vague principles like the "immediacy of experience."


UPDATE: Not surprisingly, other linguists are not convinced by Everett's claims. Here is the abstract from a 2009 paper by Andrew Ira Nevins, David Pesetsky, and Cilene Rodrigues:

Everett (2005) has claimed that the grammar of Pirahã is exceptional in displaying "inexplicable gaps", that these gaps follow from an alleged cultural principle restricting communication to "immediate experience", and that this principle has "severe" consequences for work on Universal Grammar. We argue against each of these claims. Relying on the available documentation and descriptions of the language (especially the rich material in Everett (1986; 1987b)), we argue that many of the exceptional grammatical "gaps" supposedly characteristic of Pirahã are misanalyzed by Everett (2005) and are neither gaps nor exceptional among the world's languages. We find no evidence, for example, that Pirahã lacks embedded clauses, and in fact find strong syntactic and semantic evidence in favor of their existence in Pirahã. Likewise, we find no evidence that Pirahã lacks quantifiers, as claimed by Everett (2005). Furthermore, most of the actual properties of the Pirahã constructions discussed by Everett (for example, the ban on prenominal possessor recursion and the behavior of wh-constructions) are familiar from languages whose speakers lack the cultural restrictions attributed to the Pirahã. Finally, following mostly Gonçalves (1993; 2000; 2001), we also question some of the empirical claims about Pirahã culture advanced by Everett in primary support of the "immediate experience" restriction. We are left with no evidence of a causal relation between culture and grammatical structure. Pirahã grammar contributes to ongoing research into the nature of Universal Grammar, but presents no unusual challenge, much less a "severe" one.