Daniel Everett interview

[NLN]

Hi folks. A bit of shameless self-promotion here, but I hope you'll find that it's worth it.

 

I just finished an interview with Daniel Everett, a linguist with Illinois State University who has attracted a storm of controversy with this theory of language that contradicts Chomsky's Universal Language. The implications are profound for cognitive science, and for defining what makes us human.

 

Machines Like Us interviews Daniel Everett

 

I'd also like to take this opportunity to wish everyone a prosperous new year.

 

All the best,

 

Norm Nason

[sman]

Thank you, but I'm not impressed.

 

Language is innate & Everett knows this - that's really not what's being challenged here, it's just being used to attract attention.

 

We can rip Chomsky up for any number of reasons - they're not hard to find - but Universal Grammar, FWIW, is still holding water.

 

Piraha is indeed a strange language, and it may very well be that it does not allow for multiple recursions. That doesn't blow me away though. Many languages, especially isolated ones, develop features that are unique. If every normal (not drooling) human being the world over generates multiple recursions in their speech, without much thought or effort - including the deaf - the only acception being about 350 people living in isolation under the Amazon canopy... I'm sorry, but that really does mean something.

 

I have a feeling that the Piraha think in multiple recursions just like the rest of us, but when it comes time to articulate themselves with speech, they are confined to the peculiarities of their grammar, the only one available to them. Everett could easily test for this. Had he the mindset for falsifying his own ideas, in a true scientific manner, instead of Chomsky's, I'm sure he already would have.

 

I get excited when I hear about linguists in the field studying isolated languages like this because there's not many of them left and there's a lot to learn from them and I think we owe Everett a debt of gratitude for his work with the Piraha. I have high hopes that he will proceed from here scientifically - descriptively - and leave far-reaching theorizing about human cognition to those who specialize in that arena.