Pirahã Language

Pirahã (also spelled ''Pirahá, Pirahán''), or Múra-Pirahã, is the indigenous language of the isolated Pirahã people of Amazonas, Brazil. The Pirahã live along the Maici River, a tributary of the Amazon River.

Pirahã is the only surviving dialect of the Mura language, all others having died out in the last few centuries as most groups of the Mura people have shifted to Portuguese. Suspected relatives, such as Matanawi, are also extinct. It is estimated to have between 250 and 380 speakers. It is not in immediate danger of extinction, as its use is vigorous and the Pirahã community is mostly monolingual.

The Pirahã language is most notable as the subject of various controversial claims; for example, that it provides evidence for linguistic relativity. The controversy is compounded by the sheer difficulty of learning the language; the number of linguists with field experience in Pirahã is very small.

Phonology

The Pirahã language is one of the phonologically simplest languages known, comparable to Rotokas (New Guinea) and the Lakes Plain languages such as Obokuitai. There is a claim that Pirahã has as few as ten phonemes, one fewer than Rotokas, or even as few as nine for women, but this requires analyzing as an underlying and having /h/ invariably substituted for /s/ in female speech. Although such a phenomenon is odd cross-linguistically, Ian Maddieson has found in researching Pirahã data that does indeed exhibit an unusual distribution in the language.

The 'ten phoneme' claim also does not consider the tones of Pirahã, at least two of which are phonemic (marked by an acute accent and either unmarked or marked by a grave accent in Daniel Everett), bringing the number of phonemes to at least twelve. Sheldon (1988) claims three tones, high (¹), mid (²) and low (³).

Phoneme inventory

When languages have inventories as small and allophonic variation as great as in Pirahã and Rotokas, different linguists may have very different ideas as to the nature of their phonological systems.

Vowels

Consonants

The segmental phonemes are:

* is written .
* Everett posits that is an allophone of the sequence .
* Women sometimes substitute for .

The number of phonemes is at most thirteen, matching Hawaiian, if is counted as a phoneme and there are just two tones; if is not phonemic, there are twelve phonemes, one more than the number found in Rotokas, or eleven among women who uniformly replace /s/ with /h/. (English, by comparison, has thirty to forty-five, depending on dialect.) However, many of the phonemes show a great deal of allophonic variation. For instance, vowels are nasalized after the glottal consonants and (written ''h'' and ''x''). Also,
* : the nasal after a pause, the trill before .
* : the nasal (an apical alveolar nasal) after a pause; is a lateral alveolar–linguolabial double flap that has only been reported for this language, where the tongue strikes the upper gum ridge and then strikes the lower lip. However, it is only used in certain special types of speech performances and so might not be considered a normal speech sound.
* : in women's speech, occurs as before , and "sometimes" elsewhere.
* : in men's speech, word-initial and are interchangeable. For many people, and may be exchanged in some words. The sequences and are said to be in free variation with and , at least in some words.

Because of its variation, Everett states that is not a stable phoneme. By analyzing it as , he is able to theoretically reduce the number of consonants to seven (or six for women with constant /h/-substitution).

Lexicon

Pirahã has a few loan words, mainly from Portuguese. Pirahã ("cup") is from the Portuguese word , and ("business") comes from Portuguese ("merchandise").

Kinship terms

Everett (2005) says that the Pirahã culture has the simplest known kinship system of any human culture. A single word, (pronounced ), is used for both ''mother'' and ''father'' (like English "parent" although Pirahã has no gendered alternative), and they appear not to keep track of relationships any more distant than biological siblings.

Numerals and grammatical number

According to Everett in 1986, Pirahã has words for 'one' () and 'two' (), distinguished only by tone. In his 2005 analysis, however, Everett said that Pirahã has no words for numerals at all, and that and actually mean "small quantity" and "larger quantity". Frank et al. (2008) describes two experiments on four Pirahã speakers that were designed to test these two hypotheses. In one, ten spools of thread were placed on a table one at a time and the Pirahã were asked how many were there. All four speakers answered in accordance with the hypothesis that the language has words for 'one' and 'two' in this experiment, uniformly using for one spool, for two spools, and a mixture of the second word and 'many' for more than two spools.

The second experiment, however, started with ten spools of thread on the table, and spools were subtracted one at a time. In this experiment, one speaker used (the word previously supposed to mean 'one') when there were six spools left, and all four speakers used that word consistently when there were as many as three spools left. Though Frank and his colleagues do not attempt to explain their subjects' difference in behavior in these two experiments, they conclude that the two words under investigation "are much more likely to be relative or comparative terms like 'few' or 'fewer' than absolute terms like 'one'".

There is no grammatical distinction between singular and plural, even in pronouns.

A 2012 documentary aired on the Smithsonian Channel reported that a school had been opened for the Pirahã community where they learn Portuguese and mathematics. As a consequence, observations involving concepts like the notion of quantity (which has a singular treatment in Pirahã language), became impossible, because of the influence of the new knowledge on the results.

Color terms

There is also a claim that Pirahã lacks any unique color terminology, being one of the few cultures (mostly in the Amazon basin and New Guinea) that only have specific words for ''light'' and ''dark''. Although the Pirahã glossary in Daniel Everett's Ph.D. thesis includes a list of color words (p. 354), Everett (2006) now says that the items listed in this glossary are not in fact words but descriptive phrases (such as "(like) blood" for "red").

Syntax

Pronouns

The basic Pirahã personal pronouns are ''ti'' "I, we", ''gi'' or ''gíxai'' "you", ''hi'' "(s)he, they, this". These can be serially combined: ''ti gíxai'' or ''ti hi'' to mean "we" ( inclusive and exclusive), and ''gíxai hi'' to mean "you (plural)", or combined with ''xogiáagaó'' 'all', as in "we (all) go".

There are several other pronouns reported, such as 'she', 'it' (animal), 'it' (aquatic animal), and 'it' (inanimate), but these may actually be nouns, and they cannot be used independently the way the three basic pronouns can. The fact that different linguists come up with different lists of such pronouns suggests that they are not basic to the grammar. In two recent papers, Everett cites Sheldon as agreeing with his (Everett's) analysis of the pronouns.

Sheldon (1988) gives the following list of pronouns:

Pronouns are prefixed to the verb, in the order SUBJECT-INDOBJECT-OBJECT where INDOBJECT includes a preposition "to", "for", etc. They may all be omitted, ''e.g.'', ''hi³-ti³-gi¹xai³-bi²i³b-i³ha³i¹'' "he will send you to me".

For possession, a pronoun is used in apposition ( zero-marking):

Thomason & Everett (2001) note the pronouns are formally close to those of the Tupian languages Nheengatu and Tenharim

HOME


Content is Copyleft
Website design, code, and AI is Copyrighted (c) 2014-2017 by Stephen Payne


Consider donating to Wikimedia



As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases