Oh, you know. That one. The one that all my non-linguist friends kept calling or writing to tell me about. “Hey Emma, I just read a really interesting article in the New Yorker about this guy who totally proves that Chomsky is wrong.”

Yes, the article covering Daniel Everett’s work on Pirahã and his claim that this language is non-recursive. When it first printed, almost every non-linguist hipster friend I had would ask me about it, and even though my roommate Paul had a copy of it in our apartment, I just didn’t feel like reading it. I was pretty sure of how I’d react to it, and, well, pop-linguistics usually just doesn’t interest me. (Nor does cross-linguistic work done with a sort of “A-ha! Look what we found!” spirit. Nor does cross-linguistic work done with the “A-ha! Sapir-Whorf!” spirit.)

Anyway, Simon and I read the article a couple of nights ago, and wow. It exceeded even my expectations of how bad it would be. One feeling that we both had was that we wanted to write about why it was so awful, but there were just so many flaws to the article that doing so would be a rather daunting task. So, instead of taking on that task, here’s Simon’s take on the article. Better yet, to get a sense of how we feel, you should just read the article.

emma :: Jun.20.2007 :: misc, linguistics, pop-culture :: 3 Comments »