Book Review: Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle
Daniel Everett is no by-the-book linguist. If you read his
new book, you’ll find out how Everett
went from a 26-year-old missionary taking his family to live with and
proselytize members of a remote Brazilian tribe to a major thorn in the side of
influential language theorists. Along the way, he became immersed in the
unusual culture and language of his Amazonian hosts, the Pirahã people. These deceptively
simple folk transformed the missionary, not vice versa.
With straightforward writing, Everett explains how he decoded the
mysterious Pirahã tongue during fieldwork that spanned 30 years. In that time,
he became a full-fledged linguist with a résumé that included many colorful and
harrowing jungle experiences. Everett recounts a
desperate canoe and boat trip up the Amazon River
to save his malaria-stricken wife and daughter, and a watery encounter with an
anaconda. He also gives the reader a feel for how he began to understand a
language that had stumped other linguists.
In defiance of Noam Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar
and Steven Pinker’s “language instinct,” Everett
concluded that the Pirahã language, including its grammar, had been shaped by a
culture that valued only a person’s immediate experience, not past or future
events. Everett
found that the Pirahã have no words for colors or numbers, no way to embed
phrases within other phrases and one of the smallest sets of speech sounds in
the world.
Everett
portrays these masters of jungle survival as a generally jovial bunch who have
no creation myths or storytelling traditions. They live in the present and
believe only in what they and their comrades directly observe — a cultural
characteristic that leads Everett
to abandon his own faith.
Pantheon Books, 2008,
283 p., $26.95
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