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
