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  1. 19619

    The lack of the linguistic device “recursion” in the Pirahã language might be more subtle than investigator Dan Everett suspects. I’ve heard examples of the sentence given as recursion—”When I finish eating, I want to speak to you”—rendered as a run-on sentence by speakers new to English and by lifelong speakers as well: “I finish […]

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  2. Anthropology

    The Pirahã Challenge

    A linguist has sparked controversy with his proposal that a tribe of about 200 people living in Brazil's Amazon rain forest speaks a language devoid of counting and color terms, clauses, and other elements of grammar often considered to be universal.

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  3. Math

    Rating Researchers

    A physicist has come up with a formula for characterizing a researcher's scientific output.