Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes (26 page)

In 1984 I published my first journal article on Pirahã sound structure, a “squib” in the journal
Linguistic Inquiry.
It made, I thought, a small point and corrected a theoretical error common in the literature about the nature of stress systems and the theory of syllable structure. When the article appeared, I was a visiting scholar at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with an office across the hall from Chomsky’s, and I was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. I thought I had “arrived” as a scholar.

After the article appeared, I received unexpectedly emotional letters (this was before e-mail). Ellen Kaisse, a professor at the University of Washington, sent a postcard to say that the article hit her like a “bomb” and that she had postponed the planned content of her lectures to discuss Pirahã’s sound structure with her students.

Several other linguists wrote letters. A couple told me I clearly didn’t know what I was talking about—no sound system could work that way. A couple were encouraging. Since this was my first article in an international forum, I was unprepared for the reactions. I guess I figured that no one would read this little piece and that it would simply adorn my curriculum vitae.

By 1995, after I had published extensively on Pirahã phonology, Pirahã had become well known and figured in a number of theoretical controversies about the nature of sound structure. At the heart of these controversies about sounds is the conflict between deduction and induction. Linguistic theorists believed that they had successfully established parameters within which the sound systems of human languages could vary—no variation would occur outside of these parameters. These parameters, in turn, had been
deduced
from more general theoretical axioms and were considered elegant and almost necessarily true. Yet inductive work on Pirahã revealed a system beyond these boundaries, if my work was correct.

The controversy attracted the attention of the person who was to become the most important visitor I ever hosted in Brazil, Professor Peter Ladefoged of the University of California at Los Angeles. Peter had a large grant from the National Science Foundation to document the sounds of small, endangered languages around the world. He had asked if he could come to the Pirahãs with me to hear for himself the stress system that I had described in my publications.

I was already in Brazil and drove to the airport at Pôrto Velho to meet Peter’s plane. On the drive I felt as if I was about to be audited by the Internal Revenue Service. I had made controversial claims about the sound structure of Pirahã, and now the world’s leading phonetician was coming to check these claims. I had done my best, I had been honest, and I was confident that I was right. But I was still nervous.

Peter, who died in 2006, was a tall, patrician-looking man. He had a deep voice, shaped by the dialect of upper-class English known as Received Pronunciation, or RP, English—the Queen’s English. He had been a consultant for
My Fair Lady,
the film that helped determine my choice to become a linguist after I watched it at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood the year it was released, 1962. It is Peter’s voice that emerges from the gramophones in Henry Higgins’s (Rex Harrison’s) office and Peter’s handwriting in the little notebooks that Higgins keeps and shows in an early scene in front of London’s Covent Gardens to Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn).

After collecting his luggage, Peter emerged from the baggage claim area and waved. I went over to him and told him how pleased I was that he had come, trying to hide the tension in my voice.

“I’m skeptical of the claims you have made about Pirahã’s sound system” were the first words out of his mouth. “Bruce and Donca are also skeptical and have asked me to check this out carefully,” Peter added, referring to two well-known colleagues of his at UCLA. Over the days we spent in the village, Peter made high-quality recordings of Pirahã that ultimately supported my published analyses and contributed to the impact that the Pirahã language has had in theories and research on sound structure.

But the experiments occasionally required a lot of patience from the Pirahãs. To measure things well, we had to set up a solar-powered phonetics lab. The Pirahãs had to wear headsets with microphones two inches from their mouths, and, occasionally, to tolerate tubes up their noses to measure supraglottalic pressure (airflow above the vocal cords). They took it good-naturedly and sat still for all of these experiments, surprisingly enough. Once again, science was indebted to them.

The recordings that we made were archived at the phonetics laboratory at UCLA and have been used by other researchers, such as Matthew Gordon of the University of California at Santa Barbara, to further develop theories of human speech sound structure. Because of such work, any researcher can access Pirahã sound data and not only check my analysis, but use Pirahã data, as did Gordon, to deepen our understanding of similar phenomena from a variety of other languages.

12                  Pirahã Words

F
ieldwork demands constant attention to details. And it can be hard in the jungle to continue to pay close attention day after day to anything, whether language or any other important part of life. Each day requires disciplined routine.

During the rainy season, there are frequent all-night downpours. I learned that it took only a couple of hours for a heavy rain to sink my boat. My motor was bolted onto the stern and it weighed about 150 pounds, so I could not remove it at the end of each day and put it on dry land. The motor stayed on the boat. But when it rained, the weight of the motor pulled the boat down just enough so that all the rainwater rushed aft. In an Amazonian rainstorm, it doesn’t take long for enough water to accumulate there to push the stern under the water and sink the boat—even though my boat could hold one ton of cargo.

So when I heard rain arrive about midnight, I knew that if it was a strong, hard rain, I would have to get up about 3 a.m. and walk in the downpour to my boat to bail the water out of the stern. This was paying attention to detail, part of the disciplined routine I tried to follow. But it was so
hard
to get out of a warm, comfortable hammock at 3 a.m. and go out into a driving rain, worrying about snakes and other animals, including Pirahã dogs, and walk through the village down to my boat. I knew I had to and I always did—except for one time.

It was pouring rain, but when I woke up I just couldn’t get myself to walk down to where my boat was moored, even though it was only about a hundred feet away. I told myself that the rain wasn’t that bad and that my boat would, after all, hold more than a thousand pounds of water before sinking.

As usual, about 5 a.m., I got up to begin planning my day. I noticed a smell of gasoline. Deep down I think that I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t want to admit this to myself. So I went about business as usual and was making my coffee when Xioitaóhoagí yelled out, “Hey Dan! Come see your boat!” I ran out of the house and down the path to the river. There was gasoline floating on the surface of the water. I saw the nylon rope that moored my boat stretched tight—in a nearly vertical line into the water. I walked to the edge and looked down. At the end of the rope, in some thirty feet of water, I could see my boat, sunroof still up.

I was one hundred miles by water from the Transamazon Highway. My boat was my only way out. I had no idea whether I could get it out of the water, whether I could get it running again, or what I would do if I couldn’t get it working. A group of Pirahã men and women came running to help. I got some twelve-foot-long ironwood two-by-four boards that were left over from constructing my house and I thought of a plan.

Several of us tugged on the boat until we moved it up a few feet to a submerged ledge on the bank. Then, with straining and red faces, we worked it into a still shallower area where it was only a few feet below the surface. I gave men two-by-fours and explained that we needed to use these as levers to work it bit by bit up the bank. After a couple of hours, we worked it up until the rims of the boat were just above the surface of the water. At that moment, without any prompting from me, women jumped in with gourds and started bailing out the water. We finally got about two-thirds of the water out of it. I tied its bow and stern to the shore and inserted a siphon hose into the built-in gas tank. I was able to drain out most of the water that had entered the tank. Since water is heavier than gasoline, I got the milky water-gas mixture out until pure gasoline began to exit the hose. I had about one-fourth of my gasoline left. Maybe it would be enough to get me to the road. But the pressing problem was to see if the motor would run. If not, I wouldn’t need the gasoline anyway.

The first step was to remove both carburetors and dismantle them, drying them out and coating the inside with rubbing alcohol. Then I removed and dried the spark plugs. Next I took a syringe and injected three cubic centimeters of alcohol into each of the motor’s cylinders. Finally, I pulled to start the motor. It started up on the third pull. Alcohol in the cylinders, though a bit of a risk for explosion, can really spark the gasoline. I took off and quickly got up to full speed, careful to stay within sight of the village, in case the motor died. Once the motor was warmed up I knew it would dry out the remaining water. I was pretty proud of myself.

Except that then I remembered that if I had simply gotten up for about fifteen minutes of light work during the night, none of this would have been necessary. Details. I read biographies of explorers and realized that success depended on hard work, planning, and attention to details. This attention to details would be a challenge as I began the study of Pirahã words, a far more demanding task than cleaning out a couple of Johnson carburetors.

And the analysis of the language was more important, even though not as urgent at the time, than fixing my boat. Pirahã’s importance for our understanding of human language ranges far beyond its sounds. It is in the grammar that the more profound challenges to most modern theories of the nature, origin, and use of human language lie. I was now coming to realize that Pirahã grammar was a particularly hard nut to crack for Chomsky’s hypothesis that specific grammatical principles are innate, as well as for much of his theory’s account of how the components of grammar work and fit together. Since the stakes in our conclusions about this issue are so high for our understanding of human language and the human mind, it is important that we work through all of this carefully.

The place to begin, at least following linguistic tradition in discussing the grammar of a language, is with the words. Sentences are built from words and stories are built from sentences. So linguistic studies tend to follow this order in discussions of grammars of different languages.

One of the first word groups I was interested in recording, because of its usefulness and because of what I expected to be its simplicity, was the set of words for body parts: hand, arm, eye, foot, butt, and so forth.

As usual, I was working with Kóhoibiíihíai.

“What is this?” I asked, pointing at my nose.

“Xitaooí.”

“
Xitaooí,
” I repeated, perfectly I thought.

“
Xaió, xitaopaí,
” he said.

Aargh, I thought. What is that
-paí
business doing at the end of the word?

So, naively, I asked, “Why are there two words for nose?”

“There is one word,
xitaopaí,
” came the exasperating answer.

“Just
xitaopaí
?”

“Right,
xitaooí,
” he said.

It took a long time to figure this out, but the
-paí
at the end of a body-part word (and it can occur on all of those, but on no other words in the language except body-part words) means something like “my own.” So
xitaooí
means just “nose” but
xitaopaí
means “my own nose.”The Pirahãs could no more tell me that than the average English speaker could tell me what
to
means in
I want to go.
Why isn’t it just
I want go
? Linguists have to figure this kind of thing out for themselves.

Aside from this, Pirahã nouns are for the most part very simple. They have no other prefixes or suffixes, they do not have plural or singular forms, and they don’t have any tricky features, like irregular forms and so on.

The lack of grammatical number in Pirahã is unique among the world’s languages, according to British linguist Greville Corbett’s book-length survey of grammatical number in the world’s languages, though now-extinct languages or earlier stages of spoken languages appear to have lacked number too. Thus there is no distinction between
dog
and
dogs, man
and
men,
and so on. It’s as though every Pirahã word were like the English words
fish
and
sheep
in having no plural.

So a sentence like
Hiaitíihí hi kaoáíbogi bai -aagá
is vague in various ways. It could mean “The Pirahãs are afraid of evil spirits,” or “A Pirahã is afraid of an evil spirit,” or “The Pirahãs are afraid of an evil spirit,” or “A Pirahã is afraid of evil spirits.”

This unique lack of grammatical number could follow from the immediacy of experience principle in the same way that the lack of counting did. Number entails a violation of immediacy of experience in many of its uses—as a category it generalizes beyond the immediate, establishing larger generalizations.

Although Pirahã nouns are simple, Pirahã verbs are much more complicated. Each verb can have as many as sixteen suffixes—that is, up to sixteen suffixes in a row. Not all suffixes are always required, however. Since a suffix can be present or absent, this gives us two possibilities for each of the sixteen suffixes—216, or 65,536, possible forms for any Pirahã verb. The number is not this large in reality because some of the meanings of different suffixes are incompatible and could not both appear simultaneously. But the number is still many times larger than in any European language. English only has in the neighborhood of five forms for any verb
—sing, sang, sung, sings, singing.
Spanish, Portuguese, and some other Romance languages have forty or fifty forms for each verb.

Perhaps the most interesting suffixes, however (though these are not unique to Pirahã), are what linguists call evidentials, elements that represent the speaker’s evaluation of his or her knowledge of what he or she is saying. There are three of these in Pirahã: hearsay, observation, and deduction.

To see what these do, let’s use an English example. If I ask you, “Did Joe go fishing?” you could answer, “Yes, at least I heard that he did,” or “Yes, I know because I saw him leave,” or “Yes, at least I suppose he did because his boat is gone.” The difference between English and Pirahã is that what English does with a sentence, Pirahã does with a verbal suffix.

The placement of all the various suffixes on the basic verb is a feature of grammar. There are sixteen of these suffixes. Meaning plays at least a partial role in how they are placed. So, for example, the evidentials are at the very end because they represent a judgment about the entire event being described.

The role of a verb in a sentence is crucial. So word structure is important to sentence structure. The meaning of each verb determines most of what needs to be in a simple sentence. Think about the English verb
die.
The meaning of this verb is what makes the sentence
John died Bill
sound bad. “To die” is something that happens to a single individual. If you know what
to die
means in English, you know that there are too many nouns in
John died Bill,
because dying is not something that you do to someone else. But we can say that “John
caused
Bill to die” or, more simply, “John killed Bill,” by adding to the meaning of
die
the meaning of
cause.
Thus John becomes responsible for someone else’s dying in the
kill
or
cause to die
sentence (both include the semantics of
cause to die
), so that
John died Bill
is ungrammatical but
John killed Bill
is fine. Changing the meaning structure, either by following the English options of adding other words, such as
cause to,
or selecting a related but nonidentical form, such as
kill,
alters the meaning of the entire sentence. As we study the role of verbs in sentence formation further, we see that most of the syntax of a sentence is little more than a projection of the meaning of the verb (some linguistic theories make this an explicit part of their theoretical apparatus).

Although I initially embedded my discussions of Pirahã grammar in Chomsky’s generative grammar, it became clearer and clearer over the years that this theory really had little enlightening to say about the Pirahã language, especially when culture seemed to play a role in the grammar.

According to Chomsky’s theory, what sets humans apart from all other terrestrial forms of life is the ability to use grammar. It is not the ability to communicate, since Chomsky recognizes that many other species communicate.

Certainly we have to know how to form sentences and compute the meanings of sentences that we hear or speak—some grammatical knowledge is thus vital for human speech. But since humans are not the only creatures that communicate, grammar cannot be crucial to communication per se. To live is to communicate. All living things, plants and animals and bacteria, communicate.

What makes the give-and-take of information within and across species possible? That is, what makes communication possible? There is a two-word answer: meaning and form. This is essentially what the great Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, underscored with his concept of the linguistic sign—linguistic units are composites of form and meaning.

A bee communicates the meaning that food is near by the form of dancing. An ant communicates the meaning that a picnic is under way (though it might not use that term) by secreting chemicals, the form of ant communication. A dog communicates lack of aggression by specific forms—wagging its tail, barking, licking, and so on. And humans communicate meanings by the forms of making sounds or gestures.