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The Pirah? people (pronounced ) are an
, a subgroup of the , who mainly live on the banks of the
in 's , in the territory on
municipality. (See GPS: S 7°21.642′ W 62°16.313) As of 2010, they number 420 individuals. The Pirah? people do not call themselves Pirah? but instead the Hi'aiti'ihi, roughly translated as "the straight ones".
Their culture and language have a number of unusual features, and are sometimes described as "". However, anthropological linguist
The Pirah? are supremely gifted in all the ways necessary to ensure their continued survival in the jungle: they know the usefulness and location of all important
they understand the behavior of local animals and how to
and they can walk into the jungle naked, with no tools or weapons, and walk out three days later with baskets of fruit, nuts, and small game.
The Pirah? speak the . They call any other language “crooked head.” Members of the Pirah? can , which is how the tribe's men communicate when hunting in the jungle.
As far as the Pirah? have related to researchers, their culture is concerned solely with matters that fall within direct personal experience, and thus there is no history beyond living memory. Pirah?s have a simple
system that includes baíxi (parent, grandparent, or elder), xahaigí (sibling, male or female), hoagí or hoísai (son), kai (daughter), and piihí (stepchild, favorite child, child with at least one deceased parent, and more). (pp86-87)
Daniel Everett states that one of the strongest Pirah? v you simply don't tell other people what to do. The the Pirah? have no formal leaders. Their social system can thus be labeled as , in common with many other hunter-gatherer bands in the world, although rare in the Amazon because of a history of agriculture before Western contact (see ).
Although the Pirah? use canoes every day for fishing and for crossing the river that they live beside, when their canoes wear out, they simply use pieces of bark as temporary canoes. Everett brought in a master builder who taught and supervised the Pirah? in making a canoe, so that they could make their own. But when they needed another canoe, they said that "Pirah? do not make canoes" and told Everett he should buy them a canoe. The Pirah? rely on neighboring tribes' canoe work, and use those canoes for themselves.
Pirah? build simple huts where they keep a few pots, pans, knives, and machetes. They make only scraping implements (for making arrowheads), loosely woven palm-leaf bags, bows, and arrows. They take naps of 15 minutes to, at the most, two hours throughout the day and night, and .(ppxvii, 13,70,79)
They often go hungry, not for want of food, but from a desire to be tigisái (hard).(pp76&) They do not store food in any quantity, but generally eat it when they get it. Pirah? have ignored lessons in preserving meats by salting or smoking. They cultivate manioc plants that grow from spit-out seeds and make only a few days' worth of manioc flour at a time. They trade
and sex for consumables or tools, e.g. machetes, gunpowder, powdered milk, sugar, whiskey. Chastity is not a cultural value. They trade Brazil nuts, wood, and
(rubbery sap used in chewing gum) for soda-can pull-tabs, which are used for necklaces. Men wear T-shirts and shorts that t women sew their own plain cotton dresses.
Their decoration is mostly necklaces, used primarily to .(pp74) The concept of drawing is alien to them and when asked to draw a person, animal, tree, or river, the result is simple lines. However, on seeing a novelty such as an airplane, a child may make a model of it, which may be soon discarded.
According to Everett, the Pirah? have no concept of a supreme spirit or god, and they lost interest in
when they discovered that Everett had never seen him. They require evidence based on personal experience for every claim made. However, they do believe in spirits that can sometimes take on the shape of things in the environment. These spirits can be jaguars, trees, or other visible, tangible things including people.(pp112,134-142) Everett reported one incident where the Pirah? said that “Xigagaí, one of the beings that lives above the clouds, was standing on a beach yelling at us, telling us that he would kill us if we go into the jungle.” Everett and his daughter could see nothing and yet the Pirah? insisted that Xigagaí was still on the beach.(ppxvi-xvii)
A 2012 documentary called "The Grammar of Happiness" which aired on the Smithsonian Channel, reported that a school had been opened for the Pirah? community where they learn Portuguese and mathematics. As a consequence, observations involving concepts like the notion of quantity (which has a singular treatment in Pirah? language), became impossible, because of the influence of the new knowledge on the results. According to
the school is the responsibility of the Ministry of Education of Brazil. In addition to a formal school being introduced to the culture, the documentary also reported that the Brazilian government installed a modern medical clinic, electricity and television in the remote area.
Main article:
Anthropological linguist , who wrote the first Pirah? grammar, claims that there are related pairs of curiosities in their language and culture.
After working with the language for thirty years, Everett states that it has no
or grammatical . Everett points out that there is recursion of ideas: that in a story, there may be subordinate ideas inside other ideas. He also pointed out that different experts have different definitions of recursion. If the language lacks grammatical recursion, then it is a counterexample to the theory proposed by Chomsky, Hauser and Fitch (2002) that recursion is a feature which all human languages must have.
Pirah? is perhaps second only to
for the distinction of having the fewest
of any of the world's languages. Women sometimes pronounce s as h, reducing the inventory still further.(pp178-179.) Everett states that Pirah?, Rotokas, and Hawaiian each have eleven phonemes. However, the
has either 13 or 33 phonemes and it's not known what source or method Everett used when counting the Hawaiian phonemes.[]
Their language is a unique living language (it is related to , which is no longer spoken). John Colapinto explains, "Unrelated to any other extant tongue, and based on just eight consonants and three vowels, Pirah? has one of the simplest sound systems known. Yet it possesses such a complex array of tones, stresses, and syllable lengths that its speakers can dispense with their vowels and consonants altogether and sing, hum, or whistle conversations." Peter Gordon writes that the language has a very complex verb structure: "To the verb stem are appended up to 15 potential slots for morphological markers that encode aspectual notions such as whether events were witnessed, whether the speaker is certain of its occurrence, whether it is desired, whether it was proximal or distal, and so on. None of the markers encode features such as person, number, tense or gender."
Curiously, although not unprecedentedly, the language has no cardinal or ordinal numbers. Some researchers, such as Prof. Peter Gordon of Columbia University, claim that the Pirah? are incapable of learning . His colleague, Prof. Daniel L. Everett, on the other hand, argues that the Pirah? are cognitively they simply choose not to do so. They believe that their culture is complete and does not need anything from outside cultures. Everett says, "The crucial thing is that the Pirah? have not borrowed any numbers—and they want to learn to count. They asked me to give them classes in Brazilian numbers, so for eight months I spent an hour every night trying to teach them how to count. And it never got anywhere, except for a few of the children. Some of the children learned to do reasonably well, but as soon as anybody started to perform well, they were sent away from the classes. It was just a fun time to eat popcorn and watch me write things on the board."
The language does not have words for precise numbers, but rather concepts for a small amount and a larger amount.
The language may have no . There are no unanalyzable
the recorded color words are all compounds like mii sai or bii sai, "blood-like", which is not that uncommon.[]
It is suspected that the language's entire
set, which is the simplest of any known language, was recently borrowed from one of the , and that before that the language may have had no pronouns whatsoever. Many linguists, however, find this claim questionable due to lack of evidence. However, if there had been pronouns at an earlier stage of Pirah?, this would not affect Everett's claim of the significance of the system's simplicity today. There are few Tupi–Guaraní loanwords in areas of the lexicon more susceptible to borrowing (such as nouns referring to cultural items, for instance). There are some loanwords for different types of flora and fauna (which may indicate that the Pirah? came from elsewhere). That all Pirah? pronouns were borrowed is a hypothesis and would be unusual, but there are precedents.[]
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A conversation with Jose Augusto and Yapohen Pirah?, who represent the leadership of the Pirah? tribe. (Portuguese with English subtitles.)
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