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A comment on Has a remote Amazonian tribe upended our understanding of language? (2007). Parent comment

Re:Has a remote Amazonian tribe upended our understanding of... by bryanrasmussen on Wednesday April 21, 2021 @12:56AM (#26885569)
so from that wikipedia page:

"Chomsky has replied that he considers recursion to be an innate cognitive capacity that is available for use in language but that the capacity may or may not manifest itself in any one particular language"

which makes me wonder - do they show an innate understanding of the concepts when it is discussed with them.

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Re:Has a remote Amazonian tribe upended our understanding of... by throwawayboise on Wednesday April 21, 2021 @02:11AM (#26885961)
How would you discuss it with them if indeed it is true that it isn't expressible in their language?
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Re:Has a remote Amazonian tribe upended our understanding of... by tsimionescu on Wednesday April 21, 2021 @03:06AM (#26886293)
The langauge could lack recursion but still be powerful enough to express what recursion is (just like English doesnt have pitch accent, but you can discuss pitch accent in Emglish).

Alternatively, someone who speaks Piraha natively could learn English and discuss about this concept in English.

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Re:Has a remote Amazonian tribe upended our understanding of... by coldtea on Wednesday April 21, 2021 @05:14AM (#26887103)
You could describe it using a stack.
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Re:Has a remote Amazonian tribe upended our understanding of... by rozab on Wednesday April 21, 2021 @07:49AM (#26888353)
Apparently they asked Everett to teach them basic numeracy skills (counting to 10, 1+1=2, etc) and were unable to grasp it even with months of study.
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Re:Has a remote Amazonian tribe upended our understanding of... by bryanrasmussen on Thursday April 22, 2021 @12:37AM (#26898782)
Could he teach it to the children? If not it would start to seem like an argument that members of the tribe lacked mental faculties that the rest of humanity display (unless severely disabled) and for me would really call his claims into doubt without a lot of research from multiple sources.
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Re:Has a remote Amazonian tribe upended our understanding of... by rozab on Friday April 23, 2021 @12:07PM (#26916181)
I mean, this is the whole point of linguistic determinism, the concept under discussion here. These folks believe that our ability to think in recursive terms (as is necessary when dealing with numbers) is acquired through language.

I don't really believe it, and most linguists haven't since the early 20th century, but that's the claim he made.

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