The book "Don't sleep there are snakes" by Everett is still a very entertaining read! I highly recommend it.
Re:The Pirahã are off by one (2020)
by naniwaduni on Tuesday December 13, 2022 @08:39PM
(#33978938)
Whorfianism is certainly oversold, but it's hard to come down completely against it in the face of evidence from color identification.
If it weren't that people make these claims about Pirahã all the time, "it's slightly slower to compare counts of things if you don't have basic numerals for them" is exactly the sort of thing at about the right level of automaticity to sound plausible.
My goodness. Sapir and Whorf had this theory, but neither gathered much data to prove it, and attempts to do so since Whorf's death in 1941 have not gathered much evidence for that theory. In fact the mass of evidence has been against it.
A Christian missionary named Daniel Everett studied linguistics to preach to the Pirahã in the late 1970s. When he learned their language, he became convinced that they helped make the case for Sapir-Whorf and published many papers, but other linguists who went down to work with them found countervailing evidence.
It's a pleasant theory to consider, but the evidence for it over the past eighty years has been thin, and most linguistics data seems to go against the theory.