There's quite a bit about the language, but the backstory of Daniel going over as a missionary and losing his faith (and family) while trying to convert a happy people in no need of religion is stunning.

[1] http://longnow.org/seminars/02009/mar/20/endangered-language...

[2] http://fora.tv/2009/03/20/Daniel_Everett_Endangered_Language...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms:_Their_Univer...

It may have referred to something specific once, but now it's just a colour.

There are many examples of things that are just a part of speech now. e.g. when was the last time you had the opportunity to actually "put the cart before the horse" or "strike while the iron is hot".

[1] specialist = (color-theorist, decorator)

[2] http://www.pnas.org/content/104/19/7780.full actually, this article seems to talk about Russian, I'm getting the Thai thing from a discussion I remember (a video by the authors at the Long Now foundation[3].)

[3] http://longnow.org/seminars/02010/oct/26/how-language-shapes...

    Penis
    Gay
    WTF
    Dunno
    Baige

EDIT: I didn't realise that Randall actually typed "I weep for my gender." a few lines lower down...

I believe that Russian has something similar to Piros/Voros with shades of blue.

синий: http://yandex.ua/yandsearch?text=%D1%81%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0...

голубой: http://yandex.ua/yandsearch?text=%D0%B3%D0%BE%D0%BB%D1%83%D0...

It was a bit of mind-blowing to learn that English world for #0000ff is "blue" and then suddenly "The sky is blue" (what?! no it isn't #0000ff)

The same thing goes for redheads - what? but this is not red!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms:_Their_Unive...

(which I read years ago) makes a case for a language-universal gradation of color terms in the spectrum of visible light, with some languages having few of the terms, and some languages having more, and some languages having quite a few. (In the languages I know best, English has more color terms than Chinese, but Russian has more than English.)

[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

After all, it were Sumerian traders and bureaucrats who gave us both figures -and- numbers -and- a way to write them down.

On the other hand, if you're a scout for an armed band of hunters, 5 are no longer “a lot”, it is “some” - and 50 is a lot.

You must be referring to the legendary 3 Wolf T-Shirt available on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Original-Three-Wolf-Adult-T-Shirt/dp...

Just get the T-Shirt and read the reviews - famously funny.

There aren't any wolves in the Amazon rainforest - not enough bins for them to go through, apparently.

We have:

* a language where "speakers can dispense with their vowels and consonants altogether and sing, hum, or whistle conversations"

* a language that "contains no words at all for discrete numbers"

* a tribe too arrogant to learn any other language

There are stranger things in the world, but I'd take a long, hard look at the guy reporting these facts before I took them at face value

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHv3-U9VPAs

Read: http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/people/faculty/pesetsky/Nevin...

Edit: and sure this is the Chomskians debunking the "upstart" Danial Everett but this is thorough, clear and convincing in contrast to the haphazard novelty that most Piraha discussion involves. A language with future? How...? Well, actually the answer would be just no, that's not how it works. And sure, this headline says "number" but all the discussions are interlinked.

I found the discussions of anumeracy in that PDF quite problematic because they basically argued we don't know enough about the language to say one way or another. Some of the difficulties, particularly adding vs removing spoons posed significant interpretation problems for me. Of course if I was differentiate between a few spoons and a bunch of spoons, the lines would be different if adding spoons vs subtracting them. This is because the relative frame of reference is different.

It seems to me that the problem is fraught with insurmountable epistemological problems which can't be solved and therefore people get to make best guesses. In general though I would trust the one who speaks the language more fluently than the one who doesn't. This isn't to address novelty claims. Bahasa Indonesia, for example, mostly lacks relative tenses as well, and Proto-Indo-European probably did as well.

Like I said earlier, it all sounds a little too perfect. Unpolluted by outside contact (because they refuse to learn a language that can't be whistled), the Piraha have no need for past, future, creation myths, kinship systems beyond the first degree, numbers, and so on. It's a dream of what we might be like if we were freed of our corrupt culture.

Is Everett an heir to Margaret Meade?

    for x in {0..3}; do echo $x; done

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13452711

...and then it all falls to pieces because they have no concept of god!

More to the point, what is the big deal with counting if there is no concept of private property?

I've got issues with a lot of (Dan) Everett's work, but you don't need counting to handle that scenario.

It's also even more of a challenge when the things you've got to remember aren't easily individually identified - a flock of sheep or apples or whatever.

After all, you remember your parents' names, and your grandparents' names, and probably your uncle and aunts' names.

If you went on vacation with them, would you count your family members at the start and end of the plane ride, or would you just look around, and think, "Marina, Richard, Victor and Mila, Irina and Alex - okay, everyone's here!"

What it doesn't address though, is my second point - things that don't have unique names. Remembering how many sheep you took out to the field, how many bowls you tooks with you to eat, how many pieces of wood you need to cut in order to fix up your wall etc.

Clearly they have managed to find a way to cope without needing these numbers, but I'm not sure that I buy the idea that they wouldn't regularly come across situations where having numbers would have made their lives simpler.

I don't know much about primitive tribes in the amazon, but I don't imagine that their traditional lifestyle involves very large flocks of sheep.

My family bred dogs growing up so we always had a good number (~10) running around. When I let them out and in, I don't recall ever counting but rather ticking off names. Even then I don't think it was generally a conscious listing, but rather a scanning and the ability to "feel" that someone was missing.

For a very long time (well into adulthood) I had no concept of the proper order of the months. I could recognize month names, and with great difficulty name them all...but not their proper order. I had missed that section in school and it never really came up. When it did it really blew peoples minds for some reason. Eventually, I did come across it enough that I learned it.

I know nothing of the tribe in question but I don't think it's that much of a stretch that if they have things like a communal attitude towards property, few pieces of property they consider valuable, small flocks of livestock, etc... the issue may simply never come up.

Not necessarily. Just because something is detrimental, it doesn't mean that a society will automatically come up with a solution for it. It took people in the west millenia to come up with (or more accurately to be introduced to) zero - and the entire arabic numeral way of counting. That's not because it wouldn't have been useful before. It's simply that no one had figured out that this is a better way to count than their existing representations.

>I don't know much about primitive tribes in the amazon, but I don't imagine that their traditional lifestyle involves very large flocks of sheep.

You may well be right - I'm no expert in Amazonian culture, so I don't whether they have flocks/herds/whatever of any particular animal. But that's just one possible example. I struggle to believe that they've not got some situations in their lives where numbers would be an advantage. Like I mentioned - it could be counting animals, counting the number of bits of rotten wood that might need to be replaced in their house, dividing a crop of fruits equally between the tribe, or something entirely different. But the lack of numbers in the language is no proof that there was no call for them.

You're applying your numerate bias here. I have no idea if that's how the Pirāha handle the situation, but it's certainly plausible. Perhaps their memory for this kind of thing is better than yours because they've relied on it for cases where you'd just keep track of a number.