Not knowing what to believe is probably the best thing right now. Everett (the linguist who made the claims) is quite insistent that this is the case, many other linguists are not. It's definitely a big controversy right now, particularly Everett's claim that Piraha does not allow recursion (many linguistic theories, notably Chomsky's, seem to make recursion a pretty fundamental feature of human language). A lot of the arguments are pretty technical, and they're all ham strung by the fact that the Piraha are so remote there isn't a whole lot of research on them besides Everett's, and even he has trouble going back now.

This blog post has a nice set of links about the controversy, and Everett and one of his major critics both appear in the comments to argue, so definitely read those if you are interested:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3857

When you have one data source and only a handful of data points and that data is not reproducible, you're not doing science. Everett might have some interesting hypotheses, but what he's doing isn't what you could call peer-reviewable. Linguists who have aspirations towards hard science will, for that reason alone (not to mention the theoretically tenuous/unpopular nature of his claims) dismiss him pretty quickly.

While it is far more likely that Everett is wrong, science has to start somewhere, and Pirahã people exist on this planet and other people could go check the story. You can absolutely prove him wrong.

Coming up with crazy ideas based on some strange observations is a part of science too.

And questioning that, pointing out flaws and questioning methodology, is all science, too.

It's just convenient that Everett had the only 'in' with the community and so is the de facto expert. Once the data source is available, we'll know more.

Off topic, but it's pretty funny to watch Everett give a talk to a room full of generative-trained syntacticians, just to see how angry everyone gets during the Q/A section.

Why is Everett prohibited from going back?

I regularly speak to people who do not seem capable of understanding fine distinctions. It's not difficult for me to believe that a people/tribe that has little use for numbers might not have the concept of large numbers at all, other than as a catchall word with no exact quantity.

Just yesterday on reddit, I was arguing with someone who claimed to speak English as their first language who could not understand what I meant when I pointed out that the idea of "illegal content" was nonsense. I explained how it might be illegal to get content by certain methods, but that didn't make the content itself illegal and that the crime was in the action. He seemed to think that the computer file itself was illegal, even though he admitted that an identical file on another computer might not be illegal.

A tribe that's never needed a scout to be able to tell a leader that it was 5 Roman legions and not 6 that were on the march... why would they have a word for 5 or 6? It's not as if they care about whether one has 5 or 6 bananas, the distinction is pointless on that level.

Likewise, a person who has never needed to make a distinction between the exact circumstances that might get them in trouble with the authorities might never understand the difference between "illegal download" and "illegal file".

Sounds like that person was actually confused, but there is illegal content in America, in that possession and not transmission or receiving it is the crime (notably, child pornography), and substantially more content that is illegal in other countries (pornography and dissent leap to mind). Whether they can find the files is beside the point, in the same way that whether you can trace a download is beside the question of whether it is legal.

Wasting time arguing with the lowest common denominator, not knowing anything about them, their age, their credibility, is so utter useless. I've given up reading any comments about anything whatsoever besides HN.

It seems fairly simple.

Extraordinary claims are often made and publicized widely today just because they get attention, grab eye-balls and so-forth.

Most of these ordinary claims are at least unproven if not wholly fallacious for similar reasons.

This is why "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". Once a claim has made that rounds and gotten some pretty thorough debunking, it's reasonable to say that it's water under the bridge and move to the next claim.

> the claims [...] tend to be wildly exaggerated based on whose agenda (read: radically pro- or anti-relativism) the claims would end up supporting

This sort of thinking seems to be particularly rife in the field of Linguistics. From about 2 years ago, it became apparent the linguistics subreddit was taken over by people who have some agenda which seems to be promoting some school of thought in Linguistics.

Thank you for such an insightful comment! I will absolutely check this out!