> I read that Harper's article on a
> small band of people in Brazil who basically subvert Chomsky's claims.
That would be the Piraha nine-days'-wonder, I suppose. Daniel Everett is (as far as I know) the only European who has "learned" the language. How well he has learned it is anybody's guess. Your average Piraha would be pretty funny on the subject, probably, if you could understand him. This is an old story with anthropologists.
I knew a chap, back in the day, who was doing research on the contemporary Irish of County Galway. He had a theory about the formation of noun plurals in that dialect. So he headed off one summer, armed with a modest but sufficient slush fund to buy pints, of an evening, for the Irish speakers of Galway. He returned triumphant in the fall with earth-shaking results -- Galway Irish speakers added one plural suffix to another for purposes of emphasis! It's hard to convey a sense a the monstrosities he "collected." It would be as if the plural of "dog" -- after enough subsidized pints -- was "dogmatenissimizeries". It was obvious to everybody but poor Alan that his informants were taking the piss out of him.
The only one of Everett's claims that might have any interest for linguistic theory is that there are, supposedly, no subordinate clauses in Piraha -- which, in Everett's mind, implies that there's no recursion. All that stuff about numbers and colors and history is neither here nor there. People talk about what they know about and what interests them. Stop the presses: Hottentots have no word for 'snow'!
Everett has made his career by selling Piraha -- which nobody else knows anything about -- as a game-changer. But Piraha is spoken by 300-odd folks, is known at all by few if any non-Piraha folk other than Everett, and is to date the only language which supposedly poses these major challenges to our understanding of what human language is like as a formal system.
To say the least, a certain amount of skepticism is in order.
> chomsky thinks field work
> linguistics is a waste of time (or something like that). This was confirmed
> in this book as well. (He has since done an about face -- in the last 4-5
> years or so. Some conference in 2005 when he finally conceded that it was
> worth studying the evolution of language, yadda.)
Shag, I'm sorry, but you've confused many things in this paragraph, and gotten nearly all of them wrong. So it's very difficult to unpack.
Chomsky has never said, and does not think, so far as I know, that "field work linguistics is a waste of time." It's not his cup of tea, to be sure. He has directed his efforts in another direction. But the story you're repeating here is just tendentious fiction.
And if he ever said it was "worth studying the evolution of language" -- in those words -- I'll eat my first edition of Syntactic Structures.
> there's a whole wonderful chapter
> in this book that, likewise, makes Chomsky's original criticisms of B.F.
> Skinner look kind of silly.
This does sound marvelous. If there's anything that could make Chomsky's critique of Skinner look sillier than, or as silly as, Skinner himself, that would certainly be worth reading.
Shag, as long as we're on the subject of what books we've read: have you read _Syntactic Structures_? _Aspects_? Anything more recent of Chomsky's on the subject at hand? I mean, no foul if you haven't, but secondary sources are, well, secondary, and always have an axe to grind.
Dick Lewontin observes somewhere that Marx is the most-discussed and least-read essayist in history. Chomsky must surely not be far behind.
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Michael Smith mjs at smithbowen.net http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org