Night of the Pirahã — It Could Have Been Any Night

Der Spiegel: “The language is incredibly spare. The Pirahã use only three pronouns. They hardly use any words associated with time and past tense verb conjugations don’t exist. Apparently colors aren’t very important to the Pirahãs, either — they don’t describe any of them in their language. But of all the curiosities, the one that bugs linguists the most is that Pirahã is likely the only language in the world that doesn’t use subordinate clauses.” (via MeFi)

One Comment

  1. are these the same ‘primitive people’ who were later discovered, by accident, chain-smoking marlboros and driving mustangs?

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