Dont Sleep, there are Snakes

Unrelated to any extant tongue and based on just eight consonants and three vowels, the language of the Piraha (pee-da-HAN) tribe of the Amazon is so incomprehensible to outsiders that until Daniel Everett arrived with his family in the 1970s, no one outside the tribe had ever mastered it.

For over 50 years, Noam Chomsky’s theory of a universal grammar has dominated linguistics: it is practised by linguists all over the world. Don’t Sleep There Are Snakes presents the first serious challenge to that school of thought.

The Piraha people are utterly uninterested in the outside world, but we have every reason to be interested in them. Everett says: ‘They reject everything from outside their world. They just don’t want it, and it’s been that way since the day the Brazilians first found them in this jungle in the 1700s’ Key to Everett’s revolutionary linguistic theory, the Piraha language lacks what Chomsky and the whole linguistic tradition have always insisted is vital to human language and the key to all languages across the world: recursion – the ability to collect a series of thoughts together into a sentence with more than one clause. Steven Pinker calls the paper in which Everett set out these conclusions about the Piraha ‘a bomb thrown into the party’.

Everett believes that the tribe embodies a living-in-the-present ethos so powerful it has affected every aspect of their lives. Theirs is an existence where only observable experience is real: when Everett translated Bible stories, members of the group would ask ‘Have you met this man Jesus?’ Everett uses this to explain why Piraha do not use recursion: they accept as real only that which they observe, so they speak only using direct assertions. When a sentence combines more than one concept, the embedded clauses become qualitative or quantifying rather than plain statements, which does not fit with the overriding philosophy of Piraha.

Everett too has an intriguing story: the son of a hard-drinking cowboy, he abandoned his rock band when he met his wife, instead becoming a missionary. In order to gain access to the Piraha, to learn their language and translate the Bible for them, Everett was trained as a linguist by the church, before being sent with his wife and young family to the Amazon.

However, rather than converting them, Everett found himself converted to the Piraha brand of atheism, resulting in the breakdown of his marriage and misunderstandings with his children. Don’t Sleep There Are Snakes tells many stories: of Daniel Everett’s life, of the Piraha people and of a revolution in our understanding of language.

‘An excellent book. First, it is a very powerful autobiographical account of his stay with the Piraha in the jungles of the Amazon basin. Second, it is a brilliant piece of ethnographical description of life among the Piraha. And third, and perhaps most important in the long run, his data and his conclusions about the language of the Piraha run dead counter to the prevailing orthodoxy in linguistics. If he is right, he will permanently change our conception of human language’

John Searle, Slusser Professor of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley

‘Dan Everett is the most interesting man I have ever met. This story about his life among the Pirahas is a fascinating read. His observations and claims about the culture and language of the Pirahas are astounding’

Edward Gibson, Professor of Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

· The Piraha have no fixed words for colours, directions or numbers, no perfect tense and no words for ‘all’, ‘each’, ‘every’, ‘most’, or ‘few’

· They are unique among Amazon peoples in remaining monolingual

· There is no tradition of art or drawing

· The tribe has no collective memory beyond the last 25 years

· They have no religion or creation myth to explain their existence or what happens after death

· They do not plan ahead further than a few days – for example they do not store grains beyond what is needed for a day or two and they hunt every day. They do not use any preserving techniques such as smoking or pickling

· They are wholly non-competitive – they don’t just choose not to compete, the concept does not exist in their culture

· They do not live by a clock

Daniel Everett was born in California. He lived for many years in the Amazon jungle and conducted research on over a dozen indigenous languages of Brazil. He has published on sound structure, grammar, meaning, culture and language. He has been the subject of endless controversy in academic circles and is currently Professor of Linguistics at Illinois State University.