Sometimes all your corners look squared up. Upon second look, things are not as they seem.
Speaking of recursion, on Friday night I attended the LongNow talk with Daniel Everett. "The Pirahã, a remote Amazonian tribe with little outside contact, have attracted the attention of mainstream media, scientists, zen buddhists, professors of religion, mathematicians, philosophers and others because of their unusual confluence of values, language, and culture."
Part of the synopsis by Stewart Brand:
"The Pirahã tribe in the heart of the Amazon numbers only 360,
spread in small groups over 300 miles. An exceptionally cheerful
people, they live with a focus on immediacy, empiricism, and physical
rigor that has shaped their unique language, claims linguist Daniel
Everett.
The Pirahã language has no numbers or concept of counting (only terms for "relatively small" and "relatively large"); no kinship terms beyond immediate children and parents; no "left" and "right" (only "upriver" and "downriver"); no named distinction of past and future (only near time and far time); no creation stories or myths; and---most important for linguists---no recursion.
A recursive sentence like "The boy who was fishing owned the dog" does not occur in the Pirahã language. They would say, "The boy was fishing" and "The boy owned the dog." The eminent linguist Noam Chomsky has declared that recursion is an essential part of human language and is innate. Chomsky's former student Everett says that the Pirahã language proves otherwise. The resultant controversy is profound."
The Pirahã language has no numbers or concept of counting (only terms for "relatively small" and "relatively large"); no kinship terms beyond immediate children and parents; no "left" and "right" (only "upriver" and "downriver"); no named distinction of past and future (only near time and far time); no creation stories or myths; and---most important for linguists---no recursion.
A recursive sentence like "The boy who was fishing owned the dog" does not occur in the Pirahã language. They would say, "The boy was fishing" and "The boy owned the dog." The eminent linguist Noam Chomsky has declared that recursion is an essential part of human language and is innate. Chomsky's former student Everett says that the Pirahã language proves otherwise. The resultant controversy is profound."
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