About this deal
I don't think many people living with a smartphone in their pocket would, given the choice, give up their lives, move to the jungle and spend all day hunting, gathering and making sure they're not killed by a wild animal. The Pirahã's primitive insisten
They can refer to "some" or "more", but lack a counting system, or even a way to specify a single object. Everett states in his book that he as well as a series of psychologists completed experiments to prove that the Pirahas had no words for numbers in their culture. But that means they would miss out on American English if they had no concept of the internet or television.He tells story of his stupidity to identify a massive anaconda, a caiman, and to identify malaria when he thought it was something else.
Everett realizes that these people have a peaceful happy culture and they don't need Christianity, loses his own faith, eventually divorces his wife and somehow in the midst of all this graduates Phd.
Second, only by taking a thoroughly male participant observer perspective on the culture and language is he able to maintain his romantic view of the peaceful and harmonious, nearly Edenic nature of their life. Their way of life was the same as it was 1,000 years ago, and would remain the same for the next 1,000 years. Mornings among the Pirahãs, so many mornings, I picked up the faint smell of smoke drifting from their cook fires, and the warmth of the Brazilian sun on my face, its rays softened by my mosquito net. This "evidential" aspect of language is tied to/explained by the fact that Piraha language and culture are constrained by immediate experience -- facts are only considered facts by the Pirahas if there's an eyewitness, which also helps explain why all efforts to convert Pirahas have failed over more than 200 years.