Unique traits

• As far as the Pirahã have related to researchers, their culture is concerned solely with matters that fall within direct personal experience, and thus there's no history beyond living memory.
• The language is claimed to have no relative clauses or grammatical recursion, but this isn't clear. Should the language truly feature a lack of recursion, then it would be a counterexample to the theory proposed by Chomsky, Hauser and Fitch (2002) that recursion is a crucial and uniquely human language property.
• Its seven and eight consonant phonemes (feminine and masculine, respectively) and three vowel phonemes are the fewest known of any language.
• The culture has the simplest known kinship system, not tracking relations any more distant than biological siblings.
• The people don't count and the language doesn't have words for precise numbers. Despite efforts to teach them, some researchers, such as Prof. Peter Gordon of Columbia University, claim that they're incapable of learning numeracy. His colleague, Prof. Daniel L. Everett, on the other hand, argues that the Pirahã are cognitively capable of counting; they simply choose not to do so.
• It is suspected that the language's entire pronoun set, which is the simplest of any known language, was recently borrowed from one of the Tupí-Guaraní languages, and that prior to that the language may have had no pronouns whatsoever. Many linguists, however, find this claim questionable, noting that there's no historical-comparative evidence indicating the non-existence of pronouns in a previous period of the history of Pirahã. However, if there had been pronouns at an earlier stage of Pirahã, this wouldn't affect Everett's claim of the significance of the system's simplicity today. It is true that there are few Tupi-Guarani loanwords in areas of the lexicon more susceptible to borrowing (such as nouns referring to cultural items, for instance), though there are some for different types of flora and fauna (which itself may indicate that the Pirahã didn't originate in their current location). Thus while the idea that all Pirahã pronouns were borrowed is still only a hypothesis and would constitute an unusual case, it wouldn't be unprecedented.
• There is a disputed theory that the language has no color terminology. There are no unanalyzable root words for color; the color words recorded are all compounds like bi³i¹sai, "blood-like", which isn't that uncommon.
• They have very little artwork. The artwork that's present, mostly necklaces and drawn stick-figures, is used primarily to ward off evil spirits.
• The Pirahã have no concept of God or religion. They believe in spirits, though these are not the same kinds of spirits in other cultures. These "spirits" can be jaguars, trees, or other visible, tangible things.

Further Information

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