There's a word for that.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Er, the ones that grew up in Brazilian villages wouldn't have that issue.  If Everett's claims are true the problem is one of human ontogeny.  Its well established in case studies of extreme child neglect that if a kid doesn't learn certain things growing up he or she can't ever learn them as an adult.  Any Piraha who grew up outside the tribe should have those concepts down fine.  Actually they all should within a few generations of Everett's time with them, since he would have exposed the kids to the concepts (and they in turn should pass them on to their kids).

Also iirc Everett is using this stuff as an elaborate variation on the argument from evil (God clearly doesn't exist because these people are different from other people, etc) so he *definitely* has an agenda.  I'm more amused by the idea that the entire tribe decided to pull a fast one on him though.

Yeah... OK, disregarding the documented limits to that hypothesis, actually, Portuguese-speaking Brazilians would have introduced them to that concept 200 years ago, and failing that (as unlikley as that is) the tribal members who grew up in Brazilian villages speaking Portuguese who later returned to live with the tribe would have introduced the village's children to the concept long before Everett arrived, yet he doesn't address or try to reconcile that at all.

That on top of the highly unlikely claim that he found the world's only fully functional human population that never developed the technology of numbers.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

The possibility that the tribe is fucking with him is not unlikely, as substantiated by other, even larger tribes totally fucking with anthropologists, sometimes over a course of hundreds of years.

[BabylonHoruv]

The possibility that the tribe is fucking with him is not unlikely, as substantiated by other, even larger tribes totally fucking with anthropologists, sometimes over a course of hundreds of years.

A couple hundred years?  That's kind of awesome.

links please?

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

The possibility that the tribe is fucking with him is not unlikely, as substantiated by other, even larger tribes totally fucking with anthropologists, sometimes over a course of hundreds of years.

A couple hundred years?  That's kind of awesome.

links please?

You'll have to Google it yourself. I'm an indian, not an anthropologist. As far as I know anthropologists are STILL telling people that we poke a hole in the bread "to let the evil spirits out".   There's a bunch of shit that I've heard about that's supposedly still in books.

[Phox]

The possibility that the tribe is fucking with him is not unlikely, as substantiated by other, even larger tribes totally fucking with anthropologists, sometimes over a course of hundreds of years.

A couple hundred years?  That's kind of awesome.

links please?

You'll have to Google it yourself. I'm an indian, not an anthropologist. As far as I know anthropologists are STILL telling people that we poke a hole in the bread "to let the evil spirits out".   There's a bunch of shit that I've heard about that's supposedly still in books.

Oh. This. Do not read to learn about Native American culture. And especially don't look on the Internet.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Anthropology is at least as funny as astrology. Maybe funnier.

[Phox]

Anthropology is at least as funny as astrology. Maybe funnier.

[Lies]

You might find this interesting.

Also this.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

The first one was a Cracked article, but the second one was interesting, even though any conclusions about how people perceive color based on language seem spurious in comparison to the more obvious conclusions about how culture and language affect how people organize and categorize color.

Organizing and categorizing color is a kind of a big deal in my field, as a real-world problem that each of us is forced to solve, and I would love to see these same researchers study how colorists categorize, because it often makes no sense at all to non-colorists who are used to a system of categorization that is largely based on their cultural norm, perhaps the Crayola box. I have known people to rearrange their glass completely, moving hundreds of colors around, because they had an epiphany that required a complete reorganization, with many colors moving from one category into a completely different category.

Even among English speakers, disagreement about what category a color belongs to is common. Is chartreuse a yellow, or is it a green?  

Is brown a kind of purple? Is pink a kind of brown? Do yellows go with pinks, or browns, or greens?

What is red?

We can all SEE the differences between the colors, but we don't all use the same names or even the same categories for them.

[hooplala]

Cracked is much more thought-provoking than it once was, just saying.

Here's a question that has bothered me for some time, only tangentially related to this topic, so feel free to ignore... but who decided which colors match with other colors?  Are these matches universal, or culture based?

[Adios]

What about made up but widely used words. Are they words if used often enough?

Thing-a-ma-bob for example.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Cracked is much more thought-provoking than it once was, just saying.

Here's a question that has bothered me for some time, only tangentially related to this topic, so feel free to ignore... but who decided which colors match with other colors?  Are these matches universal, or culture based?

You mean, what colors go together, aesthetically?

That's completely made up. Not only is it made up, but there is an organization which makes up new color combinations every year and then tells the fashion world what to think. So yes, in a sense it's culture-based.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

What about made up but widely used words. Are they words if used often enough?

Thing-a-ma-bob for example.

Yes. As soon as enough people recognize the word as having a common meaning, it's a word.

[hooplala]

Cracked is much more thought-provoking than it once was, just saying.

Here's a question that has bothered me for some time, only tangentially related to this topic, so feel free to ignore... but who decided which colors match with other colors?  Are these matches universal, or culture based?

You mean, what colors go together, aesthetically?

That's completely made up. Not only is it made up, but there is an organization which makes up new color combinations every year and then tells the fashion world what to think. So yes, in a sense it's culture-based.

That's kind of what I figured, thanks.

[Jenne]

Language is a plastic thing.  It's ever-changing.  You can't really stop the train that's barrelling down the tracks.  (Which is why entities like L'Ecole Francaise always crack me up.)  Usage outweighs rebuke.  And the formalized structures will no doubt vary from colloquialized structures as well.  This creates the sense that some forms are "wrong," or "bad" or inappropriate.  

Different modes of language are used for different situations (i.e. you don't talk to your boss the way you'd talk to your brother, etc.).  This is rooted so deeply from subculture to subculture in a way that folks are unaware, really, of this dialectical switch.  Unless, of course, they study it.  And then everything's so "meta" that it gets a little crazy.

The interesting studies to me are done on the emergence of language as well as the death of it.  Languages die every day, Native American Indian languages especially.  I had the privilege of cataloging some of the now-extinct language of Cado about 15 years ago.