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: The Buck Stops Here

Language Studies and Political Correctness

By Stuart Buck, Esq.

Via Rod Dreher, I came across this interesting New Yorker article about a linguist named Dan Everett, who has extensively studied a Brazilian tribe called the Piraha. Everett has claimed that the Piraha's language lacks recursion, i.e., inserting phrases inside other phrases, such as "the girl who was wearing a red cloak ate a wolf." What's interesting is how some professors reacted to Everett's claim: Some scholars believe that Everett?s claim that the Pirahã do not use recursion is tantamount to calling them stupid. Stephen Levinson, the neo-Whorfian director of the Language and Cognition Group at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, in the Netherlands, excoriated Everett in print for ?having made the Pirahã sound like the mindless bearers of an almost subhumanly simple culture...continue to full post

Full post as published by The Buck Stops Here on May 03, 2009 (boomark / email).