* * *
The Pirahã live in small groups of thirty to forty people spread out on the banks of tributaries that branch off the Amazon River.52 The village I visited with Everett and Fitch was on the Maici, a narrow, meandering tributary in the northeastern part of the country. Everett and I flew out first, in a two-seater Cessna float plane, from the former oil refinery city of Porto Velho. For an hour we soared over an ocean of unbroken rain forest, until our pilot suddenly began to descend toward the tree canopy, banking slowly until he could see a glint of silvery water between the leaves—the Maici, which proved to be a bendy river not much wider, in some parts, than the Cessna’s wingspan. We landed and stepped out onto the plane’s pontoon. Above us, on the steep riverbank, were some thirty or so tribe members: short, dark-skinned men, women, and children, some with babies on their hips, others clutching bows and arrows. They responded to the sight of Everett with a greeting that sounded like a profusion of exotic songbirds, a melodic chattering, combined with glottal clicks, tongue pops, and nasals scarcely discernible, to the uninitiated, as human speech.
Everett answered them in the tongue’s choppy staccato: “Xaói hi gáísai xigíaihiabisaoaxái ti xabiíhai hiatíihi xigío hoíhi.” He was telling them that I would be “staying for a short time” in the village.
The men and women answered in an echoing chorus, “Xaói hi goó kaisigíaihí xapagáiso.”
Everett turned to me. “They want to know what you’re called in ‘crooked head.’ ”
This was the tribe’s term for any language not Pirahã, and it was a clear pejorative. The Pirahã consider all forms of human discourse other than their own to be laughably inferior, and they are unique among Amazonian peoples in remaining completely monolingual. Told my name, they playfully tossed the sound back and forth among themselves, altering it slightly with each reiteration, until it became an unrecognizable syllable. They never uttered it again, and instead gave me a lilting Pirahã name: Kaaxáoi, that of a tribe member, from a village downriver, whom they thought I resembled. “That’s completely consistent with my main thesis about the tribe,” Everett told me. “They reject everything from outside their world. They just don’t want it, and it’s been that way since the day the Brazilians first found them in this jungle in the 1700s.”
Fitch, who was traveling with his cousin Bill, a sommelier based in Paris, arrived a few hours later in the Cessna, which had circled back to Porto Velho to fetch them. The tribe members surrounded the cousins as they stepped onto the riverbank. Having traveled widely together to remote parts of the world, the Fitches believed that they knew how to establish an instant rapport with indigenous peoples. They brought their cupped hands to their mouths and blew loon calls. The Pirahã looked on stone-faced. Bill made a popping sound by snapping a finger against the opposite palm. The Pirahã remained impassive. The cousins shrugged sheepishly. “Usually you can hook people really easily by doing these funny little things,” Fitch said later. “But the Pirahã kids weren’t buying it, and neither were their parents.”
“It’s not part of their culture,” Everett said. “So they’re not interested.”
The “village” was as Everett had described it in Current Anthropology: seven huts made of palm fronds propped on sticks. Mud floors, no decorations, no walls. During his first two decades living with the tribe, Everett and his family had slept in a tent on the edge of the village. But in 1999, he had built a two-room, eight-by-eight-meter, bug- and snake-proof house from ironwood and equipped it with a gas stove, generator, water filtration system, and other amenities. It was here that the four of us slept and where some twenty Pirahã gathered outside each morning to volunteer as research subjects. The testing was carried out in a separate hut, propped on tall stilts, that Everett used as his office.
Fitch had brought a laptop loaded with programs based on the “Chomsky hierarchy,” a system for classifying types of mental “grammar,” the term Chomskyan linguists use to describe the specific mental operation that turns abstract thought into language. Fitch began with the simplest grammar, one which would determine whether the Pirahã were capable of learning a basic pattern of sounds. The pattern involved a male voice uttering one syllable (mi or doh or ga, for instance), followed by a female voice uttering a different syllable (lee or ta or gee). (Male and female voices were used in order to make a clear differentiation between the syllables, much as you would use differently colored blocks if asking a test subject to group them into specific patterns.) When the voices spoke a “correct” construction (one male syllable followed by one female), an animated monkey head at the bottom of the computer screen would float to a corner at the top; “incorrect” constructions (anytime one male syllable was followed by another male syllable or more than one female syllable) would make the monkey head float to the opposite corner. Fitch wanted to know if, in repeated trials, the Pirahã could figure out, and learn, these patterns, a mental function basic to all language comprehension. He mounted a small digital movie camera to the top of the screen so that he could film a test subject’s eye movements. In the few seconds’ delay before the monkey head floated to either corner, Fitch hoped that he would be able to determine, from the direction of the subjects’ unconscious glances, if they were learning the “grammar.” The experiment, using different stimuli, had been conducted, at Harvard, with undergraduates and monkeys, all of whom passed the test. “My expectation is that they’re going to act just like my Harvard undergrads,” Fitch said. “They’re going to do exactly what every other human has done and they’re going to get this basic pattern. The Pirahã are humans—humans can do this.”
But in the first few days, each tribe member, seated in front of the laptop, would watch the monkey head and not respond to the audio cues. Everett, who acted as translator during the experiments, explained to Fitch that the barrier was cultural, not cognitive: all of this was so alien to the Pirahã experience, they simply didn’t understand what was expected of them. Their eyes seemed to go everywhere. Fitch asked Everett to tell the subjects to “point to where they think the monkey is going to go.” Everett explained another cultural constraint: the Pirahã don’t point. Nor do they have words for right and left. They tell others to head “upriver” or “downriver,” or “to the forest” or “away from the forest.” On Fitch’s request, Everett told a male subject to say whether the monkey head was going upriver or down. “Monkeys go to the jungle,” the man responded, quite logically. Other subjects expressed a natural curiosity about the floating head: “Is that rubber?” “Does this monkey have a spouse?” “Is it a man?” When Fitch’s computer froze in the jungle humidity, he stormed off to the main house to fix the problem. “This is typical of fieldwork in the Amazon, which is why most people don’t do it,” Everett told me. “But the problem here is not cognitive; it’s cultural,” he reiterated. He gestured toward the Pirahã man at the table. “Just because we’re sitting in the same room doesn’t mean we’re sitting in the same century.”
On the fourth day, a girl of perhaps sixteen—focused, alert, and calm—seemed to grasp the grammar, her eyes moving to the correct corner of the screen in advance of the monkey’s head. Fitch, excited, tested her on a higher level of the Chomsky hierarchy, a “phrase-structure grammar,” in which correct constructions consist of any number of male syllables followed by an equal number of female syllables. In their 2002 paper on recursion, Chomsky, Hauser, and Fitch had stated that this grammar, which makes greater demands on memory and pattern recognition, represents the minimum foundation necessary for human language. Fitch watched closely, trying to discern whether the girl’s eye movements indicated that she was learning the pattern’s rules. It was impossible to say with the naked eye. He would have to take the footage back to his lab at the University of Edinburgh, and have the film vetted by an impartial postdoc, who would “score” the images on a timeline synchronized to the soundtrack of the spoken syllables. Only then would Fitch be able to say with certainty whether the subject
’s eyes had anticipated the monkey head—or merely followed it.53
In our remaining two days in the village, Fitch failed to find another subject as promising as the girl, but he pronounced himself satisfied with the data he had collected. He was even willing to concede that culture had perhaps constrained certain aspects of the tribe’s speech. “But as far as the Pirahã disproving Universal Grammar?” he said. “I don’t think anything I could have seen would have convinced me that that was ever anything other than just the wrong way to frame the problem.” Everett insisted that it was the only way to frame the problem. He added that the endless search for Chomsky’s “universals” had destroyed the beauty of linguistics, by ignoring the things that make languages so fascinatingly different from one another—the quality that had captured the imagination of the world’s first anthropological linguist, Edward Sapir, when he studied the indigenous Indian tribes of the American West at the dawn of the twentieth century.
“When I went back and read the stuff Sapir wrote in the twenties,” Everett said, “I just realized, hey, this really is a tradition that we lost. People believe they’ve actually studied a language when they have given it a Chomskyan formalism. And you may have given us absolutely no insight whatsoever into that language as a separate language.”
* * *
I received an entirely different view of Pirahã, from that of either Fitch or Everett, on my final night in Brazil, after the Cessna flew us back to Porto Velho. There, I met in the lobby of our hotel with the only other outsider who could speak the language: Everett’s estranged wife, Keren. She and Everett had separated in 1999, after twenty years of marriage, in part because Keren kept her Christian faith and continued trying to convert the tribe. An elfin woman in her fifties, Keren still lived with the Pirahã six months of the year, but had chosen to withdraw to Porto Velho during our time in the jungle. Though her primary interest in the tribe remained missionary, Keren was also fascinated by their language. Like Everett, she had studied formal linguistics and was well acquainted with the Chomsky program. But her insights into Pirahã transcended the bitter debate over recursion and Universal Grammar, tree structures, X-bars, and phrase structures (Chomsky’s recondite terms)—for the simple reason that she did not think that these were important to understanding, or mastering, the language. The key, she had recently come to believe, was in the tribe’s singing: the way that they can drop consonants and vowels altogether and communicate purely by variations in pitch, stress, and rhythm—the prosody.
“This language uses prosody much more than any other language I know of,” Keren told me. “It’s not the kind of thing that you can write, and capture, and go back to; you have to watch, and you have to feel it. It’s like someone singing a song. You want to watch and listen and try to sing along with them. So I started doing that, and I began noticing things that I never transcribed, things I never picked up when I listened to a tape of them, and part of it was the performance. So, at that point I said, ‘Put the tape recorders and notebooks away, focus on the person, watch them.’ They give a lot of things using prosody that you never would have found otherwise. This has never been documented in any language I know.” Aspects of Pirahã that had long confounded Keren became clear, she said, through the music of their voices. “I realized, Oh! That’s what the subject-verb looks like, that’s what the pieces of the clause and the time phrase and the object and the other phrases feel like. That was the beginning of a breakthrough for me.”
Keren’s emphasis on the music of Pirahã brought to mind Darwin’s insight that language evolved from song, as strings of expressive tones arranged in melodic contours, into which words were gradually introduced. I wondered if Everett and Fitch, and the scores of linguists who had since weighed in on Everett’s Current Anthropology paper were, by bickering endlessly over recursion and syntax, missing something far more important that the Pirahã had to tell us about ourselves and where we might have come from.
Singing, Keren went on, had been the breaking point for Everett. His frustration at having to “start all over again” with the language led to his leaving the Amazon and their marriage and taking a full-time teaching job in Manchester, England. “Pirahã has just always defied every linguist that’s gone out there,” she said, “because you can’t start at the segment level and go on. You’re not going to find out anything, because they really can communicate without the syllables.”
As Keren spoke, I was reminded of one of my last evenings in the Pirahã village when a strange sound began to waft into Everett’s house: a voice singing a clutch of notes on a rising, then falling scale. Everett and Fitch, arguing over an abstruse element of Chomskyan linguistics, ignored the voice. I stepped outside and made my way through the gloaming toward the sound. It was coming from a hut on the edge of the village. I crept closer and saw that it was a woman, winding raw cotton onto a spool. For twenty minutes, she intoned this extraordinary series of notes, over and over, her voice like a muted horn. A toddler played at her feet.
When I returned to the house, I asked Everett about what I had seen and heard. He said something vague about how tribe members “sing their dreams.” But when I now described the scene to Keren, in the Porto Velho hotel, she grew animated and explained that this is how the Pirahã teach their children to speak. The toddler was absorbing a lesson in the language’s all-important prosody, through the mother’s endless repetition of that melody—a living example, one might argue, of Sapir’s view of language, not as an inborn instinct, but as a cultural skill passed, from generation to generation, through the medium of the voice. Only recently—that is, since researching this book and learning of how the mother’s voice begins tutoring a child in language even before the baby leaves her womb—have I come to see that Pirahã woman and her toddler in a still wider context, one that highlights the underappreciated role—the incalculable role—that women’s voices played in our evolutionary ascent, as the primary acoustic signal that prepares the developing human brain for language.
Which is not to suggest that the male voice has been entirely inconsequential in our evolution, given the role it played, and continues to play, in the sexual signaling critical to the propagation of our species.
FIVE SEX AND GENDER
In October 1994, NBC-TV aired an episode of Seinfeld that began with Jerry expressing amazement to Elaine that one of their friends, Noreen, was hitting on him over the phone. “Noreen?” Elaine says. “But she’s got a new boyfriend!” Mystified, Elaine calls Noreen to feel out the situation. She is several seconds into the call (we hear a distinctly female voice coming through Elaine’s earpiece), when she asks, “Noreen, were you hitting on him?” The camera cuts to the person on the other end of the line—a short, middle-aged, bald man: Dan, Noreen’s boyfriend, whom Jerry and his friends have dubbed a “high talker.” Elaine, fooled by his voice, has given away Noreen’s secret. “You’re saying that Noreen was hitting on Jerry Seinfeld?” Dan says, aghast.1
In real life, such mistakes are rare. That’s because the human voice is unique, in the animal kingdom, not only in its specialization for speech, but for its sexual dimorphism—the way it splits along gender lines. All other mammals are vocally monomorphic: their roars, barks, meows, and baahs sound the same whether made by a male or a female of the species. Even our closest primate kin, chimpanzees and bonobos, display less sexual dimorphism of voice than we do—only a few semitones difference. Human males speak at a pitch that is, on average, a full octave below women, twelve semitones, a big difference.2
You can, of course, find outliers. Writer David Sedaris has complained that his unusually high voice invariably makes room service operators politely call him “ma’am.”3 Some deep-voiced women are frequently mistaken for the opposite sex.4 But these are exceptions that prove the rule (which is why they strike us as anomalous—and as fodder for comedy). In one study of over six hundred male and female undergraduates, researchers found zero overlap in vocal pitch between the men and women: the mo
st baritone of the females spoke at a higher pitch than the highest-voiced male.5 When it comes to the human voice, nature wanted to establish a clear division between the sexes.
The human voice actually starts off, in childhood, as sexually monomorphic.6 But the male voice deepens at puberty when, around age thirteen, the testicles emit a time-released blast of hormones, known as androgens (including testosterone). These chemicals cycle through the blood and bind to androgen receptors on muscles and tissues throughout the body, changing their gene expression and causing them to explode in growth. Girls also produce androgens, just less of them (because they don’t have testes). Heavy androgen exposure is why teen boys, at puberty, develop larger muscles than girls and (on average) grow taller. The larynx happens to be rich in androgen receptors so the cartilages, ligaments, and muscles all become larger at puberty (the thyroid cartilage making its presence known as a pointed protuberance on the outside of the male neck: the Adam’s apple) and the vocal cords triple in size: lengthening, widening, and thickening, slowing their air-chopping rate, lowering the voice’s perceived pitch.
Not surprisingly, it takes adolescent boys a while to adapt themselves to the unfamiliar physical dimensions of the “new” instrument inside their neck: until they groove a revised set of neural instructions into the basal ganglia, they’re prone to emitting sudden high-pitched squeaks and squeals. At the same time, the widening and lengthening of the neck, and expansion of the mouth and nasal cavities, change the resonances of the vocal tract, boosting lower overtones, muting higher ones, thus adding a “dark” or “rich” timbre to many adult male voices. Finally, the muscles of the diaphragm and intercostals also increase in size and strength under the androgen surge, lending to male voices’ greater volume, on average, than that of females. So, the dimorphism of the human voice is not purely a matter of pitch; there are also distinct differences in timbre and volume between men and women. But pitch tends to be the one we notice most. Importantly, girls’ voices also get lower at puberty (because of androgen secretion from the adrenal glands), just not as dramatically. The female vocal cords increase only slightly in size—about 32 percent to men’s 68 percent—so women’s voices descend only a semitone or two, and thus retain much of the high, clear sound they had before puberty, and which preadolescent boys share.
This Is the Voice Page 14