Don't Sleep, There are Snakes

by Everett, Daniel L.

  Just as bigí has a wider scope of meaning than I initially imagined possible, so did another major environmental term, xoí. Originally, I believed that xoí simply meant “jungle,” because that is its most common use. Then I realized that it in fact labels the entire space between bigís. That is, it can refer to “biosphere” or “jungle,” somewhat like our word earth, which can refer either to our planet or to just the soil on the planet’s surface. If you go into the jungle you say, “I am going into the xoí.” If you tell someone to remain motionless, as when sitting in a canoe or when a stinging insect lands on them, you say, “Don’t move in the xoí.” If it is a cloudless day you can say, “The xoí is pretty.” So the word is broader than merely “jungle.”

  These terms were revelations to me about different ways to conceive of the environment. But bigger surprises were in store.

  One of the first was the apparent lack of counting and numbers. At first I thought that the Pirahãs had the numbers one, two, and “many,” a common enough system around the world. But I realized that what I and previous workers thought were numbers were only relative quantities. I began to notice this when the Pirahãs asked me when the plane was coming again, a question they enjoy asking, I eventually realized, because they find it nearly magical that I seem to know the day that the plane is arriving.

  I would hold up two fingers and say, “Hoi days,” using what I thought was their term for two. They would look puzzled. As I observed more carefully, I saw that they never used their fingers or any other body parts or external objects to count or tally with. And I also noticed that they could use what I thought meant “two” for two small fish or one relatively larger fish, contradicting my understanding that it meant “two” and supporting my new idea of the “numbers” as references to relative volume—two small fish and one medium-size fish are roughly equal in volume, but both would be less than, and thus trigger a different “number,” than a large fish. Eventually numerous published experiments were conducted by me and a series of psychologists that demonstrated conclusively that the Pirahãs have no numbers at all and no counting in any form.

  Before carrying out these experiments, however, I already had experiential evidence supporting the lack of counting in the language.

  In 1980, at the Pirahãs’ urging, Keren and I began a series of evening classes in counting and literacy. My entire family participated, with Shannon, Kristene, and Caleb (nine, six, and three at that time) sitting with Pirahã men and women and working with them. Each evening for eight months we tried to teach Pirahã men and women to count to ten in Portuguese. They wanted to learn this because they knew that they did not understand money and wanted to be able to tell whether they were being cheated (or so they told us) by the river traders. After eight months of daily efforts, without ever needing to call the Pirahãs to come for class (all meetings were started by them with much enthusiasm), the people concluded that they could not learn this material and classes were abandoned. Not one Pirahã learned to count to ten in eight months. None learned to add 3 + 1 or even 1 + 1 (if regularly writing or saying the numeral 2 in answer to the latter is evidence of learning).Only occasionally would some get the right answer.

  Whatever else might be responsible for the Pirahãs’ lack of acquiring the skill of counting, I believe that one crucial factor is that they ultimately do not value Portuguese (or American) knowledge. In fact, they actively oppose some aspects of it coming into their lives. They ask questions about outside cultures largely for the entertainment value of the answers. If one tries to suggest, as we originally did, in a math class, that there is actually a preferred response to a specific question, this is unwelcome and will likely result in a change of conversational topic or simple irritation.

  As a further example of this, I considered the fact that Pirahãs would “write stories” on paper, which I gave them for this purpose at their request. These inscriptions consisted of a series of identical, repetitive, usually circular marks. But the authors would “read” the stories back to me, telling me something about their day, about someone’s sickness, and so on—all of which they claimed to be reading from their marks. They might even make marks on paper and say Portuguese numbers, while holding the paper for me to see. They did not care at all that their symbols were all the same, nor that there are such things as correct and incorrect written forms. When I asked them to draw a symbol twice, it was never replicated. They considered their writing to be no different from the marks that I made. In classes, we were never able to train a Pirahã to draw a straight line without serious “coaching,” and they were never able to repeat the feat in subsequent trials without more coaching. Partially this was because they see the entire process as fun and enjoy the interaction, but it was also because the concept of a “correct” way to draw is profoundly foreign.

  These were interesting facts, which I began to suspect could be linked to a larger fact about the Pirahã culture. I just had no idea yet what this larger fact might be.

  I next noticed, discussing this with Keren and with Steve Sheldon and Arlo Heinrichs, that the Pirahãs had no simple color words, that is, no terms for color that were not composed of other words. I had originally simply accepted Steve Sheldon’s analysis that there were color terms in Pirahã. Sheldon’s list of colors consisted of the terms for black, white, red (also referring to yellow), and green (also referring to blue).

  However, these were not simple words, as it turned out. They were phrases. More accurate translations of the Pirahãwords showed them to mean: “blood is dirty” for black; “it sees” or “it is transparent” for white; “it is blood” for red; and “it is temporarily being immature” for green.

  I believe that color terms share at least one property with numbers. Numbers are generalizations that group entities into sets that share general arithmetical properties, rather than object-particular, immediate properties. Likewise, as numerous studies by psychologists, linguists, and philosophers have demonstrated, color terms are unlike other adjectives or other words because they involve special generalizations that put artificial boundaries in the spectrum of visible light.

  This doesn’t mean that the Pirahãs cannot perceive colors or refer to them. They perceive the colors around them like any of us. But they don’t codify their color experiences with single words that are inflexibly used to generalize color experiences. They use phrases.

  No numbers, no counting, and no color terms. I still didn’t understand all this, but the accumulation of evidence was beginning to give me a better idea, especially as I studied more Pirahã conversations and longer narratives.

  Then I found out that Pirahã also lacks another category of words that many linguists believe to be universal, namely, quantifiers like all, each, every, and so on.

  To appreciate this fact, it would be useful to look at the closest expressions Pirahã has to these quantifiers (I have put the quantifierlike words from Pirahã and English in boldface):

  Hiaitíihí hi ogixáagaó pió kaobíi

  “The bulk of the people went to swim/went swimming/are swimming/bathing, et cetera.” (Literally, “the bigness of the people . . .”)

  Ti xogixáagaó ítii isi ogió xi kohoaibaaí, koga hói hi hi Kóhoi hiaba

  “We ate most of the fish.” (Literally, “My bigness ate [at] a bigness of fish, nevertheless there was a smallness we did not eat.”)

  This latter sentence is the closest I have ever been able to get to a sentence that would substitute for a quantifier like each, as in Each man went to the field.

  Xigihí hi xogiáagaó xoga hápií. Xaikáibaísi, Xahoáápati pío, Tíigi hi pío, ogiáagaó

  (Literally, “The bigness/bulk of men all went to the field, Xaikáibaísi, Xahoáápati, Tíigi their bigness went.”)

  Gátahai hóihii xabaxáígio aoaagá xagaoa koó

  “There were (a) few cans in the foreigner’s canoe.” (Literally, “Smallness of cans remaining associated was in the gut of the canoe.”)

  H
owever, there are two words, usually occurring in reference to an amount eaten or desired, which by their closest translation equivalents, “whole” (báaiso) and “part” (gíiái), might seem to be quantifiers:

  Tíobáhai hi báaiso kohoaisóogabagaí

  “The child wanted/wants to eat the whole thing.” (Literally, “Child muchness/fullness eat is desiring.”)

  Tíobáhai hi gíiái kohoaisóogabagaí

  “The child wanted/wants to eat a piece of the thing.” (Literally, “Child that there eat is desiring.”)

  Aside from their literal meanings, there are reasons for not interpreting these two words as quantifiers. First, they can be used in ways that real quantifiers could not be. The contrast in the following examples shows this. Someone has just killed an anaconda. Kóhoi utters the first sentence. Then someone takes a piece of the snake before it is sold to me. Kóhoi utters the second sentence, in which báaiso (whole) is still used in Pirahã. This would not be acceptable in English.

  Xáoói hi paóhoa’aí xisoí báaiso xoaboihaí

  “The foreigner will likely buy the entire anaconda skin.”

  Xaió hi báaiso xoaobáhá. Hi xogió xoaobáhá

  “Yes, he bought the whole thing.”

  To understand why this exchange is important for showing that Pirahã has no quantifiers, let’s first compare it with the English equivalent. Imagine that someone, a store owner perhaps, says to you, “Sure, I’ll sell you all the meat.”

  You then pay him the money for the entire piece of meat.

  But then the store owner takes away a piece of the meat in front of you before wrapping and giving you the rest. Do you think the store owner did something dishonest? If you do it is because the word all in English, when used precisely, means that there is nothing left over, that every bit of something or every member of a set of entities is affected. English speakers, and others with a word like all, would not describe what just happened as the store owner selling all the meat—only, perhaps, a large portion of it. Linguists and philosophers refer to these properties of quantifier words as their truth conditions. Truth conditions are the circumstances under which speakers will admit that a word is used correctly or not. It is true that these can vary. So a child might say, “All the kids are coming to my party,” but neither they nor their parents actually believe that all children in the world, the country, the state, or the city will be coming—just a number of the child’s friends. In this sense, the child is not using all in its most precise meaning, but he or she is using it in an equally acceptable way. The point is that the truth conditions in Pirahã never include the precise, quantifierlike meaning of all (where all means “every single entity in a set”)for any word in their language.

  We see this because in the example above a Pirahã will always repeat, in spite of taking away a piece of the anaconda skin, that “he bought the whole anaconda skin.” If the word really meant “all” this would not be possible. So Pirahã lacks quantifiers.

  This accumulation of discoveries about Pirahã culture challenged me to look in more detail at some of the less obvious values of their society. I went about this mainly by studying their stories.

  Pirahã conversations and stories took up most of my time in the village, since they clearly embodied the beliefs and values of the society as a whole, revealing these in ways that I could not learn nearly as well by simply observing the culture. The subjects of their stories were also revealing—the people do not talk about unexperienced events, such as long past or far future events, or fictional topics.

  One story that I have always enjoyed is the story told to me by Kaaboogí, the day that he killed a panther (a black jaguar), perhaps weighing as much as three hundred pounds (my estimate is based on the size of the head and the fact that four Pirahãs could not carry the entire body back to the village). He brought its head and paws to the village in a basket for me to see.

  In the original telling of the story, immediately after his presentation of the head and paws, there were more details. He told me that he was out hunting and that his dog got a scent and ran ahead. Then he heard his dog yelp and suddenly stop. He ran to see what had happened and saw half of his dog on one side of a log and half on the other side of the log. As he approached to look more closely, he saw a black blur out of the corner of his right eye. He carried with him a 28-gauge single-shot shotgun that I had bought him the year before. He turned and fired with this pathetically small weapon and some of the buckshot went into the panther’s eye. The panther fell to the side and started to get up. Since the shotgun didn’t eject shells automatically, Kaaboogí quickly knocked the spent shell out with a stick and reloaded—he had three shells with him. He fired again and broke the panther’s leg. Then he shot and killed it. The head of this panther was much larger than mine and the paws were large enough to completely cover my hand. The claws were about half as long as my fingers. The canines, when extracted with their roots, were more than three inches long, solid ivory.

  When I got Kaaboogí to sit down to tell me the story for the tape recorder, he told it as it is on the following pages. In presenting the story here, I have removed most of the technical linguistic details so that it flows better. Talking to people from very different cultures, as this story shows, involves much more than merely getting the word meanings right. One can translate every word well and still have a hard time understanding the story. This is because our stories include unstated assumptions about the world that are made by our culture. I numbered the sentences to simplify following the story.

  Killing the Panther

  1. Xakí, xakí ti kagáíhiaí kagi abáipí koái.

  Here the jaguar pounced upon my dog, killing him.

  2. Ti kagáíhiaí kagi abáipí koái. Xaí ti aiá xaiá.

  There the jaguar pounced on my dog, killing him. It happened with respect to me.

  3. Gaí sibaibiababáopiiá.

  There the jaguar killed the dog by pouncing on it.

  4. Xi kagi abáipísigíai. Gaí sii xísapikobáobiíhaí.

  With respect to it, the jaguar pounced on the dog. I thought I saw it.

  5. Xaí ti xaiá xakí Kopaíai kagi abáipáhai.

  Then I, thus the panther, pounced on my dog.

  6. Xaí Kopaíai kagi abáipá haii.

  Then the panther pounced on my dog.

  7. Xaí ti gáxaiá. Kopaíai xáaga háía.

  Then I spoke. That this [is the work of] a panther.

  8. Xaí kopaí ti gái. Xaki xisi xísapi kobabáopiíhaí.

  Then I spoke with respect to the panther. Here is where it went. I think I see [where it went].

  9. Mm ti gáxaiá. Xakí xísaobogáxaiá xai.

  Uh, I said. The jaguar then jumped up on the log.

  10. Giaibaí, kopaíai kági abáipáháii.

  As for the dog, the panther pounced on it.

  11. Kopaíai xíbaikoaísaagáhai.

  The panther killed the dog by hitting it.

  12. Xaí kapágobaósobáíbáohoagáixiigá xaí.

  Then when I had gunshot the jaguar it began to fall.

  13. Kaapási xaí. Ti gáí kaapási kaxáowí kobáaátahaí.

  To Kaapási I spoke. Throw a basket [to me].

  14. Xí kagihoi xóbáaátahaí. Kagi abáipí.

  Throw me a basket. [It is] to put the dog into.

  15. Sigiáihí xaí báóhoipaí. Xisao xabaabo.

  The cat is the same. It pounced on the dog.

  16. Kopaíai xisao xabaabáhátaío. Xaí xabaabáátaío.

  The panther pounced on the dog. Thus it caused him to be not.

  17. Xí kagigía xiowi hi áobísigío. Kagigía xiowi.

  Put the jaguar into the same basket with the dog.

  18. Hi aobisigío xabaabátaó. Hi agía sóxoa.

  Put it in with the dog, he caused the dog to be not. He has therefore already [died].

  19. Xísagía xíigáipáó. Kagihoi xoáobáhá xaí.

  You have the jaguar parts in the basket. Put th
e basket on your head.

  20. Giaibáihi xaí xahoaó xitaógixaagahá xai.

  The dog then at night smelled him for sure then.

  21. Kagi xí gií bagáihí kagi abáboitaá híabá.

  It is right on top of the dog. It pounced on the dog and killed him.

  22. Kagi aboíboítaásogabaisai. Xóóagá.

  It wanted to pounce on the dog. It really wanted to.

  23. Xaí ti gáxaiá xaí Kaapási hi ísi hi . . .

  Then I was talking, then Kaapási he, animal, he . . .

  24. Káapí xoogabisahaí. Kapáobíigaáti.

  Don’t shoot from far away. Be shooting down on it.

  25. Xi ti boítáobíhaí. Xíkoabáobáhátaío xísagía.

  I moved quickly down toward the action onto the trunk, [I] killed it, thus it changed [died].

  26. Xí koabáobíigáhátaío. Xíkahápií hiabahátaío.

  It was dying. It wasn’t able to leave therefore.