Meet the Piraha

1500 words, 6 minute read

In Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes, Daniel Everett (2008) tells the story of his work as a Christian missionary, anthropologist, and MIT linguist studying the Piraha tribe in a semi-secluded section of Brazil’s Amazon Rain Forest.

The Piraha have a most unusual language. So far as we can tell, it is not directly related to any other living language. ‘One-off’ languages like this are rare but not unheard of, e.g. Basque (spoken in Northeast Spain and Southwest France) has no known relatives. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg (no mean feat, keeping an iceberg intact in the Amazon jungle). Piraha has features that, so far as we know, are unique among human languages.

For example, Piraha lacks a syntactic element known to linguists as ‘recursion.' Example: “The man, who was tall, played basketball.” Pretty simple concept, right? Not for the Piraha! This everyday English sentence has no equivalent in their language. (Of course, the Piraha could say, and do say, “The man was tall. The man played basketball.”)

But perhaps the Piraha are on to something here. The hidden censor in our Euro-brains whispers inaudibly, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, so why would a speaker place ‘tall’ and ‘basketball’ in the same sentence unless they were somehow connected?” But this assumption comes with a price tag.

In English, the recursive juxtaposition of ‘being tall’ and ‘playing basketball’ in the same sentence carries a faint whiff of causality, even if the speaker has no such connection in mind. We come away with the generally true idea that height is correlated with basketball prowess. We neglect guys like Yuki Kawamura (5’ 7”), currently playing in the NBA…or David Cowles (your author), the tallest boy in his 7^th grade class, who apparently thought ‘the rim’ referred to a topological feature on the surface of Neptune.

Our sentences regularly connect loosely related predicates with their subjects, suggesting structural relationships that are that may or may not exist and may or may not have been intended by the speaker. Does that ever cause any problems? What do you think?

An advocate for Piraha might point out the obvious, “If there’s no necessary connection between being tall and playing basketball, why put the two ideas together in the same sentence?” Why indeed! In Piraha, being tall and playing basketball are simply presented as serial attributes of a single human being: I took a shower and I went to the store.

We could copy the Piraha. We could craft sentences like “John is tall, he likes Bach, he reads comics, and he snores when he sleeps.” The sentence enumerates certain facts about John without in any way suggesting that these attributes are causally connected. In our defense, we’re learning: Piraha-like, non-recursive sentence structure is more often found in the 20^th century writing of Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway than in the works of Tony Trollpe or Bill Thackery.  

Traditionally, our language is a petri dish for stereotypes. Its recursive syntax encourages us to confuse statistical correlation with physical causation – a logical fallacy, enshrined more or less forever in English grammar.

Again, Piraha is the only known human language that lacks recursion. It had been thought that ‘recursion’ was the defining characteristic of human language until Piraha apparently disproved this assumption.

Now a new study, conducted by a team of scientists including Martin Surbeck (Harvard University) and posted September 21, 2026, attacks this premise from the other side. Recursive syntax has apparently been detected in the verbal communications of several non-human primates (bonobos, olive colobus monkeys, and common marmosets).

Once again, just when we’re sure we know everything, we discover we know nothing. Science and its pesky Method! It’s an outrageous inconvenience to have to study things as they are rather than as we think they should be!

And we’re only just beginning to unravel the idiosyncrasies of Piraha. For example, the language has no words for numerals (1, 2, 3) or colors (red, green, blue). It does have quantitative concepts like ‘greater than’ and ‘less than’ and words that describe an object’s visual appearance - just no words for numerals or colors per se.

Example: I have a ‘whole fish’. I start cutting the fish into pieces so that I can share it with my friends. When I’m done, I still have a ‘whole fish’ but now each of my friends has a ‘whole fish’ too. One cannot help but be reminded of Jesus’ multiplication of fishes.

A number of indigenous cultures have what we would consider ‘truncated’ number systems. For example, we find many cultures that distinguish only three quantitative states: 1, 2, > 2 (or ‘many’) – a far cry from Sister Mary Martha’s 3rd grade multiplication tables.

Yet, the mathematically inclined among us will correctly point out that we can reconstruct the entire set of rational numbers from just these three elements (1, 2, > 2). After all, computers do it with just 0’s and 1’s. But not so among the Piraha. The Piraha have no numerals, period, not even 0, not even 1. They just have fish, whole fish!

Philosophers, linguists, and anthropologists, explore the relationship, if any, between the languages we use and the ways we experience the world. Based just on this cursory review of Piraha, it is hard to imagine how anyone could argue that the Piraha see the world in the same way we do. For example, linked to our concept of quantity, we see things (objects & events) arrayed in strings or grouped in bunches. Our view of the world is horizontal. The world consists of things in relationships with other things. To be is to be related and we measure relatedness in numerical units of space and time. 

Without the concept of sets or numbers, the Piraha may see the world vertically. Each thing stands alone; it is its own self. Where we see things grouped, perhaps Piraha see them embedded. What we see as ‘moments in time’ the Piraha might see as ‘pulses in space’. If we hear the world as melody, the Piraha may experience it as rhythm.

In a vertically organized world, we can imagine that things continually emerge out of an undifferentiated background and recede back into that background. They are perpetually unfolding and enfolding. This thinking takes us neo-Europeans back to a time before Plato, back to 5^th century BCE Greece.

In my view at least, Parmenides , the father of Western philosophy, believed that the world is fundamentally, universally and eternally “whole, single-limbed…now, all together, one, continuous,” (Aletheia) and that it unfolds contingently, locally, and temporally as events, objects, and qualia (Doxa). The Piraha might have felt at home with this cosmology!

Now it’s time to get controversial! Does it make any difference to you that the cosmology of Parmenides and the Piraha is right…or at least more right than that of Plato and Newton, i.e. more internally consistent, empirically faithful, and heuristically powerful?  

(1)     We perceive things only in their unfolded state (Doxa). Multiple unfolded states of the same entity may give the appearance of a trajectory, i.e. motion, growth or change. We do not directly perceive the world in its fundamental, uniform enfolded state (Aletheia, above). But Zeno (d. 430 BCE) proved that our idea of continuous motion (calculus) is incoherent; his view was endorsed in the 20^th century by none other than the mathematician-philosopher Bertrand Russell and later confirmed by the scientist Max Planck.

(2)     Several popular, contemporary models of the Cosmos are based on the concepts of fractals and/or holograms: multivarious moments of experience (Doxa) are elaborations of a uniform, fundamental pattern (Aletheia) through the agency of Logos (Heraclitus and John the Evangelist).

(3)     We propose that the idea of a time-line needs to be replaced by a time-plane. What we call Present is an axis of Time that runs perpendicular to the Past/Future ‘continuum’.

Events originate (center) at discrete points on the timeline and have durations measured by the radius of a semi-circle inscribed in the time-plane and intersecting two points on the timeline and one point on the Present-axis. Within the unique planar region subtended by each event, discrete sub-events can occur subject to the constraints of Ultrametric arithmetic.

We’ve come a long way, baby, from the proto-philosophy of Parmenides and Zeno, and our industrial civilization has all but eclipsed the hunter-gatherer lifestyle of the Piraha; but the question must be asked: Have we made forward progress?

Thoughts While Shaving is the official blog of Aletheia Today Magazine (ATM). To never miss another Thought, choose the subscribe option below. Also, follow us on any one of our social media channels for the latest news from ATM. Thanks for reading!