Pantheon Books · 2008
The account of thirty years among the Pirahã of the Amazon — the book that brought a linguist’s fieldwork on language, culture and belief to a wide readership.
Dan Everett went to the Amazon to translate the Bible. Over the next four decades he lived in the jungle for nearly eight years, discovered a language no outsider had documented, and left an atheist.
His work among the Pirahã produced the first well-documented case of a human language without recursion, and set off one of the longest-running disputes in modern linguistics.
He is Trustee Professor of Cognitive Sciences at Bentley University.
Dan joins Joe Rogan to discuss his decades of work with the Pirahã, his journey from missionary to atheist, his challenge to Noam Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar, and the knowledge lost when languages disappear.
A Harvard Science Book Talk based on How Language Began, in which Everett argues that the tools, travel, and settlements of Homo erectus are best explained by the invention of language.
A documentary following Daniel Everett back to the Pirahã community and exploring what their language may reveal about the relationship between language and culture.
I arrived in the Amazon in October of 1977. Six weeks later I was among the Pirahãs. Since that time, over a period that ended in 2013, I lived among the Pirahãs for nearly eight years and among other Amazonian peoples for a period of one year. I began by studying sound systems and sound (phonology and phonetics), and moved on to word structure (morphology), sentence structure (syntax), and discourse studies across several languages.
“Everett has forced many researchers to reevaluate basic assumptions about the relationship among culture, language and cognition.”
