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Blog: Dark Matter of the Mind

• Thoughts on DiversityJune 26, 2017 - 12:21 pm

  My newest article appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education on April 30, 2017.  “In a Pirahã village along the Maici River in Brazil, I squeezed mustard onto a piece of bread. An old woman from the village watched me. “Why do you eat bird shit?,” she asked. There was irritation in her voice. Then […]

• Translation for an interesting Piraha textMarch 6, 2017 - 6:10 pm

  Sept. 29 A MFX3 (younger guy) 0001C6.MP4 00:00:17 Ti baabihia saagoai ‘Am I getting ill?’ (joking comment made by Kaiowa to himself as he waits) 00:00:25 Dan to Kaiowa: Baihiigi ‘(taping) goes slowly’ Kaiowa to Dan: Xai baihiigi. Xaio. ‘Yeah. Slowly. That’s right.’

• A discussion of “Understanding Recursion and Looking for Self-Embedding in Pirahã”December 19, 2016 - 1:52 pm

  A discussion of Understanding Recursion and Looking for Self-Embedding in Pirahã, by Raiane Oliveira Salles, Pontifícia Universidade Católica of Rio de Janeiro. http://www.maxwell.vrac.puc-rio.br/26480/26480.PDF In the decades since I began field research on the Pirahã language, in December of 1977, 39 years ago, no one else has done any descriptive linguistics field research on this language. Brazilian […]

• Who’s afraid of the big bad Wolfe? Apparently everyone.October 4, 2016 - 12:24 pm

  Gibberish meets Wolfe: Recursion is Just a State of Mind Tom Wolfe’s new book, The Kingdom of Speech, continues to be the object of scathing reviews on blogs, in comments, and even in newspaper articles by linguists, anthropologists, psychologists, journalists, and evolutionary biologists  – often people with some belief that the views of Noam Chomsky […]