Communication Is Literally Impossible

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ROL stalwart is back in our pages, reviewing / 's new, well, book. The Republic is closing in on itself, but man, it's never felt so large.

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COMMUNICATION IS LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE

The Pirahã people of the Brazilian Amazon are among the most remote communities in the world. They speak a language isolate: a language with no known connection to any other spoken language on earth. In the 1970s, they were studied at length by the linguist Daniel Everett, who hoped to a) learn their fascinating language and b) convert them to Christianity. But while Everett was successful with the former, he was deeply unsuccessful with the latter. The Pirahã told Everett that if they had not seen Jesus, and Everett had not seen Jesus, they weren’t interested in any stories about Jesus.

Everett claimed this was due to the structure of their language, which uses suffixes to determine if knowledge is gathered via hearsay, observation, or deduction. The story of Jesus Christ is hearsay of hearsay; the story goes so far back there is no clear connection between those events and now. And so, the Pirahã were incapable of caring about Jesus or any creator. In fact, the Pirahã were so staunch in their belief, or lack of belief in Jesus, that they not only refused to be converted, but they eventually convinced Everett to reject Jesus Christ and Christianity, divorcing his missionary Christian wife and leaving his kids in the process. Was it all because of grammar?

Proponents of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis might say “yes.” (Or “oui” or “sí” or maybe כֵּן.) The idea is that language shapes the way we think. There is a “strong” and a “weak” form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The strong form is called “linguistic determinism” and suggests that language determines what’s possible for someone to think. For example, linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf asserted that the Hopi had no conception of time because their language had no vocabulary or grammar for it. He based this on conversation…