Recursion And Human Thought: Why The Piranhã Don't Have Numbers
A Talk With Daniel L. Everett.
"As I look through the structure of the words and the structure of the sentences, it just becomes clear that they don't have recursion. If recursion is what Chomsky and Mark Hauser and Tecumseh Fitch have called 'the essential property of language', the essential building block--in fact they've gone so far as to claim that that might be all there really is to human language that makes it different from other kinds of systems--then, the fact that recursion is absent in a language --Pirahã-- means that this language is fundamentally different from their predictions."
Daniel L. Everett, a former evangelical Christian missionary to the Pirahãs in the Brazilian Amazon for more than 20 years, is Chair of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures and Professor of Linguistics and Anthropology at Illinois State University. Link
monochrom is an art-technology-philosophy group having its seat in Vienna and Zeta Draconis. monochrom is an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science, context hacking and political activism. Our mission is conducted everywhere, but first and foremost in culture-archeological digs into the seats (and pockets) of ideology and entertainment. monochrom has existed in this (and almost every other) form since 1993. [more]
