The Kingdom of Speech (10 page)

In his new role as an eminence, Chomsky hurled thunderbolts at malefactors down below, ceaselessly, at an astonishing rate…118 books, with titles such as
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
(coauthored by Edward S. Herman)…
Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance
…
Profit over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order
…
Failed States
(very much including the United States)
: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy
…an average of 2 books per year…271 articles, at a rate of 4.7 per year
120
…innumerable speaking engagements, which finally got him out of the building and onto airplanes and before podiums far away.

At the same time his output of linguistic papers continued apace, climaxing in 2002 with his and two colleagues' theory of recursion.
121
Recursion consists, he said, of putting one sentence, one thought, inside another in a series that, theoretically, could be endless. For example, a sentence such as “He assumed that now that her bulbs had burned out, he could shine and achieve the celebrity he had always longed for.” Tucked inside the one thought beginning “He assumed” are four more thoughts, tucked inside one another: “Her bulbs had burned out,” “He could shine,” “He could achieve celebrity,” and “He had always longed for celebrity.” So five thoughts, starting with “He assumed,” are folded and subfolded inside twenty-two words…
recursion
…On the face of it, the discovery of recursion was a historic achievement. Every language depended upon recursion—
every
language. Recursion was
the one capability
that distinguished human thought from all other forms of cognition…recursion accounted for man's dominance among all the animals on the globe.

Recursion!
…it was not just a theory, it was a
law!
—just like Newton's law of gravity. Objects didn't fall at one speed in most of the world…but slower in Australia and faster in the Canary Islands. Gravity was a
law
nothing could break. Likewise, recursion!…it was a newly discovered law of life on earth…
recursion!
…it was the sort of thing that could lift one up to a plateau on Olympus alongside Newton, Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, Einstein—Noam Chomsky.

By 2005, Noam Chomsky
was flying very high. In fact, very high barely says it. The man was…
in…orbit
. He had made over an entire field of study in his own likeness and put his name on it. If anybody brought up the subject of linguistics, two words inevitably followed: Noam Chomsky. After all, in 2002, so old (at seventy-three) he was already a professor emeritus, he had topped even himself. He had discovered and, as linguistics' reigning authority,
decreed
the Law of Recur—

OOOF!
—right into the solar plexus!—a twenty-five-thousand-word article in the August–October 2005 issue of
Current Anthropology
entitled “Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã,” by one Daniel L. Everett. Pirahã was apparently a language spoken by several hundred—estimates ranged from 250 to 500—members of a tribe, the Pirahã (pronounced Pee-da
a
-
hannh
), isolated deep within Brazil's vast Amazon basin (2,670,000 square miles, about 40 percent of South America's entire landmass). Ordinarily, Chomsky was bored brainless by all those tiny little languages that old-fashioned flycatchers like Everett were still bringing back from out in “the field.” But this article was an affront aimed straight at him, by name, harping on two points: first, this particular tiny language, Pirahã, had no recursion, none at all, immediately reducing Chomsky's
law
to just another feature found mainly in Western languages; and second, it was the Pirahã's own distinctive culture, their unique ways of living, that shaped the language—not any “language organ,” not any “universal grammar” or “deep structure” or “language acquisition device” that Chomsky said all languages had in common.

It was unbelievable, this attack!—because Chomsky remembered the author, Daniel L. Everett, very well. At least twenty years earlier, in the 1980s, Everett had been a visiting scholar at MIT after working toward an ScD in linguistics from Brazil's University of Campinas (Universidade Estadual de Campinas). He was a starstruck Chomskyite at the time.
b
He had an office right across the hall from Chomsky himself. In 1983 Everett received his doctorate from Campinas after writing his dissertation along devout Chomskyan lines, and he didn't stop there. In 1986 he rewrote the dissertation into a 126-page entry in the
Handbook of Amazonian Languages
.
122
It was very nearly an homage to Chomsky. Now that he had his ScD he took periodic breaks in his work with the Pirahã to teach at Campinas, at the University of Pittsburgh as chairman of the linguistics department, and at the University of Manchester in England, where he was professor of phonetics and phonology when he wrote his fateful paper on Pirahã's cultural restraint for
Current Anthropology
.
123

In his twenty-two years as an off-and-on faculty member, he had written three books and close to seventy articles for learnéd journals, most of them about his work with the Pirahã. But this was his first bombshell. It was one of the ten most cited articles in
Current Anthropology
's fifty-plus-year history.

The blast set off no
Ahahhs!
let alone
Ahuras!
within the field, however. Quite the opposite. Noam Chomsky and his Chomskyites
were
the field. Everett struck them as a born-again Alfred Russel Wallace, the clueless outsider who crashes the party of the big thinkers. Look at him! Everett was everything Chomsky wasn't: a rugged outdoorsman, a hard rider with a thatchy reddish beard and a head of thick thatchy reddish hair. He could have passed for a ranch hand or a West Virginia gas driller. But of course! He was an old-fashioned flycatcher inexplicably here in the midst of modern air-conditioned armchair linguists with their radiation-bluish computer-screen pallors and faux-manly open shirts. They never left the computer, much less the building. Not to mention Everett's personal background…he was from a too small, too remote, too hot—it averaged one hundred degrees from June to September and occasionally hit 115—too dusty, too out-of-it California town called Holtville, way down near the Mexican border. His father was a sometime cowboy and all-the-time souse and roustabout. He and Everett's mother had gotten married in their teens and broke up when Everett was not yet two years old. When he was eleven, his mother was in a restaurant staggering beneath a tray full of dirty dishes when she collapsed with a crash and died from an aneurysm.

His father returned from time to time and tried to do his best for his son. His “best” consisted of the lessons of life he taught him, such as taking the boy, who was fourteen at the time, to a Mexican whorehouse to lose his virginity…and then banging on the whore's door and yelling to his son, “Jesus H. Christ, what's keeping you?”…it being
his,
Dad's, turn next.
124

Helpless, hopeless, the boy went with the flow into the loose louche lysergic life of teenagers in the 1960s. He had just swallowed some LSD in a Methodist church—wondering what it would be like to experience acid zooms amid the curlicued decorations of the sanctuary—when he came upon a beautiful girl named Keren, about his age, with raven hair and ravishing lips. He fell so madly in love—what did it matter that she also had a willpower as blindingly bright and unbending as stainless steel?

She straightened him out very fast. She turned out to be a
real
Methodist. Her mother and father were missionaries. She made a convert out of Everett in no time. Like Everett's own parents, he and Keren got married in their late teens. Keren revved him up to an
evangelical
Methodist, and they resolved to head out into the world as missionaries, like Keren's parents. They underwent several years of intensive linguistic training at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, founded by a popular late-nineteenth-century evangelist, Dwight Moody, and the Summer Institute of Linguistics, headed by a later evangelical Christian, Ken Pike. These were tough, rigorous academies, with no fooling around. The Summer Institute's program gave advanced training in various tribal tongues and put the students through four months of survival training for life in the jungle, among other dangerous terrains. The purpose of the Moody Institute and the SIL, as the Summer Institute of Linguistics was called, was to produce missionaries who could convey to prospective converts the Word—the story of Jesus—in their own languages, anywhere on God's earth.
c

Everett had turned out to be such a remarkably adept student the SIL encouraged him to see what he could do with the Pirahã, a tribe that lived in isolation way up one of the Amazon's nearly fifteen thousand tributaries, the Maici River. Other missionaries had tried to convert the Pirahã but could never really learn their language, thanks to highly esoteric constructions in grammar, including meaningful glottal stops and shifts in tone, plus a version consisting solely of bird sounds and whistles…to fool their prey while out hunting.
125

It took three years, but Everett finally mastered it all, even the bird-word warbling, and became, so far as is known, the only outsider who ever did.
d
Pirahã was a version of the Mura tongue, which seemed to have vanished everywhere else.
126
The Pirahã were isolated geographically. They had no neighbors to threaten them…or change them. It dawned on Everett that he had come upon a people who had preserved a civilization virtually unchanged for thousands, godknew-how-many thousands, of years.

They spoke only in the present tense. They had virtually no conception of “the future” or “the past,” not even words for “tomorrow” and “yesterday,” just a word for “other day,” which could mean either one.
127
You couldn't call them Stone Age or Bronze Age or Iron Age or any of the Hard Ages because the Ages were all named after the tools prehistoric people made. The Pirahã made none. They were pre-toolers. They had no conception of making something today that they could use “other day,” meaning tomorrow in this case. As a result, they made no implements of stone or bone or anything else. They made no artifacts at all—with the exception of the bow and arrow and a scraping tool used to make the arrow. So far no one has been able to figure out how the bow and arrow—an artifact if there ever was one—became common to the Inuit (the new “politically correct” name for Eskimos) at the North Pole, the Chinese in East Asia, to the Indians—
er
—Native-born in North America, and the Pirahã in Brazil.

Occasionally some Pirahã would sling together crude baskets of twigs and leaves. But as soon as they delivered the contents, they'd throw the twigs and leaves away.
128
Likewise…housing. Only a few domiciles had reached the hut level. The rest were lean-tos of branches and leaves. Palm leaves made the best roofing—until the next strong wind blew the whole thing down. The Pirahã laughed and laughed and flung together another one…here in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
129

Pirahã was a language with only three vowels (
a, o, i
) and eight consonants (
p, t, b, g, s, h, k,
and
x,
which is the glottal stop). It was the smallest and leanest language known. The Pirahã were illiterate—not only lexically but also visually. Most could not figure out what they were looking at in two-tone, black-and-white photographs, even when they depicted familiar places and faces.
130
In the Pirahã, Everett could see that he had before him the early history of speech and visual deciphering and, miraculously, could study them alive, in the here and now. No such luck with mathematics, however. The Pirahã had none. They had no numbers, not even 1 and 2; only the loose notion of “a little” and “a lot.” Money was a mystery to them. They couldn't count and hadn't the vaguest idea of what counting was. Every night for eight months—at
their
request—Everett had tried to teach them numbers and counting. They had a suspicion that the Brazilian river traders, who arrived regularly on the Maici, were cheating them. A few young Pirahã seemed to be catching on. They were beginning to do to real mathematics. The elders sent them away as soon as they noticed. They couldn't stand children making them look bad. So much for math on the Maici. They had to continue paying the traders with vast quantities of Brazil nuts, which they gathered from the ground in the jungle. They were hunter-gatherers, as the phrase goes, but the hunting didn't do them much good in the river trade. They had no clue about smoking or curing meat.
131

Because they had little conception of “the past,” the Pirahã also had little conception of history. Everett ran into this problem when he tried to tell them about Jesus.

“How tall is he?” the Pirahã would ask.

Well, I don't really know, but—

“Does he have hair like you?,” meaning red hair.

I don't know what his hair was like, but—

The Pirahã lost interest in Jesus immediately. He was unreal to them. “Why does our friend Dan keep telling us these Crooked-Head stories?” The Pirahã spoke of themselves as the Straight Heads. Everybody else was a Crooked Head, including Everett and Keren—and how could a Crooked Head possibly improve the thinking of a Straight Head? After about a week of Jesus, one of the Pirahã, Kóhoi, said to Everett politely but firmly, “We like you, Dan, but don't tell us any more about this Jesus.” Everett paid attention to Kóhoi. Kóhoi had spent hours trying to teach him Pirahã. Neither Everett nor Keren ever converted a single Pirahã. Nobody else ever did, either.
132

The Pirahã had not only the simplest language on earth but also the simplest culture. They had no leaders, let alone any form of government. They had no social classes. They had no religion. They believed there were bad spirits in the world but had no conception of good ones. They had no rituals or ceremonies at all. They had no music or dance whatsoever. They had no words for colors. To indicate that something was red they would liken it to blood or some berry. They made no jewelry or other bodily ornaments. They did wear necklaces…lumpy asymmetric ones intended only to ward off bad spirits. Aesthetics played no part—not in dress, such as it was; not in hairstyles. In fact, the very notion of
style
was foreign to them.
133

Here, now, in the flesh, was the type of society that Chomsky considered ideal, namely,
anarchy,
a society perfectly free from all the ranking systems that stratified and stultified modern life. Well…here it is! Go take a look! If it left at some unlikely hour before dawn, you could catch an American Airlines flight from Logan International Airport, in Boston, to Brasília and from Brasília, a Cessna floatplane to the Maici River…you could see your dream,
anarchy,
walking…in the sunset.

Chomsky wasn't even tempted. For a start, it would mean leaving the building and going out into the abominable “field.” But mainly it would be a triumph for Everett and a humiliation for himself, headlined:

Chomsky never willingly mentioned Everett by name after that, nor did he expound upon the Amazon tribesmen everybody else in linguistics and anthropology was suddenly talking about. Chomsky didn't want to know. He didn't particularly want to hear about the Pirahã lore that so fascinated other people, such as the way they said good night, which was “Don't sleep—there are snakes.”

And there
were
snakes…anacondas thirty feet long and weighing five hundred pounds, often lurking near the banks in the shallows of the Maici, capable of coiling themselves around jaguars—and humans—and crushing them and swallowing them whole…lancehead pit vipers, whose bite injects a hemotoxin that immediately causes blood cells to disintegrate and burst, making it one of the deadliest snakes in the world…heavy-bodied tree boas that can descend from the branches above and suffocate human beings…plus various deadly amphibians, insects, and bats…black caimans, which are gigantic alligators up to twenty feet long with jaws capable of seizing monkeys, wild pigs, dogs, and now and again humans and forcing them under water to drown them and then, like anacondas, swallowing them whole…Brazilian wandering spiders, as they are called, if not
the
most venomous spiders on earth, close to it…golden poison dart frogs—
poisonous frogs!
—swollen with enough venom to kill ten humans…inch-long cone-nose assassin bugs, also known as kissing bugs because of their habit of biting humans on the face, transmitting Chagas' disease and causing about 12,500 deaths a year…nocturnal vampire bats that can drink human blood for as long as thirty minutes at a time while their human victims sleep.