Pirahă Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description

The Pirahă are an indigenous hunter-gatherer tribe of Amazonian Indians in Brazil who mainly live on the banks of the Maici River. They currently number about 200, which is sharply reduced from the numbers recorded in previous decades, and the culture is in danger of extinction.

The Pirahă speak the Pirahă language, which is very important to their culture and to their group identity. Members of the Pirahă actually can whistle their language, which is how its men communicate when hunting in the jungle. The culture and language each have several unique traits, which it has been argued are related. Among these:

• As far as the Piraha have related to researchers, their culture is concerned solely with matters that fall within direct personal experience, and thus there is no history beyond living memory.
• The language is claimed to have no relative clauses or grammatical recursion, but this is not clear. Its seven consonants and three vowels are the fewest known of any language.
• The culture has the simplest known kinship system, not tracking relations any more distant than biological siblings.
• The people do not count and the language does not have words for precise numbers. Researchers have made the claim that they are incapable of learning numeracy.
• The language is unwritten.
• It is suspected that the language's entire pronoun set, which is the simplest of any known language, was recently borrowed from one of the Tupi-Guarani languages, and that prior to that the language had no pronouns whatsoever.
• There is a disputed theory that the language has no colour terminology. There are no unanalyzable root words for color; the color words recorded are all compounds like bi3i1sai3, "blood-like".
• They have very little artwork. The artwork that is present, mostly necklaces and drawn stick-figures, is crude and used primarily to ward off evil spirits.

The Pirahă take short naps of 15 minutes to two hours through the day and night, and rarely sleep through the night. They often go hungry, not for want of food, but from a desire to be tigisái ("hard").

The Pirahă have not related to researchers any fiction or mythology.

Prof. Daniel L. Everett is the cognitive linguist who wrote the first Pirahă grammar.

See also

• Mundurukú

External link

• Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahă
• Article appearing in "The Globe and Mail"
• Guardian article: What happens when you can't count past four?
• The Pirahă people

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