CONTENTS

A Glimse Into The Fascinating World

p.1
Of Constructed Languages?
-Matt Cornett-

The Interpreter -John Colapinto-

p.2

English, loanword champion of the world!

p.17

-Britt Peterson-

How Many Languages

Is It Possible to Learn?

p.19

-By Ryan THE LINGUIST BLOGGER-

Conceptual metaphors in
Dark are the veils of death
by Candlemass
p.21
-Andriy Karamazov-

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

-Translations-

p.25

The Influence of Spanish on English

p.29

-Juilet EnglandEditorial Team

How I learned a language in 22 hours

-Joshua Foer-

p.32

Editor in Chief:
Jonathan Fleury
Layout Design & Graphics
Gabe Witmonger

Bibliography and Acknowledgements

Founders
Gabe Witmonger
Jonathan Fleury

A Glimse Into The Fascinating World

Of Constructed Languages

Although many of you will be familiar with

Esperanto perhaps the most widely spoken
constructed language a large number of others
have also been created. One of the first constructed
languages is Balaibalan. Developed in either the
14th or 15th century by kabbalistic mystics, the
aim was to recon
struct humanitys urlanguage
(what they felt would have been spoken by Adam
and Eve, preTower of Babel).
Similarly, linguists have attempted to re-construct
what they believe to have been much earlier
versions of modern-day spoken languages, such
as Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Afroasiatic, and
even Proto-Human, the speculative most recent
common ancestor of all world languages.
Several artificial languages have also been created
for entertainment purposes: Elvish (Lord of the
Rings), Klingon (Star Trek), Dothraki (Game of
Thrones), and Navi (Avatar) are just a few. Some
more practical applications of artificial languages
include helping us to better understand how
language affects the way we think. For instance,
in 1955 a man by the name of Dr. James Cooke
Brown began developing a language called Loglan
in order to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
The flag of Esperanto

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a principle which

holds that the language we speak determines or
affects both the way that we conceptualise the
world and our cognitive processes. Dr. Brown
thought that people would naturally think in a way
that was more logical if they were taught a language
whose grammar was entirely based on predicate
logic (Loglan). Whereas Dr. Browns plans for
the language may not have exactly panned out,
Logical Language enthusiasts predict that Loglan,
and other constructed languages like it, may play
an important role in computer translation and
interpretation of the natural languages that we all
speak every day.

Dr. James Cooke Brown

The day when computers are able to translate and

interpret natural language just as well as humans
do may not ever arrive with or without the help
of logical languages like Loglan. Luckily, theres
a very long list of very easy to learn, proposed
international auxiliary languages to choose from.
Charles Bliss Blissymbols might be an interesting
option; Interlingua, Volapk, and Toki Pona are a
few others, and, of course, theres always Esperanto.
Since no one can quite decide on which one of
these languages would best serve this purpose, let
alone take the time to teach everyone in the world
to speak it, the best and only proven solution to the
problem of language barriers is still an excellent
interpreter or translator.
1

The Interpreter
Has A Remote Amazonian Tribe Upended Our
Understanding Of Language?

One morning last July, in the rain forest of

northwestern Brazil, Dan Everett, an American
linguistics professor, and I stepped from the
pontoon of a Cessna floatplane onto the beach
bordering the Maici River, a narrow, sharply
meandering tributary of the Amazon. On the
bank above us were some thirty peopleshort,
dark-skinned men, women, and childrensome
clutching bows and arrows, others with infants on
their hips.
The people, members of a hunter-gatherer tribe
called the Pirah, responded to the sight of
Everetta solidly built man of fifty-five with a
red beard and the booming voice of a former
evangelical ministerwith a greeting that sounded
like a profusion of exotic songbirds, a melodic
chattering scarcely discernible, to the uninitiated,
as human speech. Unrelated to any other extant
tongue, and based on just eight consonants and
three vowels, Pirah has one of the simplest sound
systems known.
Yet it possesses such a complex array of tones,
stresses, and syllable lengths that its speakers
can dispense with their vowels and consonants
altogether and sing, hum, or whistle conversations.
It is a language so confounding to non-natives that

until Everett and his wife, Keren, arrived among the

Pirah, as Christian missionaries, in the nineteenseventies, no outsider had succeeded in mastering
it. Everett eventually abandoned Christianity, but
he and Keren have spent the past thirty years, on
and off, living with the tribe, and in that time they
have learned Pirah as no other Westerners have.
Xai hi gsai xigaihiabisaoaxi ti xabihai hiatihi
xigo hohi, Everett said in the tongues choppy
staccato, introducing me as someone who would
be staying for a short time in the village. The
men and women answered in an echoing chorus,
Xai hi go kaisigaih xapagiso.
Everett turned to me. They want to know what
youre called in crooked head.
Crooked head is the tribes term for any language
that is not Pirah, and it is a clear pejorative. The
Pirah consider all forms of human discourse
other than their own to be laughably inferior, and
they are unique among Amazonian peoples in
remaining monolingual. They playfully tossed my
name back and forth among themselves, altering
it slightly with each reiteration, until it became
an unrecognizable syllable. They never uttered it
again, but instead gave me a lilting Pirah name:
2

Kaaxoi, that of a Pirah man, from a village

downriver, whom they thought I resembled.
Thats completely consistent with my main thesis
about the tribe, Everett told me later. They reject
everything from outside their world. They just
dont want it, and its been that way since the day
the Brazilians first found them in this jungle in the
seventeen-hundreds.
Everett, who this past fall became the chairman
of the Department of Languages, Literature, and
Cultures at Illinois State University, has been
publishing academic books and papers on the
Pirah (pronounced pee-da-HAN) for more than
twenty-five years. But his work remained relatively
obscure until early in 2005, when he posted on his
Web site an article titled Cultural Constraints
on Grammar and Cognition in Pirah, which
was published that fall in the journal Cultural
Anthropology. The article described the extreme
simplicity of the tribes living conditions and
culture. The Pirah, Everett wrote, have no
numbers, no fixed color terms, no perfect tense,
no deep memory, no tradition of art or drawing,
and no words for all, each, every, most, or
fewterms of quantification believed by some
linguists to be among the common building blocks
of human cognition. Everetts most explosive
claim, however, was that Pirah displays no
evidence of recursion, a linguistic operation that
consists of inserting one phrase inside another
of the same type, as when a speaker combines
discrete thoughts (the man is walking down the
street, the man is wearing a top hat) into a single
sentence (The man who is wearing a top hat is
walking down the street). Noam Chomsky, the
influential linguistic theorist, has recently revised
his theory of universal grammar, arguing that
recursion is the cornerstone of all languages, and
is possible because of a uniquely human cognitive
ability.
Steven Pinker, the Harvard cognitive scientist, calls
Everetts paper a bomb thrown into the party. For
months, it was the subject of passionate debate on
social-science blogs and Listservs. Everett, once a
devotee of Chomskyan linguistics, insists not only
that Pirah is a severe counterexample to the
theory of universal grammar but also that it is not
an isolated case. I think one of the reasons that
we havent found other groups like this, Everett
said, is because weve been told, basically, that
its not possible. Some scholars were taken aback
by Everetts depiction of the Pirah as a people
of seemingly unparalleled linguistic and cultural
primitivism. I have to wonder whether hes some
Borgesian fantasist, or some Margaret Mead being
stitched up by the locals, one reader wrote in an
e-mail to the editors of a popular linguistics blog.

I had my own doubts about Everetts portrayal

of the Pirah shortly after I arrived in the village.
We were still unpacking when a Pirah boy,
who appeared to be about eleven years old, ran
out from the trees beside the river. Grinning, he
showed off a surprisingly accurate replica of the
floatplane we had just landed in. Carved from
balsa wood, the model was four feet long and
had a tapering fuselage, wings, and pontoons, as
well as propellers, which were affixed with small
pieces of wire so that the boy could spin the blades
with his finger. I asked Everett whether the model
contradicted his claim that the Pirah do not make
art. Everett barely glanced up. They make them
every time a plane arrives, he said. They dont
keep them around when there arent any planes.
Its a chain reaction, and someone else will do it,
but then eventually it will peter out. Sure enough,
I later saw the model lying broken and dirty in the
weeds beside the river. No one made another one
during the six days I spent in the village.
In the wake of the controversy that greeted his
paper, Everett encouraged scholars to come to the
Amazon and observe the Pirah for themselves.
The first person to take him up on the offer was
a forty-three-year-old American evolutionary
biologist named Tecumseh Fitch, who in 2002
co-authored an important paper with Chomsky
and Marc Hauser, an evolutionary psychologist
and biologist at Harvard, on recursion. Fitch and
his cousin Bill, a sommelier based in Paris, were
due to arrive by floatplane in the Pirah village a
couple of hours after Everett and I did. As the plane
landed on the water, the Pirah, who had gathered
at the river, began to cheer. The two men stepped
from the cockpit, Fitch toting a laptop computer
into which he had programmed a weeks worth of
linguistic experiments that he intended to perform
on the Pirah. They were quickly surrounded by
curious tribe members. The Fitch cousins, having
travelled widely together to remote parts of the
3

world, believed that they knew how to establish

an instant rapport with indigenous peoples. They
brought their cupped hands to their mouths and
blew loon calls back and forth. The Pirah looked
on stone-faced. Then Bill began to make a loud
popping sound by snapping a finger of one hand
against the opposite palm. The Pirah remained
impassive. The cousins shrugged sheepishly and
abandoned their efforts.
Usually you can hook people really easily by
doing these funny little things, Fitch said later.
But the Pirah kids werent buying it, and neither
were their parents. Everett snorted. Its not part of
their culture, he said. So theyre not interested.
A few weeks earlier, I had called Fitch in Scotland,
where he is a professor at the University of St.
Andrews. Im seeing this as an exploratory factfinding trip, he told me. I want to see with my
own eyes how much of this stuff that Dan is saying
seems to check out.

had changed completely, that I had stepped from

darkness into lightall the expressions you hear.
He stopped using drugs, and when he and Keren
were eighteen they married. A year later, the first
of their three children was born, and they began
preparing to become missionaries.
In 1976, after graduating with a degree in Foreign
Missions from the Moody Bible Institute of
Chicago, Everett enrolled with Keren in the
Summer Institute of Linguistics, known as S.I.L.,
an international evangelical organization that
seeks to spread Gods Word by translating the
Bible into the languages of preliterate societies.
They were sent to Chiapas, Mexico, where Keren
stayed in a hut in the jungle with the couples
childrenby this time, there were threewhile
Everett underwent gruelling field training. He
endured fifty-mile hikes and survived for several
days deep in the jungle with only matches, water, a
rope, a machete, and a flashlight.

Everett is known among linguistics experts for

orneriness and an impatience with academic
decorum. He was born into a working-class family
in Holtville, a town on the California-Mexico
border, where his hard-drinking father, Leonard,
worked variously as a bartender, a cowboy, and
a mechanic. I dont think we had a book in the
house, Everett said. To my dad, people who
taught at colleges and people who wore ties were
sissiesall of them. I suppose some of that is still
in me. Everetts chief exposure to intellectual life
was through his mother, a waitress, who died of
a brain aneurysm when Everett was eleven. She
brought home Readers Digest condensed books
and a set of medical encyclopedias, which Everett
attempted to memorise. In high school, he saw the
movie My Fair Lady and thought about becoming
a linguist, because, he later wrote, Henry Higginss
work attracted me intellectually, and because it
looked like phoneticians could get rich.

The couple were given lessons in translation

techniques, for which Everett proved to have a gift.
His friend Peter Gordon, a linguist at Columbia
University who has published a paper on the
absence of numbers in Pirah, says that Everett
regularly impresses academic audiences with a
demonstration in which he picks from among the
crowd a speaker of a language that he has never
heard. Within about twenty minutes, he can tell
you the basic structure of the language and how its
grammar works, Gordon said. He has incredible
breadth of knowledge, is really, really smart, knows
stuff inside out. Everetts talents were obvious
to the faculty at S.I.L., who for twenty years had
been trying to make progress in Pirah, with little
success. In October, 1977, at S.I.L.s invitation,
Everett, Keren, and their three small children
moved to Brazil, first to a city called Belm, to
learn Portuguese, and then, a year later, to a Pirah
village at the mouth of the Maici River. At that
time, we didnt know that Pirah was linguistically
so hard, Keren told me.

As a teen-ager, Everett played the guitar in rock

bands (his keyboardist later became an early
member of Iron Butterfly) and smoked pot and
dropped acid, until the summer of 1968, when he
met Keren Graham, another student at El Capitan
High School, in Lakeside. The daughter of Christian
missionaries, Keren was brought up among the
Satere people in northeastern Brazil. She invited
Everett to church and brought him home to meet
her family. They were loving and caring and had
all these groovy experiences in the Amazon,
Everett said. They supported me and told me how
great I was. This was just not what I was used to.
On October 4, 1968, at the age of seventeen, he
became a born-again Christian. I felt that my life

There are about three hundred and fifty Pirah

spread out in small villages along the Maici and
Marmelos Rivers. The village that I visited with
Everett was typical: seven huts made by propping
palm-frond roofs on top of four sticks. The huts
had dirt floors and no walls or furniture, except
for a raised platform of thin branches to sleep on.
These fragile dwellings, in which a family of three
or four might live, lined a path that wound through
low brush and grass near the riverbank. The
people keep few possessions in their hutspots
and pans, a machete, a knifeand make no tools
other than scraping implements (used for making
arrowheads), loosely woven palm-leaf bags, and
wood bows and arrows. Their only ornaments are
4

simple necklaces made from seeds, teeth, feathers,

beads, and soda-can pull-tabs, which they often get
from traders who barter with the Pirah for Brazil
nuts, wood, and sorva (a rubbery sap used to make
chewing gum), and which the tribe members wear
to ward off evil spirits.
Unlike other hunter-gatherer tribes of the Amazon,
the Pirah have resisted efforts by missionaries and
government agencies to teach them farming. They
maintain tiny, weed-infested patches of ground
a few steps into the forest, where they cultivate
scraggly manioc plants. The stuff thats growing
in this village was either planted by somebody
else or its what grows when you spit the seed out,
Everett said to me one morning as we walked
through the village. Subsisting almost entirely on
fish and game, which they catch and hunt daily, the
Pirah have ignored lessons in preserving meats by
salting or smoking, and they produce only enough
manioc flour to last a few days. (The Kawahiv,
another Amazonian tribe that Everett has studied,
make enough to last for months.) One of their few
concessions to modernity is their dress: the adult
men wear T-shirts and shorts that they get from
traders; the women wear plain cotton dresses that
they sew themselves.
For the first several years I was here, I was
disappointed that I hadnt gone to a colorful
group of people, Everett told me. I thought of
the people in the Xingu, who paint themselves and
use the lip plates and have the festivals. But then I
realised that this is the most intense culture that
I could ever have hoped to experience. This is a
culture thats invisible to the naked eye, but that is
incredibly powerful, the most powerful culture of
the Amazon. Nobody has resisted change like this
in the history of the Amazon, and maybe of the
world.
According to the best guess of archeologists, the
Pirah arrived in the Amazon between ten thousand
and forty thousand years ago, after bands of Homo
sapiens from Eurasia migrated to the Americas
over the Bering Strait. The Pirah were once part of
a larger Indian group called the Mura, but had split
from the main tribe by the time the Brazilians first
encountered the Mura, in 1714. The Mura went on
to learn Portuguese and to adopt Brazilian ways,
and their language is believed to be extinct. The
Pirah, however, retreated deep into the jungle. In
1921, the anthropologist Curt Nimuendaj spent
time among the Pirah and noted that they showed
little interest in the advantages of civilization and
displayed almost no signs of permanent contact
with civilised people.

S.I.L. first made contact with the Pirah nearly

fifty years ago, when a missionary couple, Arlo
and Vi Heinrichs, joined a settlement on the
Marmelos. The Heinrichses stayed for six and a
half years, struggling to become proficient in the
language. The phonemes (the sounds from which
words are constructed) were exceedingly difficult,
featuring nasal whines and sharp intakes of breath,
and sounds made by popping or flapping the lips.
Individual words were hard to learn, since the
Pirah habitually whittle nouns down to single
syllables. Also confounding was the tonal nature
of the language: the meanings of words depend
on changes in pitch. (The words for friend and
enemy differ only in the pitch of a single syllable.)
The Heinrichses task was further complicated
because Pirah, like a few other Amazonian
tongues, has male and female versions: the women
use one fewer consonant than the men do.
We struggled even getting to the place where we
felt comfortable with the beginning of a grammar,
Heinrichs told me. It was two years before he
attempted to translate a Bible story; he chose the
Prodigal Son from the Book of Luke. Heinrichs
read his halting translation to a Pirah male.
He kind of nodded and said, in his way, Thats
interesting, Heinrichs recalled. But there was
no spiritual understandingit had no emotional
impact. It was just a story. After suffering repeated
bouts of malaria, the couple were reassigned by
S.I.L. to administrative jobs in the city of Braslia,
and in 1967 they were replaced with Steve Sheldon
and his wife, Linda.
Sheldon earned a masters degree in linguistics
during the time he spent with the tribe, and he
was frustrated that Pirah refused to conform to
expected patternsas he and his wife complained
in workshops with S.I.L. consultants. We would
say, It just doesnt seem that theres any way that
it does X, Y, or Z, Sheldon recalled. And the
standard answersince this typically doesnt
happen in languageswas Well, it must be there,
just look a little harder. Sheldons anxiety over
his slow progress was acute. He began many
mornings by getting sick to his stomach. In 1977,
after spending ten years with the Pirah, he was
promoted to director of S.I.L. in Brazil and asked
the Everetts to take his place in the jungle.
Everett and his wife were welcomed by the
villagers, but it was months before they could
conduct a simple conversation in Pirah. There
are very few places in the world where you have
to learn a language with no language in common,
Everett told me. Its called a monolingual field
situation. He had been trained in the technique
by his teacher at S.I.L., the late Kenneth L. Pike,
a legendary field linguist and the chairman of
5

the linguistics department at the University of

Michigan. Pike, who created a method of language
analysis called tagmemics, taught Everett to start
with common nouns. You find out the word
for stick, Everett said. Then you try to get the
expression for two sticks, and for one stick drops
to the ground, two sticks drop to the ground.
You have to act everything out, to get some basic
notion of how the clause structure workswhere
the subject, verb, and object go.
The process is difficult, as I learned early in my
visit with the Pirah. One morning, while applying
bug repellent, I was watched by an older Pirah
man, who asked Everett what I was doing. Eager to
communicate with him in sign language, I pressed
together the thumb and index finger of my right
hand and weaved them through the air while
making a buzzing sound with my mouth. Then
I brought my fingers to my forearm and slapped
the spot where my fingers had alighted. The man
looked puzzled and said to Everett, He hit himself.
I tried againthis time making a more insistent
buzzing. The man said to Everett, A plane landed
on his arm. When Everett explained to him what
I was doing, the man studied me with a look of
pitying contempt, then turned away. Everett
laughed. You were trying to tell him something
about your general statethat bugs bother you,
he said. They never talk that way, and they could
never understand it. Bugs are a part of life.
O.K., I said. But Im surprised he didnt know I
was imitating an insect.
Think of how cultural that is, Everett said. The
movement of your hand. The sound. Even the way
we represent animals is cultural.
Everett had to bridge many such cultural gaps
in order to gain more than a superficial grasp
of the language. I went into the jungle, helped
them make fields, went fishing with them, he
said. You cannot become one of them, but
youve got to do as much as you can to feel and
absorb the language. The tribe, he maintains, has
no collective memory that extends back more
than one or two generations, and no original
creation myths. Marco Antonio Gonalves, an
anthropologist at the Federal University of Rio de
Janeiro, spent eighteen months with the Pirah in
the nineteen-eighties and wrote a dissertation on
the tribes beliefs. Gonalves, who spoke limited
Pirah, agrees that the tribe has no creation myths
but argues that few Amazonian tribes do. When
pressed about what existed before the Pirah and
the forest, Everett says, the tribespeople invariably
answer, It has always been this way.

Everett also learned that the Pirah have no fixed

words for colors, and instead use descriptive
phrases that change from one moment to the next.
So if you show them a red cup, theyre likely to
say, This looks like blood, Everett said. Or they
could say, This is like vrvcuma local berry that
they use to extract a red dye.
By the end of their first year, Dan Everett had a
working knowledge of Pirah. Keren tutored
herself by strapping a cassette recorder around
her waist and listening to audiotapes while she
performed domestic tasks. (The Everetts lived
in a thatch hut that was slightly larger and more
sophisticated than the huts of the Pirah; it had
walls and a storage room that could be locked.)
During the familys second year in the Amazon,
Keren and the Everetts eldest child, Shannon,
contracted malaria, and Keren lapsed into a coma.
Everett borrowed a boat from river traders and
trekked through the jungle for days to get her to
a hospital. As soon as she was discharged, Everett
returned to the village. (Keren recuperated in
Belm for several months before joining him.)
Christians who believe in the Bible believe that
it is their job to bring others the joy of salvation,
Everett said. Even if theyre murdered, beaten to
death, imprisonedthats what you do for God.
Until Everett arrived in the Amazon, his training
in linguistics had been limited to field techniques.
I wanted as little formal linguistic theory as
I could get by with, he told me. I wanted the
basic linguistic training to do a translation of the
New Testament. This changed when S.I.L. lost its
contract with the Brazilian government to work
in the Amazon. S.I.L. urged the Everetts to enroll
as graduate students at the State University of
Campinas (UNICAMP), in the state of So Paulo,
since the government would give them permission
to continue living on tribal lands only if they could
show that they were linguists intent on recording
an endangered language. At UNICAMP, in the fall
of 1978, Everett discovered Chomskys theories.
For me, it was another conversion experience, he
said.
In the late fifties, when Chomsky, then a young
professor at M.I.T., first began to attract notice,
behaviorism dominated the social sciences.
According to B. F. Skinner, children learn words
and grammar by being praised for correct usage,
much as lab animals learn to push a lever that
supplies them with food. In 1959, in a demolishing
review of Skinners book Verbal Behavior,
Chomsky wrote that the ability of children to
create grammatical sentences that they have never
heard before proves that learning to speak does
6

not depend on imitation, instruction, or rewards.

As he put it in his book Reflections on Language
(1975), To come to know a human language would
be an extraordinary intellectual achievement for a
creature not specifically designed to accomplish
this task.

hope they wont ask, Everett said. That was always

the first thing Chomsky would ask.
In 1988, Everett was hired by the University of
Pittsburgh. By then, Chomskys system of rules had
reached a state of complexity that even Chomsky
found too baroque, and he had begun to formulate
a simpler model for the principles underlying all
languages. Everett faithfully kept abreast of these
developments. Chomsky sent me all the papers
that he was working on, he said. I was like many of
the scholars, in that I made regular pilgrimages to
sit in Chomskys classes to collect the handouts and
to figure out exactly where the theory was today. At
the same time, Everett says that he was increasingly
troubled by the idiosyncrasies of Pirah. None
of it was addressed by Chomskyan linguistics, he
told me. Chomskys theory only allows you to talk
about properties that obtain of tree structures.

Chomsky hypothesised that a specific faculty for

language is encoded in the human brain at birth.
He described it as a language organ, which
is equipped with an immutable set of rulesa
universal grammarthat is shared by all languages,
regardless of how different they appear to be. The
language organ, Chomsky said, cannot be dissected
in the way that a liver or a heart can, but it can be
described through detailed analyses of the abstract
structures underlying language. By studying the
properties of natural languages, their structure,
organization, and use, Chomsky wrote, we may
hope to gain some understanding of the specific
characteristics of human intelligence. We may hope
to learn something about human nature.
In the early nineties, Everett began to reread the
work of linguists who had preceded Chomsky,
including that of Edward Sapir, an influential
Beginning in the nineteen-fifties, Chomskyans at Prussian-born scholar who died in 1939. A student
universities around the world engaged in formal of the anthropologist Franz Boas, Sapir had taught
analyses of language, breaking sentences down at Yale and studied the languages of dozens of
into ever more complex tree diagrams that showed tribes in the Americas. Sapir was fascinated by the
branching noun, verb, and prepositional phrases, role of culture in shaping languages, and although
and also X-bars, transformations, movements, he anticipated Chomskys preoccupation with
and deep structuresChomskys terms for some linguistic universals, he was more interested in the
of the elements that constitute the organizing variations that made each language unique. In his
principles of all language. Id been doing linguistics 1921 book, Language, Sapir stated that language
at a fairly low level of rigor, Everett said. As soon is an acquired skill, which varies as all creative
as you started reading Chomskys stuff, and the effort variesnot as consciously, perhaps, but
people most closely associated with Chomsky, nonetheless as truly as do the religions, the beliefs,
you realised this is a totally different levelthis is the customs, and the arts of different peoples.
actually something that looks like science. Everett Chomsky, however, believed that culture played
conceived his Ph.D. dissertation at UNICAMP as little role in the study of language, and that going to
a strict Chomskyan analysis of Pirah. Dividing far-flung places to record the arcane babel of nearhis time between So Paulo and the Pirah village, extinct tongues was a pointless exercise. Chomskys
where he collected data, Everett completed his thesis view had prevailed. Everett began to wonder if this
in 1983. Written in Portuguese and later published was an entirely good thing.
as a book in Brazil, The Pirah Language and the
Theory of Syntax was a highly technical discussion When I went back and read the stuff Sapir wrote
replete with Chomskyan tree diagrams. However, in the twenties, I just realised, hey, this really is a
Everett says that he was aware that Pirah contained tradition that we lost, Everett said. People believe
many linguistic anomalies that he could not fit into theyve actually studied a language when they have
Chomskys paradigm. I knew I was leaving out a given it a Chomskyan formalism. And you may
lot of stuff, Everett told me. But these gaps were have given us absolutely no insight whatsoever into
unexplainable to me.
that language as a separate language.
The dissertation earned Everett a fellowship from
the American Council of Learned Societies, and
a grant from the National Science Foundation
to spend the 1984-85 academic year as a visiting
fellow at M.I.T. Everett occupied an office next to
Chomskys; he found the famed professor brilliant
but withering. Whenever you try out a theory on
someone, theres always some question that you

Everett began to question the first principle of

Chomskyan linguistics: that infants could not learn
language if the principles of grammar had not
been pre-installed in the brain. Babies are bathed
in language from the moment they acquire the
capacity to hear in the womb, Everett reasoned,
and parents and caregivers expend great energy
teaching children how to say words and assemble
7

them into sentencesa process that lasts years.

Was it really true that language, as Chomsky
asserted, simply grows like any other body organ?
Everett did not deny the existence of a biological
endowment for languagehumans couldnt talk
if they did not possess the requisite neurological
architecture to do so. But, convinced that culture
plays a far greater role than Chomskys theory
accounted for, he decided that he needed to take
a radical rexamination of my whole approach to
the problem.
In 1998, after nine years as the chairman of
the linguistics department at the University of
Pittsburgh, Everett became embroiled in a dispute
with the new dean of the arts and sciences faculty.
Keren was completing a masters in linguistics at
the university and was being paid to work as a
teaching assistant in Everetts department. Everett
was accused of making improper payments to
Keren totalling some two thousand dollars, and
he was subjected to an audit. He was exonerated,
but the allegation of misconduct infuriated him.
Keren urged him to quit his job so that they could
return to the jungle and resume their work as
missionaries among the Pirah.
It had been more than a decade since Everett had
done any concerted missionary worka reflection
of his waning religious faith. As I read more and
I got into philosophy and met a lot of friends who
werent Christians, it became difficult for me to
sustain the belief structure in the supernatural, he
said. But he was inclined to return to the Amazon,
partly because he hoped to rekindle his faith, and
partly because he was disillusioned with the theory
that had been the foundation of his intellectual life
for two decades. I couldnt buy Chomskys world
view any longer, Everett told me, and I began to
feel that academics was a hollow and insignificant
way to spend ones life.
In the fall of 1999, Everett quit his job, and on
the banks of the Maici River he and Keren built a
two-room, eight-by-eight-metre, bug- and snakeproof house from fourteen tons of ironwood that
he had shipped in by boat. Everett equipped the
house with a gas stove, a generator-driven freezer,
a water-filtration system, a TV, and a DVD player.
After twenty years of living like a Pirah, Id had
it with roughing it, he said. He threw himself into
missionary work, translating the Book of Luke
into Pirah and reading it to tribe members. His
zeal soon dissipated, however. Convinced that
the Pirah assigned no spiritual meaning to the
Bible, Everett finally admitted that he did not,
either. He declared himself an atheist, and spent
his time tending house and studying linguistics. In
2000, on a trip to Porto Velho, a town about two
hundred miles from the village, he found a month-

old e-mail from a colleague at the University of

Manchester, inviting him to spend a year as a
research professor at the school. In 2002, Everett
was hired to a full-time position, and he and
Keren moved to England. Three years later, he and
Keren separated; she returned to Brazil, where she
divides her time between the Pirah village and
an apartment in Porto Velho. He moved back to
the United States last fall to begin the new job at
Illinois State. Today, Everett says that his three
years in the jungle were hardly time wasted. This
new beginning with the Pirah really was quite
liberating, he told me. Free from Chomskyan
constraints, I was able to imagine new relationships
between grammar and culture.
It is a matter of some vexation to Everett that the
first article on the Pirah to attract significant
attention was written not by him but by his
friend (and former colleague at the University of
Pittsburgh) Peter Gordon, now at Columbia, who
in 2004 published a paper in Science on the Pirahs
understanding of numbers. Gordon had visited
the tribe with Everett in the early nineties, after
Everett told him about the Pirahs limited one,
two, and many counting system. Other tribes,
in Australia, the South Sea Islands, Africa, and
the Amazon, have a one-two-many numerical
system, but with an important difference: they are
able to learn to count in another language. The
Pirah have never been able to do this, despite
concerted efforts by the Everetts to teach them to
count to ten in Portuguese.
During a two-month stay with the Pirah in
1992, Gordon ran several experiments with tribe
members. In one, he sat across from a Pirah
subject and placed in front of himself an array of
objectsnuts, AA batteriesand had the Pirah
match the array. The Pirah could perform the
task accurately when the array consisted of two
or three items, but their performance with larger
groupings was, Gordon later wrote, remarkably
poor. Gordon also showed subjects nuts, placed
them in a can, and withdrew them one at a time.
Each time he removed a nut, he asked the subject
whether there were any left in the can. The Pirah
answered correctly only with quantities of three
or fewer. Through these and other tests, Gordon
concluded that Everett was right: the people could
not perform tasks involving quantities greater than
three. Gordon ruled out mass retardation. Though
the Pirah do not allow marriage outside their
tribe, they have long kept their gene pool refreshed
by permitting women to sleep with outsiders.
Besides, Gordon said, if there was some kind
of Appalachian inbreeding or retardation going
on, youd see it in hairlines, facial features, motor
ability. It bleeds over. They dont show any of that.
8

Gordon surmised that the Pirah provided

support for a controversial hypothesis advanced
early in the last century by Benjamin Lee Whorf, a
student of Sapirs. Whorf argued that the words in
our vocabulary determine how we think. Since the
Pirah do not have words for numbers above two,
Gordon wrote, they have a limited ability to work
with quantities greater than that. Its language
affecting thought, Gordon told me. His paper,
Numerical Cognition Without Words: Evidence
from Amazonia, was enthusiastically taken up by
a coterie of neo-Whorfian linguists around the
world.
Everett did not share this enthusiasm; in the ten
years since he had introduced Gordon to the tribe,
he had determined that the Pirah have no fixed
numbers. The word that he had long taken to
mean one (hoi, on a falling tone) is used by the
Pirah to refer, more generally, to a small sise or
amount, and the word for two (hoi, on a rising
tone) is often used to mean a somewhat larger sise
or amount. Everett says that his earlier confusion
arose over whats known as the translation fallacy:
the conviction that a word in one language is
identical to a word in another, simply because, in
some instances, they overlap in meaning. Gordon
had mentioned the elastic boundaries of the words
for one and two in his paper, but in Everetts
opinion he had failed to explore the significance
of the phenomenon. (Gordon disagrees, and for a
brief period the two did not speak.)
Shortly after Gordons article appeared, Everett
began outlining a paper correcting what he
believed were Gordons errors. Its scope grew as
Everett concluded that the Pirahs lack of numerals
was part of a larger constellation of gaps. Over
the course of three weeks, Everett wrote what
would become his Cultural Anthropology article,
twenty-five thousand words in which he advanced
a novel explanation for the many mysteries that
had bedevilled him. Inspired by Sapirs cultural
approach to language, he hypothesised that the
tribe embodies a living-in-the-present ethos so
powerful that it has affected every aspect of the
peoples lives. Committed to an existence in which
only observable experience is real, the Pirah do
not think, or speak, in abstractionsand thus
do not use color terms, quantifiers, numbers, or
myths. Everett pointed to the word xibipo as a clue
to how the Pirah perceive reality solely according
to what exists within the boundaries of their direct
experiencewhich Everett defined as anything
that they can see and hear, or that someone living
has seen and heard.
When someone walks around a bend in the river,
the Pirah say that the person has not simply
gone away but xibipogone out of experience,

Everett said. They use the same phrase when a

candle flame flickers. The light goes in and out of
experience.
To Everett, the Pirahs unswerving dedication to
empirical realityhe called it the immediacy-ofexperience principleexplained their resistance
to Christianity, since the Pirah had always reacted
to stories about Christ by asking, Have you met
this man? Told that Christ died two thousand
years ago, the Pirah would react much as they
did to my using bug repellent. It explained their
failure to build up food stocks, since this required
planning for a future that did not yet exist; it
explained the failure of the boys model airplanes
to foster a tradition of sculpture-making, since the
models expressed only the momentary burst of
excitement that accompanied the sight of an actual
plane. It explained the Pirahs lack of original
stories about how they came into being, since this
was a conundrum buried in a past outside the
experience of parents and grandparents.
Everett was convinced that the Pirahs
immediacy-of-experience principle went further
still, extending its tentacles, as he put it, deep
into their core grammar, to that feature that
Chomsky claimed was present in all languages:
recursion. Chomsky and other experts use the
term to describe how we construct even the
simplest utterances. The girl jumped on the bed
is composed of a noun phrase (the girl), a verb
(jumped), and a prepositional phrase (on the
bed). In theory, as Chomsky has stressed, one
could continue to insert chunks of language inside
other chunks ad infinitum, thereby creating a
never-ending sentence (The man who is wearing
a top hat that is slightly crushed around the brim
although still perfectly elegant is walking down
the street that was recently resurfaced by a crew
of construction workers who tended to take coffee
breaks that were a little too long while eating a hot
dog that was . . .). Or one could create sentences
of never-ending variety. The capacity to generate
unlimited meaning by placing one thought inside
another is the crux of Chomskys theorywhat
he calls, quoting the early-nineteenth-century
German linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt, the
infinite use of finite means.
According to Everett, however, the Pirah do not
use recursion to insert phrases one inside another.
Instead, they state thoughts in discrete units.
When I asked Everett if the Pirah could say, in
their language, I saw the dog that was down by
the river get bitten by a snake, he said, No. They
would have to say, I saw the dog. The dog was at the
beach. A snake bit the dog. Everett explained that
because the Pirah accept as real only that which
they observe, their speech consists only of direct
9

assertions (The dog was at the beach), and he

maintains that embedded clauses (that was down
by the river) are not assertions but supporting,
quantifying, or qualifying informationin other
words, abstractions.
In his article, Everett argued that recursion is
primarily a cognitive, not a linguistic, trait. He
cited an influential 1962 article, The Architecture
of Complexity, by Herbert Simon, a Nobel Prisewinning economist, cognitive psychologist, and
computer scientist, who asserted that embedding
entities within like entities (in a recursive tree
structure of the type central to Chomskyan
linguistics) is simply how people naturally organise
information. Microsoft Word is organised by tree
structures, Everett said. You open up one folder
and that splits into two other things, and that splits
into two others. Thats a tree structure. Simon
argues that this is essential to the way humans
organise information and is found in all human
intelligence systems. If Simon is correct, there
doesnt need to be any specific linguistic principle
for this because its just general cognition. Or,
as Everett sometimes likes to put it: The ability
to put thoughts inside other thoughts is just the
way humans are, because were smarter than
other species. Everett says that the Pirah have
this cognitive trait but that it is absent from their
syntax because of cultural constraints.
Some scholars believe that Everetts claim that
the Pirah do not use recursion is tantamount
to calling them stupid. Stephen Levinson, the
neo-Whorfian director of the Language and
Cognition Group at the Max Planck Institute for
Psycholinguistics, in the Netherlands, excoriated
Everett in print for having made the Pirah sound
like the mindless bearers of an almost subhumanly
simple culture. Anna Wierzbicka, a linguist at the
Australian National University, was also troubled
by the paper, and told me, I think from the point
of view ofI dont knowhuman solidarity,
human rights, and so on, its really very important
to know that its a question that many people dont
dare to raise, whether we have the same cognitive
abilities or not, we humans.
Everett dismissed such criticisms, since he
expressly states in the article that the unusual
aspects of the Pirah are not a result of mental
deficiency. A Pirah child removed from the jungle
at birth and brought up in any city in the world,
he said, would have no trouble learning the local
tongue. Moreover, Everett pointed out, the Pirah
are supremely gifted in all the ways necessary to
insure their continued survival in the jungle: they
know the usefulness and location of all important
plants in their area; they understand the behavior

of local animals and how to catch and avoid them;

and they can walk into the jungle naked, with no
tools or weapons, and walk out three days later
with baskets of fruit, nuts, and small game. They
can out-survive anybody, any other Indian in this
region, he said. Theyre very intelligent people.
It never would occur to me that saying they lack
things that Levinson or Wierzbicka predict they
should have is calling them mindless idiots.
For Everett, the most important reaction to the
article was Chomskys. In an e-mail to Everett
last April, Chomsky rejected Everetts arguments
that the Pirahs lack of recursion is a strong
counterexample to his theory of universal
grammar, writing, UG is the true theory of the
genetic component that underlies acquisition
and use of language. He added that there is no
coherent alternative to UG. Chomsky declined
to be interviewed for this article, but referred me
to Pirah Exceptionality: A Reassessment, a
paper that was co-authored by David Pesetsky, a
colleague of Chomskys at M.I.T.; Andrew Nevins,
a linguist at Harvard; and Cilene Rodrigues, a
linguist at UNICAMP. In the paper, which was
posted last month on the Web site LingBuzz, a
repository of articles on Chomskyan generative
grammar, the authors used data from Everetts 1983
Ph.D. dissertation, as well as from a paper that he
published on Pirah in 1986, to refute his recent
claims about the languages unusual features
including the assertion that the Pirah do not use
recursion. The authors conceded that, even in
these early works, Everett had noted the absence of
certain recursive structures in Pirah. (The tribe,
Everett wrote in the early eighties, does not embed
possessives inside one another, as English speakers
do when they say, Toms uncles cars windshield
. . .). Nevertheless, they argued, Everetts early
data suggested that the Pirahs speech did contain
recursive operations.
The fact that Everett had collected the data
twenty-five years ago, when he was a devotee of
Chomskys theory, was irrelevant, Pesetsky told me
in an e-mail. At any rate, Pesetsky wrote, he and
his co-authors detected no sign of a particularly
Chomskyan perspective in the descriptive
portions of Everetts early writings, adding, For
the most part, those works are about facts, and the
categorizing of facts.
Everett, who two weeks ago posted a response to
Pesetsky and his co-authors on LingBuzz, says that
Chomskys theory necessarily colored his datagathering and analysis. Descriptive work apart
from theory does not exist, he told me. We ask
the questions that our theories tell us to ask. In
his response on LingBuzz, Everett addressed his
critics arguments point by point and disputed the
10

contention that his early work was more reliable

than his current research as a guide to Pirah.
I would find the opposite troublingi.e., that
a researcher never changed their mind or found
errors in their earlier work, he wrote. He added,
There are alternatives to Universal Grammar,
and the fact that NPRNevins, Pesetsky, and
Rodriguesinsist on characterizing the issue as
though there were no alternatives, although typical,
is either ignorant or purposely misleading.
In a comment on Everetts paper published in
Cultural Anthropology, Michael Tomasello, the
director of the Department of Developmental
and Comparative Psychology at the Max Planck
Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in
Leipzig, endorsed Everetts conclusions that culture
can shape core grammar. Because the Pirah talk
about different things [than we do], different
things get grammaticalised, he wrote, adding that
universal grammar was a good try, and it really
was not so implausible at the time it was proposed,
but since then we have learned a lot about many
different languages, and they simply do not fit one
universal cookie cutter.
Steven Pinker, the Harvard cognitive scientist, who
wrote admiringly about some of Chomskys ideas
in his 1994 best-seller, The Language Instinct,
told me, Theres a lot of strange stuff going on in
the Chomskyan program. Hes a guru, he makes
pronouncements that his disciples accept on faith
and that he doesnt feel compelled to defend in
the conventional scientific manner. Some of them
become accepted within his circle as Gods truth
without really being properly evaluated, and,
surprisingly for someone who talks about universal
grammar, he hasnt actually done the spadework of
seeing how it works in some weird little language
that they speak in New Guinea.
Pinker says that his own doubts about the
Chomskyan program increased in 2002, when
Marc Hauser, Chomsky, and Tecumseh Fitch
published their paper on recursion in Science.
The authors wrote that the distinctive feature of
the human faculty of language, narrowly defined,
is recursion. Dogs, starlings, whales, porpoises,
and chimpanzees all use vocally generated sounds
to communicate with other members of their
species, but none do so recursively, and thus none
can produce complex utterances of infinitely
varied meaning. Recursion had always been an
important part of Chomskys theory, Pinker said.
But in Chomsky Mark II, or Mark III, or Mark
VII, he all of a sudden said that the only thing
unique to language is recursion. Its not just that
its the universal that has to be there; its the magic
ingredient that makes language possible.

In early 2005, Pinker and Ray Jacken-doff, a

linguistics professor at Tufts University, published
a critique of Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitchs paper in
the journal Cognition. In my paper with Ray, we
argue that if you just magically inject recursion into
a chimpanzee youre not going to get a human who
can put words together into phrases, label concepts
with words, name things that happened decades
ago or that may or may not happen decades in the
future, Pinker said. Theres more to language than
recursion. Pinker and Jackendoff, in a reference to
Everetts research, cited Pirah as an example of a
language that has phonology, morphology, syntax,
and sentences, but no recursion. Pinker, however,
was quick to tell me that the absence of recursion
in one of the more than six thousand known
languages is not enough to disprove Chomskys
ideas. If you had something that was present in
five thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine of the
languages, and someone found one language that
didnt have itwell, I think there may be some
anthropologists who would say, This shows that
theres no universals, that anything can happen,
he said. But, more likely, youd say, Well, whats
going on with that weird language?
Contemporary linguists have generally avoided
speculation about how humans acquired language
in the first place. Chomsky himself has long
demonstrated a lack of interest in language origins
and expressed doubt about Darwinian explanations.
It is perfectly safe to attribute this development
to natural selection, Chomsky has written, so
long as we realise that there is no substance to this
assertion, that it amounts to nothing more than a
belief that there is some naturalistic explanation for
these phenomena. Moreover, Chomskys theory of
universal grammar, which was widely understood
to portray language as a complex system that arose
fully formed in the brain, discouraged inquiry into
how language developed. This totally slams the
door on the question, Brent Berlin, a cognitive
anthropologist at the University of Georgia, told
me. It acts as if, in some inexplicable way, almost
mysteriously, language is hermetically sealed from
the conditions of life of the people who use it to
communicate. But this is not some kind of an
abstract, beautiful, mathematical, symbolic system
that is not related to real life.
Berlin believes that Pirah may provide a snapshot
of language at an earlier stage of syntactic
development. Thats what Dans work suggests,
Berlin said of Everetts paper. The plausible
scenarios that we can imagine are ones that would
suggest that early language looks something like
the kind of thing that Pirah looks like now.
Tecumseh Fitch, a tall, patrician man with long,
pointed sideburns and a boyishly enthusiastic
11

manner, owes his unusual first name to his ancestor,

the Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman.
Fitch attended Brown University and earned a
Ph.D. there. As a biologist with a special interest in
animal communication, Fitch discovered that red
deer possess a descended larynx, an anatomical
feature that scientists had previously believed
was unique to human beings and central to the
development of speech. (The descended larynx has
since been found in koalas, lions, tigers, jaguars,
and leopards.) Fitch, eager to understand how
humans acquired language, turned to linguistics
and was surprised to learn that Chomsky had
written little about the question. But in 1999 Fitch
happened to read an interview that Chomsky had
given to Spare Change News, a newspaper for the
homeless in Cambridge. I read it and all the stuff
he said about evolution was almost more than hes
ever said in any published thingand here it is
in Spare Change! Fitch said. And he just made
a few points that made me realise what hed been
getting at in a more enigmatic fashion in some of
his previous comments. Fitch invited Chomsky
to speak to a class that he was co-teaching at
Harvard on the evolution of language. Afterward,
they talked for several hours. A few months later,
Chomsky agreed to collaborate with Fitch and
Hauser on a paper that would attempt to pinpoint
the features of language which are unique to
humans and which allowed Homo sapiens to
develop language. The authors compared animal
and human communication, eliminating the
aspects of vocalization that are shared by both, and
concluded that one operation alone distinguished
human speech: recursion. In the course of working
on the article, Fitch grew sympathetic to Chomskys
ideas and became an articulate defender of the
theory of universal grammar.
When Fitch and Everett met in Porto Velho in
July, two days before heading into the jungle, they
seemed, by tacit agreement, to be avoiding talk of
Chomsky. But, on the eve of our departure, while
we were sitting by the pool at the Hotel Vila Rica,
Everett mentioned two professors who, he said,
were among the three most arrogant people Ive
met.
Whos the third? Fitch asked.
Noam, Everett said.
No! Fitch cried. Given his status in science,
Chomsky is the least arrogant man, the humblest
great man, Ive ever met.
Everett was having none of it. Noam Chomsky
thinks of himself as Aristotle! he declared. He has
dug a hole for linguistics that it will take decades
for the discipline to climb out of!

The men argued for the next two hours, though

by the time they parted for the night civility had
been restored, and the dtente was still holding
when they met in the Pirah village the next day
and agreed to begin experiments the following
morning.
At sunrise, a group of some twenty Pirah gathered
outside Everetts house. They were to be paid
for their work as experimental subjectswith
tobacco, cloth, farina, and machetes. And, believe
me, Everett said, thats the only reason theyre
here. They have no interest in what were doing.
Theyre hunter-gatherers, and they see us just like
fruit trees to gather from.
Fitch went out with Everett into the thick heat,
carrying his laptop. The two men, trailed by the
Pirah, followed a narrow path through the low
underbrush to Everetts office, a small hut, raised
off the ground on four-foot-high stilts, at the edge
of the jungle. Fitch placed his computer on the
desk and launched a program that he had spent
several weeks writing in preparation for this trip.
Fitchs experiments were based on the so-called
Chomsky hierarchy, a system for classifying
types of grammar, ranked in ascending order of
complexity. To test the Pirahs ability to learn
one of the simplest types of grammar, Fitch had
written a program in which grammatically correct
constructions were represented by a male voice
uttering one nonsense syllable (mi or doh or ga,
for instance), followed by a female voice uttering a
different nonsense syllable (lee or ta or gee). Correct
constructions would cause an animated monkey
head at the bottom of the computer screen to float
to a corner at the top of the screen after briefly
disappearing; incorrect constructions (anytime
one male syllable was followed by another male
syllable or more than one female syllable) would
make the monkey head float to the opposite corner.
Fitch set up a small digital movie camera behind
the laptop to film the Pirahs eye movements. In
the few seconds delay before the monkey head
floated to either corner of the screen, Fitch hoped
that he would be able to determine, from the
direction of the subjects unconscious glances, if
they were learning the grammar. The experiment,
using different stimuli, had been conducted with
undergraduates and monkeys, all of whom passed
the test. Fitch told me that he had little doubt that
the Pirah would pass. My expectation coming
in here is that theyre going to act just like my
Harvard undergrads, he said. Theyre going to
do exactly what every other human has done and
theyre going to get this basic pattern.
The Pirah are humanshumans can do this.
12

Fitch called for the first subject.

Everett stepped outside the hut and spoke to a short
muscular man with a bowl-shaped haircut and
heavily calloused bare feet. The man entered the
hut and sat down at the computer, which promptly
crashed. Fitch rebooted. It crashed again.
Its the humidity, Everett said.
Fitch finally got the computer working, but then
the video camera seised up.
Goddam Chomskyan, Everett said. Cant even
run an experiment.

But when theyre hunting they must have those

skills of visual anticipation, Fitch said.
Yeah, Everett said dryly. But this is not a real
monkey. He pointed at the grinning animated
head bobbing on the screen.
Fuck! Fitch said. If Id had a joystick for him
to hunt the monkey! He paced a little, then said,
The crazy thing is that this is already more realistic
than the experiments Aslin did with babies.
Look, Everett said, the cognitive issue here is
the cultural impediment to doing new things. He
doesnt know theres a pattern to recognise.

Eventually, Fitch got all the equipment running

smoothly and started the experiment. It quickly
became obvious that the Pirah man was simply
watching the floating monkey head and wasnt
responding to the audio cues.

Everett dismissed the man and asked another

Pirah to come into the hut. A young man appeared,
wearing a green-and-yellow 2002 Brazilian World
Cup shirt, and sat at the computer. Everett told
him to say whether the monkey was going to go
upriver or downriver.

It didnt look like he was doing premonitory

looking, Fitch said. Maybe ask him to point to
where he thinks the monkey is going to go.

Fitch ran the experiment. The man smiled and

pointed with his chin whenever the monkey head
came to rest.

They dont point, Everett said. Nor, he added, do

they have words for right and left. Instead, they
give directions in absolute terms, telling others to
head upriver or downriver, or to the forest
or away from the forest. Everett told the man
to say whether the monkey was going upriver or
downriver. The man said something in reply.

The other idea, Fitch said, is if we got a bunch of

the kids, and whoever points first gets a lollipop.

What did he say? Fitch asked.

He said, Monkeys go to the jungle.
Fitch grimaced in frustration. Well, hes not
guessing with his eyes, he said. Is there another
way he can indicate?
Everett again told the man to say whether the
monkey was going upriver or down. The man made
a noise of assent. Fitch resumed the experiment, but
the man simply waited until the monkey moved.
He followed it with his eyes, laughed admiringly
when it came to a stop, then announced whether it
had gone upriver or down.
After several minutes of this, Fitch said, on a rising
note of panic, If they fail in the recursion oneits
not recursion; Ive got to stop saying that. I mean
embedding. Because, I mean, if he cant get this
This is typical Pirah, Everett said soothingly.
This is new stuff, and they dont do new stuff.

Thats got an element of competition that they

wont go for, Everett said.
The computer crashed. Convinced that there was a
glitch in the software, Fitch picked up the machine
and carried it back to the main house to make
repairs.
This is typical of fieldwork in the Amazon, which
is why most people dont do it, Everett said. But
the problem here is not cognitive; its cultural. He
gestured toward the Pirah man at the table. Just
because were sitting in the same room doesnt
mean were sitting in the same century.
By the next morning, Fitch had debugged his
software, but other difficulties persisted. One
subject, a man in blue nylon running shorts,
ignored instructions to listen to the syllables and
asked questions about the monkey head: Is that
rubber? Does this monkey have a spouse? Is
it a man? Another man fell asleep mid-trial (the
villagers had been up all night riotously talking and
laughinga common occurrence for a people who
do not live by the clock). Meanwhile, efforts to get
subjects to focus were hampered by the other tribe
members, who had collected outside the hut and
held loud conversations that were audible through
the screened windows.
zteve Sheldon, Everetts predecessor in the Pirah
13

village, had told me of the challenges he faced in

the late sixties when he did research on behalf
of Brent Berlin and Paul Kay (an anthropologist
and linguist at the University of California at
Berkeley), who were collecting data about colors
from indigenous peoples. Sheldon had concluded
that the Pirah tribe has fixed color termsa view
duly enshrined in Berlin and Kays book Basic
Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution
(1969). Only later did Sheldon realise that his data
were unreliable. Told to question tribe members
in isolation, Sheldon had been unable to do so
because the tribe refused to be split up; members
had eavesdropped on Sheldons interviews and
collaborated on answers. Their attitude was Who
cares what the color is? Sheldon told me. But
well give him something because thats what he
wants. (Today, Sheldon endorses Everetts claim
that the tribe has no fixed color terms.)

of male syllables followed by an equal number

of female syllables. Hauser, Chomsky, and Fitch,
in their 2002 paper, had stated that a phrasestructure grammar, which makes greater demands
on memory and pattern recognition, represents
the minimum foundation necessary for human
language.

Sheldon said that the Pirahs obstructionist

approach to researchers is a defensive gesture.
They have been made fun of by outsiders because
they do things differently, Sheldon told me. With
researchers who dont speak their language, they
make fun, giving really bad information, totally
wrong information sometimes.

The girl gazed at the screen and listened as the

HAL-like computer voices flatly intoned the
meaningless syllables. Fitch peered at the cameras
viewfinder screen, trying to discern whether the
girls eye movements indicated that she understood
the grammar. It was impossible to say. Fitch
would have to take the footage back to Scotland,
where it would be vetted by an impartial post-doc
volunteer, who would score the images on a time
line carefully synchronised to the soundtrack of the
spoken syllables, so that Fitch could say without a
doubt whether the subjects eyes had anticipated
the monkey head, or merely followed it. (Last
week, Fitch said that the data look promising,
but he declined to elaborate, pending publication
of his results.)

On the third day, Fitch had figured out that he was

being hindered by some of the same problems that
Sheldon had faced. That morning, he tacked up
bedsheets over the window screens and demanded
that the tribe remain at a distance from the hut.
(Several yards away, Fitchs cousin, Bill, entertained
the group by playing Charlie Parker tunes on
his iPod.) Immediately, the testing went better.
One Pirah man seemed to make anticipatory
eye movements, although it was difficult to tell,
because his eyes were hard to make out under the
puffy lids, a feature typical of the mens faces. Fitch
tried the experiment on a young woman with large,
dark irises, but it was not clear that her few correct
glances were anything but coincidental. Lot of
random looks, Everett muttered. Its not obvious
that theyre getting it either way, Fitch said.
On the fourth day, Fitch seemed to hit pay dirt.
The subject was a girl of perhaps sixteen. Focussed,
alert, and calm, she seemed to grasp the grammar,
her eyes moving to the correct corner of the
screen in advance of the monkeys head. Fitch was
delighted, and perhaps relieved; before coming to
the Amazon, he had told me that the failure of a
Pirah to perform this task would be tantamount
to discovering a Sasquatch.
Fitch decided to test the girl on a higher level
of the Chomsky hierarchy, a phrase-structure
grammar. He had devised a program in which
correct constructions consisted of any number

Fitch performed several practice trials with the

girl to teach her the grammar. Then he and Everett
stepped back to watch. If this is working, Fitch
said, we could try to get N.S.F. money. This could
be bigeven for psychology.
At the mention of psychologya discipline that
often emphasises the influence of environment on
behavior and thus is at a remove from Chomskys
naturismEverett laughed. Now hes beginning
to see it my way! he said.

That evening, Everett invited the Pirah to come to

his home to watch a movie: Peter Jacksons remake
of King Kong. (Everett had discovered that the
tribe loves movies that feature animals.) After
nightfall, to the grinding sound of the generator, a
crowd of thirty or so Pirah assembled on benches
and on the wooden floor of Everetts Indian
room, a screened-off section of his house where
he confines the Pirah, owing to their tendency
to spit on the floor. Everett had made popcorn,
which he distributed in a large bowl. Then he
started the movie, clicking ahead to the scene in
which Naomi Watts, reprising Fay Wrays role,
is offered as a sacrifice by the tribal people of an
unspecified South Seas island. The Pirah shouted
with delight, fear, laughter, and surpriseand
when Kong himself arrived, smashing through the
palm trees, pandemonium ensued. Small children,
who had been sitting close to the screen, jumped
up and scurried into their mothers laps; the adults
laughed and yelled at the screen.
If Fitchs experiments were inconclusive on the
14

subject of whether Chomskys universal grammar

applied to the Pirah, Jacksons movie left no
question about the universality of Hollywood
film grammar. As Kong battled raptors and Watts
dodged giant insects, the Pirah offered a running
commentary, which Everett translated: Now hes
going to fall! Hes tired! Shes running! Look.
A centipede! Nor were the Pirah in any doubt
about what was being communicated in the long,
lingering looks that passed between gorilla and
girl. She is his spouse, one Pirah said. Yet in their
reaction to the movie Everett also saw proof of his
theory about the tribe. Theyre not generalizing
about the character of giant apes, he pointed out.
Theyre reacting to the immediate action on the
screen with direct assertions about what they see.
In Fitchs final two days of experiments, he failed
to find another subject as promising as the sixteenyear-old girl. But he was satisfied with what he had
been able to accomplish in six days in the jungle.
I think Dans is an interesting and valid additional
approach to add to the arsenal, Fitch told me after
we had flown back to Porto Velho and were sitting
beside the pool at the Hotel Vila Rica. I think you
need to look at something as complex as language
from lots of different angles, and I think the angle
hes arguing is interesting and deserves more work,
more research. But as far as the Pirah disproving
universal grammar? I dont think anything I could
have seen out there would have convinced me that
that was ever anything other than just the wrong
way to frame the problem.
On my final night in Brazil, I met Keren Everett,
in the gloomy lobby of the hotel. At fifty-five,
she is an ageless, elfin woman with large dark
eyes and waist-length hair pulled back from her
face. She is trained in formal linguistics, but her
primary interest in the Pirah remains missionary.
In keeping with the tenets of S.I.L., she does not
proselytise or actively attempt to convert them; it
is enough, S.I.L. believes, to translate the Bible into
the tribal tongue. Keren insists that she does not
know the language well yet. I still havent cracked
it, she said, adding that she thought she was
beginning to feel it for the first time, after twentyfive years.
The key to learning the language is the tribes
singing, Keren said: the way that the group can
drop consonants and vowels altogether and
communicate purely by variations in pitch, stress,
and rhythmwhat linguists call prosody. I was
reminded of an evening in the village when I had
heard someone singing a clutch of haunting notes
on a rising, then falling scale. The voice repeated
the pattern over and over, without variation, for
more than half an hour. I crept up to the edge
of one of the Pirah huts and saw that it was a

woman, winding raw cotton onto a spool, and

intoning this extraordinary series of notes that
sounded like a muted horn. A toddler played at
her feet. I asked Everett about this, and he said
something vague about how tribe members sing
their dreams. But when I described the scene to
Keren she grew animated and explained that this
is how the Pirah teach their children to speak.
The toddler was absorbing the lesson in prosody
through endless repetitionan example, one
might argue, of Edward Sapirs cultural theory of
language acquisition at work.
This language uses prosody much more than any
other language I know of, Keren told me. Its not
the kind of thing that you can write, and capture,
and go back to; you have to watch, and you have to
feel it. Its like someone singing a song. You want to
watch and listen and try to sing along with them.
So I started doing that, and I began noticing things
that I never transcribed, and things I never picked
up when I listened to a tape of them, and part of it
was the performance. So at that point I said, Put
the tape recorders and notebooks away, focus on
the person, watch them. They give a lot of things
using prosody that you never would have found
otherwise. This has never been documented in
any language I know. Aspects of Pirah that had
long confounded Keren became clear, she said. I
realised, Oh! Thats what the subject-verb looks
like, thats what the pieces of the clause and the
time phrase and the object and the other phrases
feel like. That was the beginning of a breakthrough
for me. I wont say that Ive broken it until I can
creatively use the verbal structureand I cant do
it yet.
Keren says that Everetts frustration at realizing that
they would have to start all over again with the
language ultimately led to his decision to leave the
Amazon in 2002 and return to academia. He was
diligent and he was trying to use his perspective
and his training, and I watched the last year that
we were together in the villagehe just was, like,
This is it. Im out of here. That was the year I started
singing, and he said, Damn it if Im going to learn
to sing this language! And he was out. Its torment.
It is tormenting when you have a good mind and
you cant crack it. I said, I dont care, were missing
something. Weve got to look at it from a different
perspective. Keren shook her head. Pirah has
just always been out there defying every linguist
thats gone out there, because you cant start at the
segment level and go on. Youre not going to find
out anything, because they really can communicate
without the syllables.

15

Later that day, when Everett drove me to the airport in Porto Velho, I told him about
my conversation with Keren. He sighed. Keren has made tremendous progress, and
Im sure she knows more about musical speech than I do at this point, he said. Theres
probably several areas of Pirah where her factual knowledge exceeds mine. But its not all
the prosody. Thats the thing. Kerens perspective on Pirah derives from her missionary
impulses, he said. It would be impossible for her to believe that we know the language,
because that would mean that the Word of God doesnt work.
Everett pulled into the airport parking lot. It was clear that talking about Keren caused
him considerable pain. He did not want our conversation to end on a quarrel with her. He
reminded me that his disagreement is with Chomsky.
A lot of peoples view of Chomsky is of the person in the lead on the jungle path, Everett
had told me in the Pirah village. And if anybodys likely to find the way home its him. So
they want to stay as close behind him as possible. Other people say, Fuck that, Im going to
get on the river and take my canoe.

16

Its a common experience for English speakers

abroad: suddenly recognizing a familiar word in
a newspaper, or on a billboard, or in a fragment
of conversation. Since World War II, English has
become by far the leading exporter of loanwords,
as theyre known, including nearly universal terms
like OK, Internet, and hamburger. The extent
to which a language loans words is a measure of
its prestige, said Martin Haspelmath, a linguist at
the Max Planck Institute. English, clearly, is now
on top.
But that imbalance can build resentment. In
France, the secretary of the Academie Franaise
called last December for a reconquest of the
French language from loanwords; in China,
government-friendly papers printed screeds this
spring against Wi-Fi, VIP, and e-mail. Even
as many governments work to protect languages
from the spread of English, however, speakers
in those countries go blithely off to hot jooga,
meaning that official policy and the daily reality of
English may be very different things.

English,
loanword champion
of the world!
Its the number-one lender of words to
other languages- but not everyone wants
to borrow them...

There is nothing like visiting Finland to make

an English-speaker appreciate the value
of words borrowed from other languages.
Finnish, as I learned during a trip earlier this
month, is an agglutinative language, in which
parts of words stay distinct instead of fusing
together. This makes for very long words, like
kahdenneksikymmenenneksiyhdeksnneksi
(one way to say 29, according to my guidebook),
and considerable bewilderment for a visitor. To
me, it might as well have been Klingon, only with
more umlauts. Every now and then, though, a
light would shine through the darkness: Id catch
something like hot jooga or muffensi or grill
maisteri, and sigh with relief.

Linguistic loans can appear in a number of forms:

Some float on the surface of a language, while others
are more integrated. Because English and Japanese
have very different sound systems, for instance,
Japan often adapts words in ways that make them
nearly unrecognizable to English-speakers. berJapanese media franchise Pokmon actually takes
its name from English (pocket monster). Japans
puroresu is another abbreviated compound,
from professional wrestling; similarly, the
extra syllables required to pronounce English
consonants have given rise to purasuchikku
(plastic) and furai (fry). Then there are loans
where a word stays intact but the meaning shifts. A
smoking is French for a tuxedo, and a dressman
is a German male model. Chinese people say they
want to high when they want to have a (nondrug-related) good time.
Loanwords are fun to track, from the perspective
of the loaner. But if youre the borrower, there can
be a feeling of defeat, that youve relinquished
your own way of saying things. This has fed
linguistic purism: attempts to cleanse languages
of foreign influences, or resist them in the first
place. Sometimes purism peaks after a war or in
a post-colonial situation. South Korea tried to deJapanify its language after World War II; the Indian
and Pakistani governments tried to separate Hindi
and Urdu after their partition. A purist approach
can also be a smaller languages way of resisting
outside influence. In Iceland, the Icelandic
Language Institute preserves the countrys Vikingera language by cobbling together new terms from
indigenous roots. Some Native American groups
do the same to resist English.
17

Chinese is an imperial language that has always

loaned more than it borrowed. In the Max Planck
Institutes World Loanword Database, Mandarin
Chinese has the lowest percentage of borrowings
of all 41 languages studied, only 2 percent.
(English, with one of the highest, has 42 percent.)
In part because of the difficulty of translating
alphabet-based languages into Chinese characters,
its common to see what are called calques
nonphonetic literal translations like re gou
for hot dog or zhi zhu ren for Spiderman.
Despite (or because of) the vast appetite among
the Chinese for learning English as a foreign
language, Chinese ministers have recently cracked
down on loanwords. And yet Chinese people still
say baibai and sorry; e-mail is just a lot easier
than dianzi youjian, the official substitute.
When languages are full of borrowed words, its
often not by choice. Romany has many loans because
of a history of extreme marginalization. Japan has
a long tradition of cultural borrowing; it was also
occupied for years after World War II. Vietnam,
following centuries of successive occupations, has
a high rate of Chinese and French loans presaging
more recent English ones like canguru, according
to the Max Planck research. Other languages are
more deliberately open: According to research
by Anne-Line Graedler, an English professor at
Norways Hedmark University College, the Danes
are the most welcoming Scandinavian country to
loans.

Crystal, author of English as a Global Language,

has written about how Welsh-language purism
may be furthering an elitism that prevents younger
speakers from adopting the tongue. And its worth
noting that English owes much of its vitality to
its long history of borrowing from French, Latin,
Arabic, and pretty much any other language it met.
Loanwords...do alter [a languages] character
but is this a bad thing? Crystal told me. Imagine
English without French or Latin loanwords. No
Shakespeare, for a start.
When England became an empire, English began
borrowing less and became the prolific word
lender it is today, Haspelmath told me. If we
start borrowing againthe way Arabic stopped
exporting words to the rest of the world once its
empire crumbled and started borrowing more
from French and Englishwell know weve seen
the apex of our cultural influence. Until then, at
least well be able to find a hot yoga class just about
anywhere in the world.

Most languages fall somewhere in between the

extremes. Many European countries went through
a period of linguistic nationalism in the 19th
century and continue to regulate loans today.
The Language Council of Norway, for example,
has created official Norwegian spellings for
English loanwords since 1996although some,
like pbb (pub), were apparently rejected by the
Norwegian people. Finland, fairly open to loans,
has the Kielitoimisto, the Finnish Language Office,
which helps create neologisms like pehmel
(smoothie) and advises on how to adapt foreign
words into Finnish. Smaller European languages
like Czech, Slovenian, and Croatian (with its
dez, or jazz, and hardver), have traditionally
been more resistant than larger ones.
Its not hard to see why governments would seek
to defend their languages. But some linguists
think a staunch anti-English stance may be
counterproductive. Truly endangered languages
tend to be encroached on mostly by their dominant
geographic neighbors, says Selma Sonntag, a
political scientist at Humboldt State University who
studies language purist movements: The threat
isnt from English, its from whatever the official
language is within their area. Linguist David
18

How Many Languages Is It Possible to Learn?

After watching the Olympics and the amazing

feats of people like Michael Phelps it makes me
reconsider what is possible for people to achieve.
How fast can human beings swim; how fast can
we run; how much weight can we lift? Similarly, it
wouldnt be strange for any linguist to wonder how
many languages a human being could learn in the
course of a lifetime.
Its a Bigger Number than You Think
John Bowring was a British literary translator,
economist, politician and diplomat whose service
included being the fourth governor of Hong Kong.
He claimed that he knew 200 languages and that he
could speak 100 of them. Cardinal Joseph Caspar
Mezzofanti knew more than 70 languages and could
speak 38 without ever having left his homeland:
Italy. In our day, the Brazilian linguist Dr. Carlos do
Amaral Freire claims to know over 100 languages
and the Lebanese language instructor Ziad Fazah
claims 59. This article has information regarding
great hyperpolyglots of the past and this article
has information about the great polyglots that are
still with us. You may find these numbers hard to
believe but each one of these hyperpolyglots has
publications or video recordings that suggest that
their claims are true.
What Is Speaking a Language?
I used to naively think that this meant being able
to say anything in the foreign language and in your
own native language. That would mean that if you
couldnt explain how to change a carburetor, the
difference between socialism and communism or
the steps to buying a house in your target language,
without making any obvious grammatical or
pronunciation mistakes, then you couldnt really say
that you spoke it. That seems to be a bit demanding
since there are many monolinguals that have a hard
time doing that well in their own native language.

Even so, I get very annoyed with people who learn

a dozen phrases in five languages and try to pass
themselves off as cultured polyglots. I dont think
that we should claim to speak a language unless we
can at least deal with native speakers well enough
to say: Im sorry. What is a wiggetybunket? Ive
never heard that word before. and then be able to
understand the native speakers simple explanation.
We should also be able to pronounce words well
enough for native speakers to be able to understand
almost every word we say.
Lastly, we should have a good enough understanding
of the grammar/structure of the language to form
original sentences that are at least mostly correct. If
you have a higher level of proficiency then so much
the better. Qualifying the number of languages you
speak is always a good idea. Statements like, I speak
two fluently and am conversational in four others
or, I know four and have studied eight are good
examples of how to honestly portray your language
abilities.
Studying, Forgetting and Remembering
Bowring and Mezzofanti died over 200 years ago
but I have had the opportunity to personally deal
with Freire and Fazah, as well as with a few other
truly great linguists, and I imagine that the former
pair were something like the latter. First of all, both
Freire and Fazah have studied many languages that
they have had no occasion to use in decades. They
both admit that speaking them with no prior notice
would be very difficult. Freire describes these
languages as being deactivated. The curious thing
is that they both claim that they can reactivate these
languages after a few days of study. This means that
if you were to drop them in Istanbul tomorrow and
ask them to give a speech to an audience of locals
they would probably struggle greatly with the task.

19

If you were to give them a weeks notice they would probably receive praise for how
well they spoke Turkish.
How Many Languages Is It Possible to Have a High Level of Fluency In?
That is what many people would really like to know. How many languages can you
speak with near native fluency in and have an enormous vocabulary in? To date my
experience has taught me that this number has everything to do with your lifestyle.
If you have a life that not only gives you the opportunity but also necessitates that
or greatly benefits from knowing thirteen languages well then you will probably
speak thirteen languages well. If you have a very monolingual lifestyle then even
maintaining one other language will most likely be quite difficult.
Limitless Possibilities
What if you studied a new language until you were proficient in it and then switched
to another for ten years? Lets say youre not Mezzofanti and only became proficient in
four languages during that time. Then life happens and you dont touch the languages
for another ten years. Your languages will have become quite deactivated but as soon
as you choose to pick up an old book in one of them or spend more than a day or two
in a country that speaks that language you will find that it all starts to come back to
you. Will your time have been wasted all of those years ago? Only if being able to get
around in a foreign country without the help of a third party is not enjoyable for you;
only if reading good literature in its original form has no value; only if if learning
foreign languages is not enjoyable for you.
How many languages can humans learn? They learn as many as they have time to
study and practice. Scientists have yet to find any biological reason why everyone
cannot learn twenty languages or even one hundred. Linguists like Bowring,
Mezzofanti, Freire and Fazah suggest that our abilities are much greater than we
think. As it is with so many things in life, we often become our greatest limitation or
our greatest asset. Our attitudes, lifestyles, habits, practices, interests, hobbies, etc.
are what usually what determine what we can achieve much more than our physical
or mental capacity.

20

Conceptual metaphors in
Dark are the veils of death by Candlemass

Hi there! In this article we are headed to

Scandinavia Scandinavia to explore a Klondike of
death metaphors. Well, the title has already spilled
the beans. Sweden is in focus in October, the
country which gave us Bathory, At the Gates and
IKEA (among others). And although I really adore
several outputs by Quorthon (1984, 1988-1991),
I am going to analyse a song by another pillar of
Swedish metal. Candlemass is the star of the show
today with its Dark are the veils of death epic
(taken from the Nightfall LP, 1987).
No more intros. I do not like and never liked doom
metal, but the first four efforts by Candlemass
(1986-1988) take me into the state of delightful
bliss. Lets go straight to the lyrics:
Death is present the candle has burned out
the scythe is raised hes eager to reap
the extreme unction prepares for the last flight
but God knows where you will rest
Dark are the veils of death
To sail the seas of eternal damnation
to cross the desert of woe and despair
or drink the chalice of divine ambrosia
Your life will be put to the test
Dark are the veils of death
Enter the great adventure
just wait and see
Heaven or hell will call you
now when your spirit is free

Where can your salvation be

now when your spirit is free
where can your salvation be
now when your spirit is free
Fading light
disappearing light
tells you darkness is to come
Ancient rites
the death-mass itself
has never revealed where you will go
You will enter realms where angels fear to tread
open hidden doors within your mind
Sail with Charon sail into destiny
accept your death and make it to your own choice.
So, it will be a rather easy all-about-death read. Enjoy.
Seasons dont fear the reaper
The first five lines of the song are the richest in
death metaphors and we are going to spend some
time dealing with them, because spoiler alert
everything following after is the same stuff in a
different wrapping. So
Death is present the candle has burned out
the scythe is raised hes eager to reap
the extreme unction prepares for the last flight
but God knows where you will rest
Dark are the veils of death
21

Two metaphors are hidden in the opening line.

The first hides behind the words Death is
present. It is a personification of death through
the EVENTS ARE ACTIONS metaphor. Its
mechanics is easy: an agentless event (dying is an
event, for instance, unless you commit suicide)
may be seen as an action, thus presuming the
presence of an actor, the one who causes the event
to happen and embodies the property(ies) of the
event (event=action=actor). Give this thought a
minute and you will come up with tons of innocent
everyday expressions featuring the metaphor. For
instance, bad weather destroyed my weekend trip
(event bad weather, property changing the state
of affairs); time will take your sorrow away (event
time passing, property movement); this work
is killing me (event certain physical or mental
challenge, property causation of physical or
mental stress) etc. Notice that these three examples
of agentless events are reasoned in terms of actions
as if on behalf of a human being an actor whose
main attribute is the event property. Moreover,
the personification process, apart from providing
an actor with the event property(ies), also adds
human properties to actors (=events) nature.
This, together with the property of the event of
death, namely, that it suddenly happens to a living
person that he/she loses their life, allows using the
frame of an unexpected visit, for instance, when
reasoning about dying. Primitively put, the frame
goes as follows: a visitor is absent a second ago, but
then he/she suddenly pops up at your side and is
here now. Hence, we may say things like Death
came and took him or Death paid him a visit,
Death claimed his life and all kinds of other crazy
things which we rarely pay attention to.

best way: a candle burns, emitting both heat and

light. How is it possible that we can conceptualise
life and death in terms of a flame?
The experiential grounding for this very metaphor
is extremely simple. A living human being is
warm and a dead one is cold. Moreover, in order
to function properly, a human body needs warm
temperatures; we die, however, when exposed to
cold. Then, when it comes to the light part of the
metaphor, the majority of people are active during
the daytime, when it is light and warmer outside,
and, on the contrary, sleep during the nighttime,
when it is dark and colder. Plants need light to
survive; they die when left in the darkness. The
combination of these factors contributes to our
association of life with warmth and light, which
together constitute a concept of fire/flame. Hence
a strong, experientially based correlation between
life and fire/flame. Can you support the case with
your own examples? Any reference to darkness
when talking about death/underworld/evil, for
instance, has this metaphor (the LIGHT part
of it) as its core. Here is another one. Yesterday,
when I started typing this post, I listened to Epicus
Doomicus Metallicus by Candlemass. Remember
the Ashes to ashes and dust to dust from
Solitude? Thats it.

The last thing to note in this regard is a bit offtopic. There are cultural differences when it comes
to seeing the personified Death as male or female.
The cultural tradition I come from (Russian/
Ukrainian) conceptualises death as an old scary
female.

Line 2 the scythe is raised hes eager to reap

portrays death as a Reaper, which is arguably one
of the most famous of all personifications of death.
This metaphoric image is also deeply rooted in
our everyday experience and its logic is clear. It
derives from blending two metaphors: PEOPLE
ARE PLANTS and personification of death via
EVENTS ARE ACTIONS. The latter structures
the event of death as an action, brought about
by an agent (actor), thus personifying death. The
former reasons about peoples lives in terms of
the life cycles of the plants: a birth of a person is a
germination of a plant, a lifetime is a burgeoning
and an event of death is withering or harvesting
of a plant. Examples are abundant (He is a young
sprout; she is withering away; my wife is in full
bloom etc.). Harvesting has an inherent actor to
it: a reaper. Reapers scythe cuts the plants, thus
finishing their life cycles. Now think about humans
as plants and death naturally fills the place of the
reaper in the cross-domain mappings (from plants
to peoples stages of life).

The words the candle has burned out in the

opening line offer us another metaphor. This
one may seem to be innocent at the first glance;
however, there are three possible ways to explain it
as three related metaphors fit the utterance. These
are LIFE IS LIGHT (DEATH IS DARKNESS),
LIFE IS A FLAME, and LIFE IS FIRE. I go for
LIFE IS A FLAME as it seems to fit the case in the

The extreme unction prepares for the last flight

(Line 3) already contains a clear hint on the
metaphor, which shapes the line. It is DEATH
IS GOING TO A FINAL DESTINATION. This
metaphor is also a complex one. It obtains its
logic and form from two more specific metaphors:
DEATH IS DEPARTURE and STATES ARE
LOCATIONS. The former is a part of a triple

In our case present is synonymous to here,

hence the line says Death is here, right now,
evoking the frame of a visit, because it (death)
was away a second ago, but now it is here, present,
standing by your side. I hope the whole concept is
more or less clear.

22

metaphor complex in which BIRTH IS ARRIVAL

and LIFE IS BEING PRESENT HERE are the
first two constituents. These allow us to refer to
the dead as to those passed away or gone. The
latter STATES ARE LOCATIONS provides us
with the reasoning patterns from the domain of
locations when we describe the states: for instance,
staying out of trouble, getting into the trouble,
being in trouble, getting out of a trouble and
being out of trouble. Being dead is a final state for
a human, thus via metaphor a final location.
When death is conceptualised as a departure from
this life and going into the state of being dead,
which is a metaphoric final location and, hence,
final destination for a human, we get a metaphor
DEATH IS GOING TO A FINAL DESTINATION.
The way you departure may be, generally speaking,
anything the authors imagination can take him to
when writing a piece about death. In our song it
is a flight. Greek mythology imagined going to
the final destination as crossing Acheron in Hades
on Charons ferry. Nordic paganism saw death
as a departure as well, however there were four
different destinations (Valhalla, Folkvangr, Hel
and Helgafjell).
The extreme unction stands here for a dying
human. It is actually a rite of anointing with oil in
the Christian tradition.
Line 4 but God knows where you will rest
presents us yet with another new metaphor, namely,
DEATH IS REST. This one is coherent with other
similar death metaphors: DEATH IS NIGHT/
COLD/SLEEP/DARKNESS. What commonsense
correlation links the source and target domains
in this metaphor? Simple: it is the immobility of
a body when at rest and when dead. Moreover,
it is also a horizontal position of a human body,
because the most common way to rest is to take
a nap. I have been pointing out a lot that one of
the beauties of metaphor is the transfer of the
source domain properties, its reasoning logic and
qualities to the target domain via cross-domain
mappings, constituting conceptual metaphor.
As we shall see below, the source domain of rest
in this metaphor enriches the target domain of
death with certain details, allowing for creation of
interesting elaborations.
Finally, we reach line 5 of the text, which follows
the title of the song: dark are the veils of death.
Armed with the knowledge of metaphors from the
first four lines, you are able now to understand why
death may have veils and why they are black and
not, say, yellow or pink. Two metaphors are at work
here: personification of death as a woman, wearing
a veil, and DEATH IS DARKNESS (dark veils). In
addition, I would like to add that probably the
word dark also carries here a meaning of non-

transparent, thus resonating with the preceding

line but God knows where you will rest. Right,
you cannot know that and you cannot read it off
the face of death, because her veils are dark.
When half way through the
journey of our life
The metaphors start to repeat from here on. To make
an article readable at one go, I will restrain myself
from re-analyzing the same metaphors. They are
to be indicated without further explanation.
To sail the seas of eternal damnation
to cross the desert of woe and despair
or drink the chalice of divine ambrosia
Your life will be put to the test
Dark are the veils of death
Enter the great adventure
just wait and see
Heaven or hell will call you
now when your spirit is free
I used here the opening line of Divine Comedy as
a subchapter title. Dantes Inferno is full of detailed,
picturesque elaborations of death. To be more
precise, of the state of being dead. Elaboration is
a common poetic mode of thought which twists
a conceptual metaphor by unconventional filling
of its slots. For example, lines 6-8 above are all
based on the DEATH IS DEPARTURE metaphor.
The departure is, however, elaborated differently,
offering us pictures of various deaths:
it may be sailing the seas of damnation;
or it may be crossing of the desert woe and despair;
or it may be going to heaven after drinking divine
ambrosia (from Greek mythology: food/drink of
the gods, which grants immortality).
The same metaphor is echoed in line 11 (Enter
the great adventure) and together they all stand
in an anaphoric relation to line 13 Heaven or hell
will call you, as some of these departures will be to
hell and one, in case of ambrosia, to heaven.
In line 9 Your life will be put to the test life is
objectified through the ABSTRACT NOTIONS
ARE PHYSICAL OBJECTS metaphor. The logic
of this one is very straightforward: an abstract
concept acquires the properties of a physical object
and, thus, may be reasoned about in terms of a
physical object. It is this very conceptualization
that allows us to say all of the following and much
more: What do you want to do with your life? Take
your time; give it a thought or two etc.
Line 14 (now when your spirit is free) contains
yet another popular poetic metaphor, namely LIFE
IS BONDAGE (DEATH IS DELIVERANCE).
Human body can be conceived of as a container
23

for a soul/spirit, which leads its life inside of this container (a body is, actually,
a biological container; this embodied experience allows the container image
schema to be imposed on it via metaphor when reasoning abstractly). There is no
option for a soul/spirit to leave it, except for the body to die. Hence, a soul/spirit
is a metaphoric prisoner, serving a life term. Life imprisons in a body-jail, death
delivers from it. Hence the metaphor.
Where can your salvation be?
So far, we have covered almost all of the metaphors in the lyrics. Below are the last
lines of the song.
Where can your salvation be
now when your spirit is free
where can your salvation be
now when your spirit is free
Fading light
disappearing light
tells you darkness is to come
Ancient rites
the death-mass itself
has never revealed where you will go
You will enter realms where angels fear to tread
open hidden doors within your mind
Sail with Charon sail into destiny
accept your death and make it to your own choice.
From here on it goes as follows:
lines 16-18: DEATH IS DELIVERANCE
lines 19-21: LIFE IS LIGHT/DAYTIME, DEATH IS DARKNESS, personified death
line 24: DEATH IS DEPARTURE
lines 25-27: elaborated DEATH IS DEPARTURE
The last thing I would like to mention is a mind metaphor in line 26. I have never
encountered it. However, after giving it a thought I came up with the MIND IS
A CONTAINER. This is a higher-level metaphor, meaning that here it is further
specified to the level of a building: MIND IS A BUILDING. Think of it. We say
These thoughts left my mind; it just came to my mind; this idea dwells/resides in
my mind. In our case with doors, the source domain of the metaphor (building)
supplies the target domain (mind) with its certain properties. Thus, it is possible,
feasible and appropriate to say Open the doors within the mind or This research
is a window to the human mind, but probably not The walls of his mind are thin
or The roof of his mind is leaking. Why certain features are mapped and others
are not is a topic for a separate discussion.
Candlemass is a doom metal band with a cult status. The best out there in the realm
of doom if you ask me and, arguably, the first as well (not counting Black Sabbath).
Usually, I do not finish my articles with a downer, so, please, relax and cheer up
listening to this beautiful, mesmerizing music.
Best wishes, Andriy Karamazov.

andriykaramazov@gmail.com

24

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

-TranslationsI wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high oer vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
- William Wordsworth-

25

Andy Ayres Celinese

Elodain ainham elth nwym, coth iolbo
Afuir g-coln ar hwylboth, m teimon,
Clois gonwymig leios m pyrthoo
Ternaint: leira go soncwylot oloseg
Ders elen ar daisn d-tainot sen
Ar c mailwyno pybrn ar san.

Gabe Acosta - Awrta

W isma bavkidaf umlo
tjiro walarmar gaul Likaeu dul Mlilus,
u W Youmr sn Warbon dwaolo,
dul Warbon lel Fioseu,
we Baison, we Ituriku,
awilan dul izioln we ezfiltu

Olivier Simon Sambahsa

Io wiender mon kam uno nebh
quod uper dals ed clins hog swehbht
quando stayg io visim un horde
narcissen qua kwohk makht ex gold
nieb id lac ed ender ia drus,
floren qua id brise gentile-ye scuss.

Lorinda J. Taylor Shshi

shokrinot| kwiil| kum| thozi|
vi| faiswaio| apri| shpolmi| u| shkwaizami|
izot| glisil| shoteiot| utzizi| dano|
ki| hangri| shrazi|
oi| aogwaimi| aska| shseip|
adavamo| u| adayingo| da| zakaizi| ||

26

Lori Simpson - Kutimu

Nu re sonul fa, fa,
La-se ha lithiwisa,
Higo sudowit ke zhorowit...
Supena nu foko ha korat, ha korat
Zel Nisan folape
Me-zath ha wado-wi
Sudon tepet
Kun libosi tidal ke riol.
Lori Simpson Fulk dialect
I trekt lunlie all abut
An flit on hie oer pales an hills,
Pen all-a-unk I sa
A krat,
A hust, o guilden flauer-kilts;
Besite Th lauk beneate
Th tree Flutin an dankin
In th breese.

Marco Airaghi - ?angely

Dunedi lonol y qala:d
Fility hi:H werula: an halli:n
Wan ?ini:s se?ui karrad
Ki:ruda ennbil iliwi:n
Boirid enla:x, ni:thtarut
Felewil an deneshil oburaz

27

Dmitry Ivanov Lingwa de Planeta

Me wandi solem, wandi for
kom un badal kel floti trist.
Turan me vidi menga flor,
gro-mucho golda-ney narsis.
Sub baumes, bli akwa dlak
kun feng li dansi kadalok.
James William McCleary Khljha
Tfhuwoitt tyrntatser xhnir tymlu
Keis qywqnil tyrotlha xhnoe tntra
Keqoas tyrtlha khmrti pyepakh
Keis kla tsaruinxhuwlkha qtnokor pfho
Khlkhawotaxing trufhar
Keis khyarfha tnxhe qir pfhafha.

Alexander Schoemaker - Nyjsassesh

Y lyefe eensam as n blg
dee op heewger taaln n hggeln drif,
van y plts zaa nnen meanskemas,
nnen begster goalden poaskelyelns.
Nasten mar, nyem beawmen,
fladdernder n taansender innen breaz.

28

The Influence of Spanish on English

Spanish is one of the main Latin or Romance

languages, and as such, its influence and inflections
can be heard throughout the world. But its influence
on English is marked.
Words you Already Know

During the westward migration and growth of the

cattle trade in the US in the 1870s in the states and
territories which had been part of Mexico, namely
Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada,
Utah, Colorado, the settlers borrowed much from
Mexican Spanish.

You almost certainly know far more Spanish than

you think. Just think of how often words and
phrases like siesta, adios, maana attitude, hasta
la vista, baby, amigo, and even no way, Jos, are
bandied about, often in a jokey, slangy way.
Even our word orange ultimately comes from
the Spanish word naranja via Old French and
Sanskrit!

More Spanish words entered English following

the American acquisition of Puerto Rico after the
1898 Spanish-American War. But by then many
Spanish words were already a feature of everyday
American English idiom, and most contributions
had come from the Mexicans, since they lived in
large numbers in those territories which the United
States took over.

Influence on American English

Today this influence can be most obviously seen

in the number of words of Spanish origin which
American English, in particular, has borrowed English, particularly American English, has
much from Spanish. So many place names in the adopted. This is especially true of terms from Wild
States are words with Spanish origins Los Angeles, West films such as buckaroo, corral, gringo and
San Diego, Colorado and San Francisco.
so on.
History

Making Spanish-sounding Words

The Spanish influence on the English language was

especially important in the sixteenth century, when
Spain was a global military and political power,
and in conflict with Britain at the same time. This
gathered in momentum after the Spanish first
arrived in the Americas.

But, more than just words, Spanish has also made its
mark on English derivational morphology or the
way the meaning of words is changed by applying
derivations. (This is not something which can be
said of most other living languages.)

29

For example, the addition of -tera to make words No one language enjoys official recognition as such
like cafeteria betrays the Spanish origins of those in the States, but in places like California bilingual
words.
notices and documents, and Spanish is certainly
the most widely taught non-English language in
Even the addition of -aroo, which appeared in secondary schools.
1930s American English to make new, jokey words
like stinkaroo came from the word buckaroo When he was president, Bill Clinton established
which originally came from the Spanish word for a precedent of translating the State of the Union
cowboy, vaquero.
address and other presidential speeches into
Spanish, and official Spanish translations are
This slangy character can also be seen in the available online.
other ways in which American English uses bits
of Spanish to make new words. An example is the Controversy
use of esta to denote extra fanfare in words such as
Hallowesta (instead of Halloween.)
The controversial issues of language as part of
cultural rights and bilingual state government
Then there is the use of el and o (a common form of representation has caused socio-cultural friction
Spanish singular masculine noun) to make amusing between non-Hispanic Anglophones and Hispanic
versions of whatever word is being changed such citizens.
as el cheapo to mean a cheap product of some kind.
Equally, English-only movement seeks to establish
Still more recent is the use of ista, a Spanish suffix, English as the sole official language of the US.
in the English language. For example fashionista, Generally, they exert political public pressure
or Guardianista to describe a certain type of on Hispanophone immigrants to learn English
Guardian-reading, politically correct left-wing and speak it publicly. As universities, business,
liberal.
and the professions use English, there is much
social pressure to learn English for upward socioWhich all goes to show, love it or loathe it, the economic mobility.
influence of Spanish on the English language is
pronounced, and not to be underestimated.
Lets not forget that Spanish was first brought to
the US in 1513. Some 50 years later, the Spaniards
This takes us to the point, were after English, Spanish founded St Augustine in Florida, the oldest
is Americas most widely spoken language, making continuously occupied European settlement in the
the US the worlds second-largest Spanish speaking modern United States.
community. It is more widely spoken there than
French, Hawaiian and the indigenous languages Historically, the Spanish-speaking population
combined, and was the first European language to increased because of territorial annexation of lands
arrive in North America.
conquered earlier by the Spanish empire, and by
wars with Mexico and by land purchases, while in
The US is home to more than 45 million Hispanics, more modern times this population continues to
or 13.4% of the 2002 population. A survey carried grow.
out in 2007 showed that Spanish is the primary
language at home for some 34 million people aged Texas was part of the republic of Mexico in the
five or older.
nineteenth century, when Cuba and Puerto Rico
became US territories. In 1902, Cuba became
Where Youll Hear it Most
independent, while Puerto Rico became part of the
US commonwealth its Spanish-speaking people
Understandably, Spanish is especially prevalent in have US citizenship.
the states bordering Mexico California, Arizona,
New Mexico and Texas. Over half of the countrys Immigration
Spanish speakers have made their homes in
California, Texas and Florida.
Immigration to the United States of Spanishspeaking Cubans began because of Cubas political
Written Spanish in the US
instability after independence. There are now
around a million Cubans in the country.
Across the US, 500 newspapers and over 150
magazines are produced in Spanish, while corporate At the same time, many Puerto Ricans have migrated
America is increasingly selling itself through to New York, increasing the citys Spanish-speaking
Spanish-language advertising.
population.
30

As a consequence of former Spanish and, later, Mexican

sovereignty over lands that are now belong to America,
many places in the country, especially in the south west,
have Spanish names from Nevada to Colorado, from
Los Angeles to San Diego.
Spanish Words in American English
Likewise, the influence of Spanish can be seen in many
words familiar to the Wild West words like buckaroo,
ranch, corral and desperado.
The influence of English on American Spanish is very
important. In many Latino sub-cultures, it is fashionable
to variously mix Spanish and English, thereby producing
Spanglish, the name for the admixture of English words
and phrases to Spanish for effective communication.
The new generation of American Hispanics, while having
a good command of English, also want to preserve
knowing and using Spanish as a language on equal terms
to English.
Big in the US
Spanish has a long history in the United States and recent
immigration from Latin America has revitalised this,
so the language will remain hugely important in North
America.
With the birth rate high in much of the Spanish-speaking
world, it seems reasonable to expect this trend in the rise
of Spanish to continue. By the year 2050, almost half
of the US population could be Spanish speaking, for
example, and Hispanics represent the fastest growing
ethnic group in that country. This rising importance and
status of Spanish in the US is having a significant effect
on its spread world-wide, and, in particular, within the
English-speaking world. What will be the evolution of
these two languages? - only time can tell.

31

How I learned a language in 22 hours

What do you know about where I come from?

That was one of the first questions I ever asked Bosco
Mongousso, an Mbendjele pygmy who lives in the
sparsely populated Ndoki forest at the far northern
tip of the Republic of Congo. We were sitting on
logs around a fire one evening four years ago, eating
a dinner of smoked river fish and koko, a vitaminrich wild green harvested from the forest. Id come
to this hard-to-reach corner of the Congo basin
a spot at least 50km from the nearest village to
report a story for National Geographic magazine
about a population of chimpanzees who display the
most sophisticated tool-use ever observed among
non-humans.

Have you ever heard of the United States of

America? I asked Mongousso.

Mongousso, who makes his living, for the most part,

by hunting wildlife and gathering forest produce
such as nuts, fruits, mushrooms and leaves, had
teeth that had been chiselled to sharp points as a
child. He stood about 1.4m (4ft 7in) tall and had a
wide, wonderful grin that he exercised prolifically.
He considered my question carefully.

There was a brief moment this summer, a little

over a year after the publication of my first book,
Moonwalking With Einstein: The Art And Science
Of Remembering Everything, when I thought I
had finally put the subject of my memory into my
memory. No phone interview with an obscure
midwestern talk radio station or lunchtime lecture
in a corporate auditorium was going to prevent me
from finally moving on to another topic and starting
work on my next long-term project inspired by
my encounter with Mongousso about the worlds
last remaining hunter-gatherer societies and what
they can teach us.

He shook his head. No.

I didnt know where to begin. Well, the United
States is like a really big village on the other side
of the ocean, I told him. The translator conveyed
my explanation, and then had a back-and-forth
exchange with Mongousso.
What did he say? I asked.
He wanted to know, Whats the ocean?

I dont know. Its far away, he told me finally, through

a translator. According to UCL anthropologist
Jerome Lewis, the Mbendjele believe that the spirit
world is inhabited by people with white skin. For
them, the afterlife and Europe go by the same word,
putu. Amu dua putu is a common euphemism
for death literally, Hes gone to Europe. For me As part of my research, I had begun planning a
to have come all the way to the Ndoki forest was a series of logistically complicated trips that would
journey of potentially metaphysical dimensions.
take me back to the same remote region where I
had met Mongousso. My goal was to spend the

32

summer living in the forest with him and his fellow

Mbendjele pygmies. Its virtually impossible to find
pygmies in northern Congo who speak French,
much less English, and so in order to embed to the
degree I was hoping, I needed to learn Lingala, the
trade language that emerged in the 19th century
as the lingua franca of the Congo basin. Though it
is not the first language of the pygmies, Lingala is
universally spoken across northern Congo not
only by the pygmies, but by their Bantu neighbors
as well. Today, the language has about two million
native speakers in both the Congos and in parts of
Angola, and another seven million, including the
Mbendjele pygmies, who use it as a second tongue.

stop learning things because of a bunch of negative

feedback, such as worries about whether theyll
actually get anywhere, insecurities about their own
intelligence, and a sense of it being effortful. With
Memrise, were trying to invert that and create a
form of learning experience that is so fun, so secure,
so well directed and so mischievously effortless that
its more like a game something youd want to do
instead of watching TV.
I have never been particularly good with languages.
Despite a dozen years of Hebrew school and a
lifetime of praying in the language, Im ashamed
to admit that I still cant read an Israeli newspaper.
Besides English, the only language I speak with
any degree of fluency is Spanish, and that came
only after five years of intense classroom study and
more than half a dozen trips to Latin America. Still,
I was determined to master Lingala before leaving
for the Congo. And I had just under two and a half
months to do it. When I asked Ed if he thought it
would be possible to learn an entire language in
such a minuscule amount of time using Memrise,
his response was matter-of-fact: Itll be a cinch.

You might think that learning a language with so

many speakers would be an easy task in our global,
interconnected age. And yet when I went online
in search of Lingala resources, the only textbook
I could find was a US Foreign Service Institute
handbook printed in 1963 when central Africa
was still a front of the cold war and a scanned
copy of a 1,109-word Lingala-English dictionary.
Which is how I ended up getting drawn back into
the world of hard-core memorising that I had
written about in Moonwalking.
Memrise takes advantage of a couple of basic, wellestablished principles. The first is whats known
Readers of that book (or the extract that ran last as elaborative encoding. The more context and
year in this magazine) will remember the brilliant, meaning you can attach to a piece of information,
if slightly eccentric, British memory champion the likelier it is that youll be able to fish it out of
named Ed Cooke who took me under his wing and your memory at some point in the future. And the
taught me a set of ancient mnemonic techniques, more effort you put into creating the memory, the
developed in Greece around the fifth century more durable it will be. One of the best ways to
BC, that can be used to cram loads of random elaborate a memory is to try visually to imagine it
information into a skull in a relatively short amount in your minds eye. If you can link the sound of a
of time. Ed showed me how to use those ancient word to a picture representing its meaning, itll be
tricks to perform seemingly impossible feats, such far more memorable than simply learning the word
as memorising entire poems, strings of hundreds of by rote.
random numbers, and even the order of a shuffled
pack of playing cards in less than two minutes.
Memrise encourages you to create a mnemonic,
which it calls a mem, for every word you want
Since my book was published, Ed had moved on to learn. A mem could be a rhyme, an image, a
to other things and co-founded an online learning video or just a note about the words etymology,
company called Memrise with a Princeton University or something striking about its pronunciation. In
neuroscience PhD named Greg Detre. Their goal: the case of languages such as French and Chinese,
to take all of cognitive sciences knowhow about where there are thousands of people learning it at
what makes information memorable, and combine any one time, you can browse through a catalogue
it with all the knowhow from social gaming about of mems created by other members of the Memrise
what makes an activity fun and addictive, and community. This is especially fun for Chinese, where
develop a web app that can help anyone memorise users have uploaded videos of various logographic
anything from the names of obscure cheeses, to the characters morphing into cartoons of the words
members of the British cabinet, to the vocabulary of they represent.
an African language as efficiently and effectively
as possible. Since launching, the site has achieved As I was the only user trying to learn Lingala
a cult following among language enthusiasts and at the time, it was up to me to come up with my
picked up more than a quarter of a million users.
own mems for each word in the dictionary. This
required a good deal of work, but it was fun and
The idea of Memrise is to make learning properly engaging work. For example, engine is motele in
fun, Ed told me over coffee on a recent visit to Lingala. When I learned that word, I took a second
New York to meet with investors. Normally people to visualise a rusty engine revving in a motel room.

33

Its a specific motel room I stayed in once upon on

a time on a cross-country road trip the cheapest
room I ever paid to occupy. Twenty dollars a night,
as I recall, somewhere in central Nevada. I made an
effort to see, hear and even smell that oily machine
revving and rattling on the stained carpet floor. All
of those extra details are associational hooks that
will lead my mind back to motele the next time I
need to find the Lingala word for engine.
Likewise, for motema, which means heart, I
visualised a beating organ dripping blood on
a blinking and purring computer modem. To
remember that bondoki means gun, I saw James
Bond pointing a gun at Dr No, and saying, Okeydokey. If this all sounds a little silly, it is. But thats
also the point. Studies have confirmed what Cicero
and the other ancient writers on memory knew
well: the stranger the imagery, the more markedly
memorable.
Memrise is built to discourage cramming. Its easy
to spend five minutes learning vocabulary with the
app, but hard to spend 50. That is by design. One
of the best-demonstrated principles of memory
proven both in the controlled setting of the
laboratory and in studies conducted in the wilds
of the classroom is the value of whats known
as spaced repetition. Cognitive scientists have
known for more than a century that the best way
to secure memories for the long term is to impart
them in repeated sessions, distributed across time,
with other material interleaved in between. If you
want to make information stick, its best to learn it,
go away from it for a while, come back to it later,
leave it behind again, and once again return to it
to engage with it deeply across time. Our memories
naturally degrade, but each time you return to a
memory, you reactivate its neural network and help
to lock it in. The effect on retention of learning in
this manner is staggering. One study found that
students studying foreign language vocabulary can
get just as good long-term retention from having
learning sessions spaced out every two months as
from having twice as many learning sessions spaced
every two weeks. To put that another way: you can
learn the same material in half the total time if you
dont try to cram.
One of the great challenges of our age, in which the
tools of our productivity are also the tools of our
leisure, is to figure out how to make more useful
those moments of procrastination when were idling
in front of our computer screens. What if instead of
tabbing over to the web browser in search of some
nugget of gossip or news, or opening up a mindless
game such as Angry Birds, we could instead scratch
the itch by engaging in a meaningful activity, such
as learning a foreign language?

If five million people can be convinced to log into

Zyngas Facebook game Farmville each day to water
a virtual garden and literally watch the grass grow
on their computer screens, surely, Ed believes, there
must be a way to co-opt those same neural circuits
that reward mindless gaming to make learning
more addictive and enjoyable. Thats the great
ambition of Memrise, and it points towards a future
where were constantly learning in tiny chunks of
our downtime.
The secret of Zyngas success has been endless
iteration of its product through A/B testing. Show
two groups of users two slightly different versions of
the same game, and see which group sticks around
longer. Then change another variable and re-run
the experiment. Memrise is beginning to use the
same aggressive empirical testing to figure out not
just how to make learning appealing, but also how
to make it more effective. If it turns out that users
remember 0.5% better when words are shown in
one font versus another, or that their memories
are 2% more durable when prodded at 7am versus
11am, those changes will be logged in Memrises
servers and affect the next days updates to the
app. The software is beginning to act as a massively
distributed psychology experiment, discovering on
a daily basis how to optimise human memory.
In a nod to Farmville, Memrise refers to the words
youre trying to learn as seeds. Each time you revise
a given word, you water it in your greenhouse
until it has fully sprouted and been consolidated
in your long-term memory garden. When youve
been away from Memrise for too long, you receive
an email letting you know that the words youve
memorised have begun to wilt and need to be
watered.
Because Memrise knows what words you already
know plus exactly how well you know them
and what words you havent yet got a handle on,
its algorithm tests you only on the information just
at the edge of your knowledge and doesnt waste
time forcing you to overlearn memories that youve
already banked in your long-term garden.
My own pattern of using the app worked like this:
each morning there would be a message waiting
in my inbox, prodding me to water a few of my
memories that were in danger of wilting, and so
I would dutifully log in and spend a few minutes
revising words I had learned days or sometimes
weeks earlier. Sometime mid-morning, when I was
ready for my first break from work, Id log back in
and get a new bundle of seeds to start watering.
Two or three times after lunch, just after checking
email and Facebook, Id go back and do some more
watering of whichever plants Memrise told me
needed the most attention. All the while, I kept
34

a close eye on all the points I was accumulating, in return for little more than cigarettes or alcohol.
and took meaningless satisfaction in watching my The pygmies in turn put on a completely different
ranking among Memrise users inch up day by day. face among the village Bantu to whom they refer
as gorillas behind their backs than they do when
After two and a half months, Id not only planted theyre alone out in the forest. Even the presence
my way through the entire Lingala dictionary, but of an affable, urban, educated outsider such as
also watered all of my mems to the point where they my translator immediately caused the pygmies to
were secure in my long-term memory garden. You tighten up.
could pick any word in the dictionary and I could
translate it into Lingala. Still, even after memorising I followed Makoti out of the village and on to an
an entire dictionary, I was only the 2,305th highest- elephant trail, where we found a comfortable log on
ranked Memrise user.
which to sit, smoke a cigarette and talk in hushed
tones about relationships between the Bantu and
I asked Ed if one of his software engineers could the pygmies. Bantu, mondele, babendjele: makila
mine the data stored on Memrises servers and put ya ndenge moko The Bantu, the whites, the
together a report on how much time I ended up pygmies: we all have the same blood. He pinched
whiling away with the software. When the figures the skin of his forearm. Kasi, bayebi te, he told me.
were finally tallied, I had clocked 22 hours and 15 But they dont know that. He meant the Bantu.
minutes learning vocabulary on Memrise, spread
out over 10 weeks. The longest single uninterrupted This was my first conversation in Lingala without
burst that I spent learning was 20 minutes, and my a translator at my side. Even though I had to keep
average session lasted just four minutes. In other telling him, Malembe, malembe Slow down,
words, it took a little less than one full day, spread slow down I realised I was understanding quite
out over two and a half months, devoting bite-sised a bit of what he was telling me and that my drilling
chunks of time, to memorise the entire dictionary. with Memrise had given me a far better grounding
than I had thought possible.
But did it work?
It goes without saying that memorising the 1,000
It took me almost a week by plane, truck and ferry most common words in Lingala, French or Chinese
to get back to the Ndoki forest and Mongoussos is not going to make anyone a fluent speaker. That
village of Makao, the last small outpost on the would have been an unrealistic goal. But it turns
Motaba river before you reach the uninhabited out to be just enough vocabulary to let you hit the
wilderness of Nouabal-Ndoki National Park. For ground running once youre authentically immersed
several days, I was stuck 120km west of Makao in in a language. And, more importantly, that basic
a village called Bomassa, while I waited for a truck. vocabulary gives you a scaffolding to which you can
It was a frustrating experience, but it gave me an attach other words as you hear them. It also lays down
opportunity to begin to test my Lingala with the the raw data from which you can begin to detect
locals. On my third day in town, a pygmy named the patterns that define a languages grammar. As I
Makoti came to visit me early in the morning. I memorised words in Lingala, I started to notice that
couldnt tell within a decade in either direction there were relationships between them. The verb to
how old he was, but he had a long, intimidating work is kosala. The noun for work is mosala. A tool
scar down his left cheek and an intense demeanor. is esaleli. A workshop is an esalelo. At first, this was
Yo na ngai, totambola na zamba You and me, all white noise to me. But as I packed my memory
lets walk in the forest, he said. He pointed at me with more and more words, these connections
and pointed at himself, and then held his index and started to make sense and I began to notice the
middle finger together to suggest it should be just same grammatical formulas elsewhere and could
the two of us.
even pick them up in conversation. This sort of
pattern recognition happens organically over time
I had brought with me a translator from Brazzaville, when a child learns a language, but giving myself all
who spoke not only English, French and Lingala, the data points to work with at once certainly made
but also a little bit of Mbendjele and four other the job easier, and faster.
tribal languages to boot. Though he was helpful in
getting me settled, we quickly ran into a problem. Makoti, who had worked with European foresters,
The pygmies have a complicated relationship American primatologists and even for a brief spell
with their Bantu neighbours, one that in some with the UCL anthropologist Lewis, seemed to
ways resembles medieval serfdom. Pygmies are understand what I was after, and why I had come
relentlessly discriminated against by the Bantu, who such a long way to spend time with his family and
refer to them as subhuman and often refuse even friends. As he stubbed out the last ashes of his
to touch them. Each pygmy has an inherited Bantu cigarette, he suggested, in Lingala sentences that
proprietor for whom he does menial labour, often had to be repeated three or four times before I fully
35

grasped them, that I abandon my Bantu translator

and make him my assistant instead. It was a
tremendous, if perhaps unwarranted, statement of
confidence in my Lingala. Nakokende na ya na
Makao Ill come with you to Makao. It was only
a four-hour truck ride away, but the farthest hed
been from home in his entire life.
I told him, Omona, nayoka Lingala malamu mingi
te. Nasengeli kozala na mosalisi koloba Anglais
Look, I dont understand Lingala very well. I need
to have a helper who speaks English.
He shook his head. Te, te, oyoka malamu No,
no, you understand well.
Then a thought occurred to him, which I was
surprised it had taken him so long to express.
Wapi oyekolaka Lingala? Where did you learn
Lingala?
I thought about trying to tell him about the internet,
about my computer, about this web app developed
over in putu but once again I didnt know where
to begin. Instead, I held out my hand to shake his
and told him he should let his wife know that hed
be travelling with me to Makao. As for explaining
Memrise, that conversation would have to wait for
a little more fluency

Joshua Foer in the Republic of Congo

36

Bibliography and Acknowledgements

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Fascinating World
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Anthropology
andriykaramazov@gmail.com

English,
loanword champion
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English

By Britt Peterson -via:

http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/06/28/ By Juilet England -via:
e n g l i s h - l o a n w o r d - c h a m p i o n - w o r l d / http://www.howtolearnspanish.co.uk/influencespanish-english.html
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How Many Languages Is It How I learned a language in

Possible to Learn?
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possible-to-learn/

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