Grandpa Harley Posted January 20, 2008 Share Posted January 20, 2008 http://www.wunderkabinett.co.uk/damndata/i...raha-extra.html Read and enjoy! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pandora Posted January 21, 2008 Share Posted January 21, 2008 Heart-warming and fascinating. I certainly think he's on to something with his language theory. If only being embedded in a culture would deconvert all missionaries. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ouroboros Posted January 21, 2008 Share Posted January 21, 2008 I recommend the Poisonwood Bible. It's about the language barrier for missionaries and how it destroys the family. And the reason why they get totally desillusioned is from seing how language and culture is so different. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pitchu Posted January 21, 2008 Share Posted January 21, 2008 It's beautiful in and of itself, but anything which takes Chomsky down a peg makes me deliriously . Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Medjool Posted January 21, 2008 Share Posted January 21, 2008 Thanks so much for sharing this. I'm almost as passionate about linguistics as I am about the process of leaving religion, so this story has captivated me. I've found a very thorough article at edge.org that goes into the linguistics issues, as well as his personal faith experience. When I first started working with the Pirahã, I realized that I needed more linguistics if I was going to understand their language. When I began to tell them the stories from the Bible, they didn't have much of an impact. I wondered, was I telling the story incorrectly? Finally one Pirahã asked me one day, well, what color is Jesus? How tall is he? When did he tell you these things? And I said, well, you know, I've never seen him, I don't know what color he was, I don't know how tall he was. Well, if you have never seen him, why are you telling us this? I started thinking about what I had been doing all along, which was, give myself a social environment in which I could say things that I really didn't have any evidence for—assertions about religion and beliefs that I had in the Bible. And because I had this social environment that supported my being able to say these things, I never really got around to asking whether I knew what I was talking about. Whether there was any real empirical evidence for these claims. The Pirahã, who in some ways are the ultimate empiricists—they need evidence for every claim you make—helped me realize that I hadn't been thinking very scientifically about my own beliefs. At the same time, I had started a Ph.D. program in linguistics at the University of Campinas in southern Brazil, and I was now in the middle of a group of very intelligent Brazilian intellectuals, who were always astounded that someone at a university doing a Ph.D. in linguistics could believe in the things I claimed to believe in at the time. So it was a big mixture of things involving the Pirahã, and at some point I realized that not only do I not have any evidence for these beliefs, but they have absolutely no applicability to these people, and my explanation of the universe. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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