Comments on: Linguistics and Faith

By: Greg Walkup

Greg Walkup — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 03:40:15 +0000

When I read your comments, my great intellectual response was “yes!”. Someone who gets this pseudo-sophistication regarding Christian faith and practice…I think the number of scientists and academians in general who do not “believe” do so out of contempt for Christian morals rather than comtempt for a Christ created universe. Thank you for your pointed response!

By: Chainsaw

Chainsaw — Tue, 19 May 2009 03:42:17 +0000

Everyone seems to be spouting off without having read the article. It’s only a few pages, and you sound like utter idiots without it.

In inverse order:
He’s talking about one particular small group – it’s the ways in which they’re different that make them noteworthy – it has nothing to do with “people in the Amazon”

The biblical thing comes from the same place fundamentalists get all their “biblical” things. It’s biblical to THEM. And they were both missionaries, there to convert the Piraha, and their culture/lanaguage made conversion impossible/meaningless. Hence the spiritual trouble.

You have to read about them reading Biblical stories to the Piraha, and them going, basically “So? Do you know this Jesus man?” and laughing in contempt when they find that Jesus died 2000 years ago, to really get that part.

Yer linguistics teacher was wrong. That’s the whole factual basis of the controversy. WHY they were wrong is still being debated.

At the time, they “couldn’t” be taught another language because they thought they were all stupid, “laughably inferior”, in Everett’s phrase, to their language, and they refused to learn one. For chrissakes, they’ve been refusing to learn other languages since 1700!!! Likewise many other parts of Christian philosophy – I think it was watching THIS that made him question it himself.

And so on…

By: Sergey

Sergey — Thu, 14 May 2009 05:01:37 +0000

I have heard of Dan Everett by linguists. he seems really bright.

I would like to know why the people in the amazon are not complex people.

I would be shocked that someone from an academia setting would assert such an assumption.

People in the amazon and in Africa in general have a very compex culture which deals with psychology.
Psychologists would definitely disagree with Everett’s assumptions.

I would like to hear why he would hypothesize that idea. Has he tested that hypothisis?

By: Dave Snoke

Dave Snoke — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 13:40:46 +0000

The belief that \any idea can be expressed in any language\ comes about because of the ability to express complex ideas using compound phrases. I was impressed when I learn Dutch, several years ago, how they have so few words (about 2000) yet express all kinds of concepts by making compounds. That is essentially what is meant by the term \recursion\ used in the article– you can build up phrases of unlimited complexity by simply compounding words. Everett is saying that this tribe can’t. That is why the claim of lack of recursion is so controversial. And he is saying that culturally they have no desire to learn other languages, though intellectually they could.

I do see an almost mystical belief implied that it the Piraha get the Bible, they must be converted. I wonder if that belief is widespread in Wycliffe. I don’t see any promises from Scripture for that, though we certainly see a correlation, in our experience.

By: Peter V

Peter V — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 14:51:20 +0000

My interpretation of Dan’s comment “It would be impossible for her to believe that we know the language, because that would mean that the Word of God doesn’t work.” is different from dopderbeck’s. Perhaps her (Dan’s wife’s) assumption is that if the Bible is translated correctly, the lives of the Piraha must soon be transformed by the Gospel. Since they have not responded as she hoped, therefore the translation must be deficient, indicating that the translators don’t really know the language well enough. Perhaps Dan instead chose to believe that the Gospel lacks power.

By: mark c.

mark c. — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 19:06:55 +0000

I remember one of my linguistics teachers explaining that any language is just as rich as another. In other words, You can say whatever you want in any language.

I think that someone is about as likely to “lose” or “gain” faith in Christ while studying linguistics as they would be while studying astrophysics or chemistry. Linguistics is a field of study, and you can find Christians as well as non-christians publishing in journals, studying as undergrads, or just enjoying it as laypeople.

By: dopderbeck

dopderbeck — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 23:15:31 +0000

I don’t really see from this article what linguistics had to do with his loss of faith. At one point he says: “As I read more and I got into philosophy and met a lot of friends who weren’t Christians, it became difficult for me to sustain the belief structure in the supernatural,” . Nothing specifically about linguistics there.

Towards the end of the article, criticizing his wife somewhat, he says: “It would be impossible for her to believe that we know the language, because that would mean that the Word of God doesn’t work.” I take it that he means here that if the language is very simple, it will be impossible to translate the Bible, and therefore the people will not be able to hear the gospel. But this doesn’t follow, for at least two reasons: (a) the “Word of God” in scripture refers primarily to Christ and thus one can receive the “Word of God” without having the Bible or even a facility for language (I say this as the father of a child with a neurological disorder that severely impairs language); and (b) there doesn’t seem to be any reason why these people can’t be taught a more detailed language (English? French? Portugese?) in which the scriptures could be read.

By: Dave Snoke

Dave Snoke — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 21:25:55 +0000

Good points, Michael. A few more thoughts:
1) When dealing with tribes we are not looking back in time. We are looking at people today, with a history just like anybody else. Just because they say they have no sense of time and have always been this way, does not mean it is so.
2) Do the Piraha have no moral code, no sense of right and wrong? If they do, how do they argue for it?
Again, a live-for-today attitude is not much different from what I see in many Pitt undergrads. I wonder if you took some of them and put them on an island, if many words for larger concepts would disappear.

By: Micheal Hickerson

Micheal Hickerson — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 18:32:36 +0000

Tom and Dave, I should have known the Pittsburgh connection would mean some of you would know the Everetts. Thanks for bringing a personal perspective to the article.

The idea of human beings as different from other animals is (to understate things) very important. I was just speaking a medical researcher who noted how rarely it is considered in medical research that human beings are indeed “not just animals.” The article I posted today about W.H. Auden gets to a similar point – Auden (following Kierkegaard, I suppose) distinguishes between “nature” (the world of biological necessity) and “history” (the world of choice and action), but then notes that human beings are the only creature to live in both of those worlds.

I wish that I knew more about the Piraha. Since reading Charles Mann’s book 1491, about the Americas before the arrival of Columbus, I’ve been acutely aware of the influence of Europeans on all of pre-Columbian Americans, even supposedly remote tribes.

From the article:

The Piraha 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 Pirahã, however, retreated deep into the jungle.

The article does not take seriously the choices made by the Piraha. Their attitudes towards outsiders is viewed as an accident of their linguistics, rather than as a deliberate strategy. Sometime in the past, I bet someone or some group among the Piraha said, “Look what happened to the Mura. We don’t want that, do we?”

By: Richard J. Cox

Richard J. Cox — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 18:19:01 +0000

I am always interested when I hear that someone has lost that faith. I don’t believe that happens. When someone says this has happened, it may mean one or two things, either that they never had it to begin with or that they have strayed. Universities are great places of temptation for this to seem to occur because so many other faith systems compete for our attention, including a belief in our own rationality and our ability to construct infallible sciences. I know that we cannot know everything and that there will always be mysteries in the creation. Unless we remain humble in our own limited capacities, it is easy to build an idol to worship.