Re: Sapir-WhorFreakiness

Doug Dee said:
> In a message dated 8/22/2004 1:56:25 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
> mark@POLYMATHIX.COM writes:
>
>>I think Piraha might be a creole that didn't evolve much beyond a pidgin
>>precursor, for whatever reason. If something caused all the lexifier and
>>substrate languages to cease to be spoken in the community, we might be
>>left with a pidgin that only had whatever vocabulary it had accrued up to
>>a certain point.
>
> Wouldn't the "very complex morphological structure" [Everett's words] of
> Piraha be highly atypical for a creole that hadn't evolved much beyond a
> pidgin?
Yes.

If Piraha *is* a creole, then it must be one that elaborated itself in
some areas but not in others (for whatever reasons). So non-elaboration of
the creole may be better stated in terms of *lopsided* elaboration.

Maybe the pidgin scenario won't hold water, and all we really have to do
is find an explanation for apparently lopsided evolution (very complex
morphology with nearly unbelievably simple syntax and serious lexical
gaps). That by itself would merely make Piraha a typological extreme,
perhaps, but it still wouldn't explain the lack of oral literature. That's
why it's so tempting to pursue the isolated pidgin/creole scenario as far
as it'll go. (The Krio community of Sierra Leone, for example, considers
itself a separate and homogeneous ethnic group. AFAIK, they've lost the
oral literature of any substrate groups, and I wouldn't think they'd be
likely to adopt tribal stories they heard now as part of their own
heritage.)

As I said before, I think an agent-based model may be the only way to pin
down a set of constraints that might have led to this development.
Thinking on our feet probably won't get us there.

-- Mark