I've been following this story for a few weeks now, and this article, though long, seems to be the best at explaining what the big buzz is in linguistics with the Piraha language. The interesting thing for me, not a convinced Chomskyan, is this. "In a comment on Everett’s 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 Everett’s conclusions that culture can shape core grammar. "
In part it interests me because it seems to put Sapir-Whorfe hypothesis into reverse, despite the Whorfian perspective of the linguist at the centre of the debate. And that is important because a lot of academic post modernism seems to be linguistic-determinist in approach, whereas this seems to actually turn that on its head.
A Reporter at Large: The Interpreter: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker:
A review of Common Threads
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