The note about the Piraha language not having embedding is incredibly interesting. Example taken from Wikipedia:
>Everett stated that Pirahã cannot say "John's brother's house" but must say, "John has a brother. This brother has a house." in two separate sentences.
Compounding this on the apparent lack of numbers/counting, expressing higher order concepts seems like it'd be borderline impossible in the language as-is. I wonder if many other languages started out "simple" like this, and developed grammatical complexity alongside their society?
Of course, the issue here could just be a lack of understanding and insufficient ability to ask questions to native speakers by people researching it. It only has 250 speakers and picking it up as a second language with zero resources leaves plenty of room for error. More recent research suggests it might be possible, but no non-native speakers are really sure.
>Everett stated that Pirahã cannot say "John's brother's house" but must say, "John has a brother. This brother has a house." in two separate sentences.
Compounding this on the apparent lack of numbers/counting, expressing higher order concepts seems like it'd be borderline impossible in the language as-is. I wonder if many other languages started out "simple" like this, and developed grammatical complexity alongside their society?
Of course, the issue here could just be a lack of understanding and insufficient ability to ask questions to native speakers by people researching it. It only has 250 speakers and picking it up as a second language with zero resources leaves plenty of room for error. More recent research suggests it might be possible, but no non-native speakers are really sure.