Category: Native American Languages

Categories
Culture Linguistics Native American Languages Psycholinguistics

The Language That Broke the Rules: Daniel Everett and the Pirahã Controversy

Estimated read time 6 min read

Deep in the Amazon, linguist Daniel Everett encountered a language that seemed to break all the rules. His claim that Pirahã lacks recursion—a feature once thought to be the bedrock of all human language—ignited a fierce debate with Noam Chomsky and forced us to question the very nature of how we think and speak. This small, isolated tribe’s language challenges the idea of a universal grammar and suggests that culture, not just biology, may be the ultimate architect of language.

Categories
History Native American Languages Writing

Reading the Knots: Quipu, the Inca’s Mysterious 3D Writing System

Estimated read time 6 min read

What if writing wasn’t flat on a page, but a three-dimensional web of information you could hold in your hands? The Inca Empire’s Quipu, an intricate system of knotted, colorful cords, did just that, recording everything from complex census data to epic histories. We explore this mysterious tactile language and the ongoing global efforts to finally crack its code.