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  3. A World Without Time or Number The Piraha are an isolate

A World Without Time or Number The Piraha are an isolate

游客2023-10-20  45
问题                     A World Without Time or Number
    The Piraha are an isolated Amazonian tribe of hunter-gatherers who live deep in the Brazilian rainforest. The tribe has survived for centuries, although there are now only around 200 people left. The Piraha, who communicate mainly through hums and whistles, have fascinated ethnologists for years, mainly because they have almost no words for numbers. They use only three words to count: one, two, and many.

    We know about the Piraha thanks to Dan Everett, a Professor of Phonetics, who spent seven years with the tribe in the 1970s and 1980s. Everett discovered a world without numbers, without time, without words for colours, without subordinate clauses and without a past tense. Their language, he found, was not just simple grammatically: it was restricted in its range of sounds and differed between the sexes. For the men, it has just eight consonants and three vowels: for the women, who have the smallest number of speech sounds in the world, to seven consonants and three vowels. To the untutored ear, the language sounds more like humming than speech. The Piraha can also whistle their language, which is how men communicate when hunting.
    Their culture is similarly constrained. The Piraha can’t write, have little collective memory, and no concept of decorative art. In 1980 Everett tried to teach them to count: he explained basic arithmetic to an enthusiastic group keen to learn the skills needed to trade with other tribes. After eight months, not one could count to ten: even one plus one was beyond them. The experiment seemed to confirm Everett’s theory: the tribe just couldn’t conceive the concept of number.
    The Piraha’s inability to count is important because it seems to disprove Noam Chomsky’s influential Theory of Universal Grammar, which holds that the human mind has a natural capacity for language, and that all languages share a basic rule structure, which enables children to understand abstract concepts such as number.
Questions 71 -75
Complete the summary with a maximum of three words from the passage.
    The Piraha is a tribe who has lived in the Brazilian rainforest for hundreds of years. They communicate just with【R1】______. This has made many ethnologists interested in them. Their language is very special, not only because it is simple【R2】______, but also because it is different【R3】____the sexes. Men and women acquire different【R4】______. Although a professor of phonetics has tried to teach them【R5】______, he failed. This seems to disprove Noam Chomsky’s influential Theory of Universal Grammar. [br] 【R1】
选项
答案 hums and whistles
解析 (文章第一段第三句提到“The Piraha，who communicate mainly through hums and whistles…”，即Piraha人主要通过哼哼和吹口哨来交流。)
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