Semantic Werks

Via Kottke’s year-end list:

• a fascinating article on language and culture. The subject of the article is the Pirahã, an Amazonian tribe who apparently have no words for past events, don’t use recursive sentence structures (the man with the red bicycle went to school), and no system for counting numerically. Their language seems to contradict the Chomskyian universal grammar, which argues that all human beings have an innate capacity for recursive sentences. Two issues stood out for me: one, how can we know what a language is, if the only teachers might not want us to understand?  Secondly, what role did the disease epidemics of the post-Contact world play? For example, perhaps this culture was quite successful, but horribly vulnerable to smallpox. The disease wipes out most of the elders and culture of the group, leaving only young people and an aversion to recalling the past. There are scholars who believe upwards of 90% of New World people were killed. Wouldn’t this type of group trauma have a profound impact on culture and language? The only thing I was disappointed by in the article was the lack of insight into the Pirahã as a people independent of the people studying them. The journalist writing the piece seemed more interested in the academic questions of language than the people themselves.
• Malcolm Gladwell on race and DNA. He reviews a book which argues that IQ scores have been steadily increasing since the test was first introduced. This by way of establishing that the notion that IQ scores compared across generations or cultural groups are pretty meaningless. For example, the test that Chinese immigrants took that showed their average IQ to be 10% higher than white Americans was easier than the comparison group.  I don’t think any of this was a terrible surprise for me; I’ve never understood what IQ tests were designed to measure. Things like charisma, social intelligence, emotional intelligence, numeracy, problem solving skills and so on always seemed difficult to measure with what seems to amount to a Tetris skill test. I think most of the foofarah around IQ tests comes from the old “correlation is not causation” error.

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