Greater Blogazonia

I am presently in Lima, getting on with the logistical and bureaucratic preparations for fieldwork this summer. Of possible interest to readers in Peru, however, I will also be giving several academic talks on Peruvian Amazonian languages while in Lima. The first two that I have confirmed dates on are both at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP), on May 20th and May 22nd. I don’t yet have precise locations for the talks, but I will add that information as soon as I have it. Below I present abstracts for the two talks (with due apologies to the Spanish-speaking peoples of the world). Hope to see some people there!

May 20th, 5:00 pm
La marcación de una categoría flexiva por el orden de palabras: el modo irreal en el idioma iquito (familia zaparoana, Amazonía peruana)

Se sabe que las categorías flexivas de tiempo, aspecto, y modo (TAM) se pueden marcar utilizando diversas estrategias entre las lenguas humanas, inclusive por medio de los afijos, la mutación fonológica, la suplencia léxica y por procesos super-segmentales, como los cambios en los patrones tonales (Anderson 1992, Spencer 1998). En esta ponencia describiré un tipo de marcación de una categoría TAM que no ha sido mencionado hasta el presente en las tipologías de morfología flexiva: la marcación por medio de cambios en el orden de las palabras en una cláusula.

Existe un sistema de marcación de una categoría TAM por medio del orden de palabras en el idioma iquito, un idioma zaparoano de la Amazonía peruana. En este idioma, el modo irreal es marcado por el desplazamiento de elementos post-verbales a la posición entre el sujeto y el verbo, como en (1), donde el elemento /nu/ se desplaza a esta posición. El modo real es marcado por la falta de tal desplazamiento, como en (2).

(1) iina anitáaqui nu ása-qui
DET huangana 3.PRO comer-PERF
`El huangana va a comerlo.’

(2) iina anitáaqui ása-qui nuú.
DET huangana comer-PERF
`El huangana lo comió.’

Muestro que los elementos que desplazan a la ‘posición irreal’ no forman una clase sintáctica coherente, y que los elementos desplazados no son constituyentes sintácticos en todos casos, sino que, a veces son fragmentos de constituyentes. A base de estas observaciones, argumento que el elemento desplazado es un constituyente fonológico (una ‘palabra fonológica’) y que el significado del elemento y sus rasgos sintácticos no son relevantes en marcar el modo irreal. Como tal, el elemento desplazado es semánticamente vacío, y solo sirve como materia fonológica que ocupa la posición irreal.

Bibliografía

Anderson, Stephen. 1992. A-morphous morphology. Cambridge University Press.

Spencer, Andew. 1998. Morphophonological operations. En Andrew Spencer and Arnold Zwicky (Eds.), The handbook of Morphology. pp. 123-143.

May 22nd, 12:00 noon
La evidencialidad, la pragmática y la responsibilidad: nexos entre la gramática y la vida social en la sociedad Nanti (familia arahuaco, Amazonía peruana)

La evidencialidad ha sido un enfoque importante la para investigaciones sobre la actividad comunicativa como un aspecto de la vida social (Hill & Irvine 1993, Sidnell 2005). Es claro que la evidencialidad es una parte de las prácticas que forman una ‘epistemología cotidiana’ y su investigación ofrece una apertura para entender las maneras en que los recursos gramaticales sirven como instrumentos en la construcción de las relaciones y estructuras sociales a través de la interacción comunicativa.

En esta charla, analizo el uso de recursos evidenciales por los hablantes del Nanti, un idioma arahuaco de la Amazonía peruana, en el contexto de interacciones sociales cotidianos. Muestro que uno de los usos principales de los recursos evidenciales en la sociedad Nanti es para construir representaciones de acontecimientos que disminuyen la responsabilidad del hablante por percances o por situaciones problemáticas. Mi argumento es que la disminución de responsabilidad es un resultado de una ‘metáfora pragmática’ (Silverstein 1976) por lo cual el tipo de relación perceptual indicado por un recurso evidencial corresponde a la intensidad con que el hablante se involucra en un cierto acontecimiento, y por este medio, el recurso indica de manera indirecta la responsibilidad del hablante por la situación.

Este resultado ilustra un aspecto de las funciones sociales y comunicativas de los evidenciales, los cuales han sido un tema de debate entre lingüistas y antropólogo-lingüistas (Aikhenvald 2004). Este resultado también respalda los argumentos de De Haan (1999) y Aikhenvald (2004) quiénes señalan que la evidencialidad es distinta de la modalidad epistémica, aún al nivel de la pragmática.

Referencias
Aikhenvald, Alexandra. 2004. Evidentiality. Cambridge University Press.

De Haan, Ferdinand. 1999. Evidentiality and epistemic modality: Setting boundaries. Southwest Journal of Linguistics. 18: 83-101.

Hill, Jane and Judith Irvine. 1993. Responsibility and evidence in oral discourse. Cambridge University Press.

Sidnell, Jack. 2005. Talk and practical epistemology. John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Silverstein, Michael. 1976. Shifters, linguistic categories, and cultural description. En Keith Basso and Henry Selby (Eds.), Meaning in Anthropology. University of New Mexico Press. pp. 11-56

Fabre’s Diccionario etnolingüístico

I recently had a conversation that made me realize that not every single Amazonianist is familiar with Alain Fabre’s on-line Diccionario etnolingüístico y guía bibliográfica de los pueblos indígenas sudamericanos. Since I have found this to be the single most comprehensive and detailed bibliographic reference work on Amazonian languages currently available I though I should help publicize this resource.

The Diccionario is organized by language family, and within each family, Fabre provides information on genetic classification, numbers of speakers, and their location for each language. The greatest value of this work, however, lies in the incredible thoroughness of its bibliographic references on the languages and societies he covers. Of course, I can only judge the references on languages and language families with which I am familiar, but I have found the coverage to be truly impressive. Fabre has managed to locate both printed works of great obscurity and more recent out-of-the-way digital publications. In addition Fabre updates this work periodically, which means that it has steadily improved over time.

Etnolinguistica.org

In a recent message, Eduardo Rivail Ribeiro informed me that the etnolinguistica.org site has been updated, redesigned, and has had a great deal of new information and material added to it. For those who are unfamiliar with the site, etnolinguistica.org is devoted to the linguistics of South America, and to a lesser but still significant degree, the ethnography of the region. The focus of the site is very much on Amazonia, and especially Brazilian Amazonia, but I think this simply reflects the center-of-gravity of the interests of those involved with the site.

The site has several very useful pages, including my favorite: a page of links to digital versions of MA and PhD theses on Amazonian languages. There is also a page providing links to open access on-line journals that focus on, or touch on, South American languages. Last, but certainly not least, a link is provided to join the etnolinguistica.org listserve, which I have found very informative and interesting.

Tomorrow morning my partner Chris Beier and I return to Peru for a summer of fieldwork. I plan to keep blogging as much as I can while in Peru, and it’s my hope to break some new ground in terms of from how close to the edge of the wired world I can post. Internet access is spreading further and further into the jungle, so who knows how far I’ll be able to get.

We have a very busy summer planned. In fact, I feel that I have transitioned into a phase of my life where I would like to do much more fieldwork than I possibly have time for. We first plan to return to the Nanti community of Montetoni, where we actually have a house, if the thatch hasn’t given out by now. Apart from seeing our friends and drinking huge amounts of manioc beer with them during village feasts, and continuing our long-term health- and education-related work with the community, I have a number of research goals.

I’m presently writing a paper on the fascinating Nanti reality status (realis/irrealis) inflectional system, and I need to check on reality status marking in epistemic conditional constructions. They’re rare as hen’s teeth in texts, so I need to get some more examples. I’m also planning to do some more work on the Nanti stress system. A few years back Megan Crowhurst and I wrote a paper that focused on stress in Nanti verbs, and I now want to write a paper looking at the nominal stress, which behaves quite differently. Finally, in writing my dissertation, I noticed an interesting gap in the textual data I have on an exotic and discursively rare morphosyntactic alignment system found in Nanti ditransitive verbs: I realized I had no data at all on first or second person theme/patient arguments. Curiously, a perusal of the literature on the languages most closely related to Nanti showed the exact same gap, without a word of explanation from any of the authors. So now I am intensely curious if this empirical gap is accidental, or if it represents a restriction that the patient/theme argument must be lower in the speech act participant hierarchy than the beneficiary/recipient argument.

We’ll also be returning to the Iquito community of San Antonio, to say hello to our friends there, see how the language revitalization program is doing, and do a couple of weeks of research. I’m working on a comprehensive reference grammar of this language — along with several colleagues — which I will finally be getting back to, now that my dissertation is out of the way. I’ll be working on a few outstanding things for the grammar, including nailing down the complicated prosodic system, which features some subtle interactions between stress and tone. I feel we have a good analysis of the system, and I think we’ll be able to clear up the remaining questions quickly. I also hope to settle the semantics of one stubborn corner of the evidential system, and in particular, the semantics a morpheme that appears to exhibit visual evidential, mirative, and malefactive (!) meanings. Once again, this morpheme is textually very rare, so it has proven difficult to figure out.

The single most exciting project we have planned for this summer, however, is an attempt to do some fieldwork on Andoa, a language of the same family as Iquito. The word on the street was that the last speaker of this language died in 1993, but in late 2006 we ran into a French anthropologist who had located two elderly speakers and made several hours of recordings with them, some of which I listened to. The speakers seemed quite fluent, as far as I could tell, so there may still be a chance to get some basic data on the language. In the coming years I’m hoping to do some historical work on the Zaparoan family, and a few weeks of work to gather to basic lexical and morphological data on Andoa would be hugely helpful.

Now, back to packing…

Recent research on Aharip, one of the typologically remarkable languages of the Mt. Iso area of Papua New Guinea, has revealed striking evidence in support of recent proposals that a people’s culture can significantly affect the grammar of the language spoken by that people (Everett 2005). In particular, the culture of the Aharip, who live between the 300 and 400 meter isoclines of Mt. Iso, appears to prohibit any direct reference to immediate experience. Instead Aharip culture appears to be governed by a ‘Distant Experience Principle’ (DEP).

The cultural and grammatical consequence of the DEP are wide-ranging, including a tense system that distinguishes only distant future and distant past tenses. One of the most remarkable findings regarding Aharip grammar, however, is the absence of any grammatical structures lacking recursion.

All sentences in Ahirip are minimally biclausal, consisting of a main clause and and a subordinate clause. Concepts that are typically expressable monoclausally in most human languages are expressed in Aharip as subordinate clauses to a large class of speech act verbs, verbs of perception, or verbs of cognition.

Obligatory recursion is also found in possessive constructions. Thus, no expression directly corresponding to ‘my foot’ exists in Aharip, and must instead by expressed by an expression like `my brother’s brother’s foot’. Indeed, it appears that eloquence is Aharip society is measured by a speaker’s ability to employ recursion to create sentences so long that his or her interlocutor loses consciousness before they are complete.

The Aharip numeral system also shows the consequences of the DEP, in that it consists solely of transfinite numbers and infinitesimals.

As far as linguistic anthropologists have been able to determine, all Aharip utterances consist of quotations of creation myths and science fiction novels, the meanings of which are inferred on the basis of culture-specific communicative maxims, including the Maxim of Vast Quantities. This shows that the results reported by Picard et al. are not limited to extra-terrestrial languages, but apply to human ones also.

It is not clear how these results regarding Aharip culture and grammar are related to the previous results linking phonological inventories in Diuwe and Hidbap to altitude, although psychologists speculated that the fact that heavy clouds at the 300 meter isocline block the views of Aharip speakers of everything but distant mountain peaks may have exerted a significant effect on Aharip culture.

References

Everett, Daniel. 2005. Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirahã. Current Anthropology. 46 (4): 621-646.

The electrons have not even dried on the PDF of my dissertation — I submitted it and handed in the final lump of paperwork a few hours ago — but you can download it here. Here’s the abstract:

This dissertation examines the strategic deployment of evidential resources in communicative interactions among Nantis, an Arawak people of Peruvian Amazonia. In particular, this work focuses on Nantis’ uses of evidentials to modulate representations of responsibility, and shows that two distinct types of responsibility must be distinguished in order to account for the socially instrumental properties of evidential resources: event responsibility and utterance responsibility. Event responsibility concerns praiseworthiness or blameworthiness for happenings in which the relevant individual is causally implicated; while utterance responsibility concerns the socially salient attributes of an utterance (e.g. truthfulness), and not the utterance’s consequences. Evidential resources are shown to mitigate event responsibility in Nanti interactions by serving as a pragmatic metaphor, whereby the sensory directness or indirectness encoded by evidentials yields inferences regarding individuals’ participation in, and responsibility for, events. The use of evidential resources, principally quotative resources, to modulate utterance responsibility operates on quite different principles. Specifically, quotative resources serve to individuate utterances by attributing them to a particular source, thereby rendering explicit that individual’s commitment to the stances expressed by the quoted utterance. In doing so, the use of the quotative resource emphasizes that individual’s responsibility for the expressed stance. Quotative resources are also employed to decrease a first party’s responsibility for a stance, by attributing it to a third party. In this case, inferences based on the Maxim of Quantity lead interactants to infer reduced commitment on the part of the first party on the basis of the attribution of strong commitment to a third party. Both epistemic stance and a variety of moral and evaluative stances are relevant to utterance responsibility. Significantly, utterance responsibility is one of the few areas in which a pragmatic tie exists between evidentiality and epistemic modality, indicating the relative marginality of epistemic modality to evidentiality in Nanti, even at the level of pragmatics. An ethnographic and historical sketch of the Nanti people is provided, and a grammatical description of the Nanti language is also included.

Mark Dingemanse just wrote a nice post over at The Ideophone, fleshing out some of the linguistic and historical facts surrounding ‘Arda’. Among other things, he points the reader to the Wikipedia Gbe languages page, which he authored, which identifies ‘Arda’ as the language now known as Gen. This page includes a scan of one of the pages of de Nájera’s work, in case you are interested, and gives a nice overview of the major features of the languages of this family.

A few days ago I was thumbing through some issues of the Journal de la Société des Américanistes available online when I came across an 1910 article by Alexander Chamberlain entitled Sur quelques familles linguisitiques peu connues ou presques inconnues de l’Amérique du Sud. The article was in the main fairly uninteresting: it consisted of a list of language names with some basic geographical, classificatory, and bibliographic information for each language — a common enough genre of linguistics article at the time. However, one of the languages mentioned caught my eye: Arda.

According to the article, Arda was already extinct at the time the article was written, but was supposedly spoken on the Amazon between the Nanay and Marañon Rivers. The article also mentioned a source for data on this language: P. José de Nájera’s 1658 work, Doctrina cristiana, y explicación de sus misterios, en nuestro idioma español, y en lengua arda. I was, to say the least, stunned: I had never before come across mention of either this language name or this source — which is saying something, since this very part of the Amazon Basin has been a strong interest of mine for several years.

I was positively aquiver: either, I thought, this represented a source on a forgotten Amazonian language, or a forgotten source on a known Amazonian language — Yameo, I guessed (see below). Of course, I immediately went to the obvious sources: Campbell (1997) and Gordon (2005), and turned up absolutely nothing. Odd. Then onto Google, which turned up a couple of confusing results. My first major clue that something very peculiar was going on was an entry for de Nájera in the online Pequeña Encyclopedia Franciscana, the first part of which I reproduce here:

NÁJERA, José de (1621-1684). Capuchino, misionero y escritor ascético. Nació en Nájera (Logroño) el año 1621 y vistió el hábito de san Francisco en 1643. Estuvo de misionero en Arda (Africa) en 1660, pero por poco tiempo. En septiembre de 1661 llegó a la misión de Cumaná (Venezuela), donde permaneció hasta 1670, fundando la población de Nuestra Señora del Pilar. Volvió a España por enfermo y, en 1673, marchó a la misión de Los Llanos, de Caracas; aquí fundó el pueblo de San Antonio de Araure (Venezuela), donde falleció en 1684. Aparte de sus méritos como misionero, se distinguió por la santidad de vida.

Al P. José de Nájera se debe el primer impreso que se conoce de la lengua arda: Doctrina cristiana y explicación de sus misterios en nuestro idioma español y en lengua arda, Madrid 1658.

So first, Arda is identified as being in Africa (Arda was a West African kingdom, as well as the name used briefly by Europeans for the language spoken there), but even more tellingly, the publication of de Nájera’s work precedes his arrival in the Americas by three years. For that matter, even when de Nájera was in the Americas, he was over a thousand kilometers from where the nonexistent ‘Amazonian Arda’ was supposedly spoken. So Arda was obviously not spoken in the Americas, let alone on the banks of the Amazon. This page, from Dalby (1998) confirms this, and supplies the fact that the language in question belongs to the Gbe family of languages.

The story behind the confusion seems to be this: de Nájera’s work was published and quickly fell into obscurity, leaving apparently one known surviving copy. This one surviving copy was subsequently misclassified in the library that held the work as treating an American, and not an African, language. I infer de Nájera’s work must not provide the necessary geographical information to resolve the location of the language it treats, and I suspect that the emergence of the genre of Spanish missionary grammars in the New World led the misguided librarian to assume that de Nájera’s work — also a Spanish missionary grammary — must treat an American language.

The first clear sign of this error is found in a work by Henry Stevens, an American bibliographer who was heavily involved in collecting North and South American materials for the British Museum (among other employers). Google Books makes clear that he mentions de Nájera’s work in his 1851 Catalogue of the library of the Count Mondidier (actually a fictional personage invented by Stevens), but the first actual prose I could find is from his 1862 Bibliotheca Americana, where Stevens mentions the de Nájera volume (which Stevens oddly attributes to one Domingo Garcia Morrás), and remarks:

The Ardas are a barbarous tribe of Indians dwelling between the rivers Napo and Marañon, in the Province of Quijos, Quito. This, as far as we can learn, is not only the sole book published in the Arda Language, but is only copy known of it.

Stevens inter-continental error propagates through several other 19th century works on American Indian languages, such as Ludewig and Turner (1858), and Sabin and Eames (1873). (Actually, Ludewig and Turner (1858) is the earliest reference I have laid my eyes on that explicitly makes the intercontinental Arda error. Stevens (1851) is a truly obscure work, and I have yet to locate a copy I can check; here I am assuming — perhaps in error — that Stevens (1862) reprises Stevens’ (1851) identification of Arda. So the question of whether the original error can be attributed to Stevens or Ludewig is still open.)

In any event, we know that Paul Rivet located a copy de Nájera’s work. Rivet was understandably excited by this find, and we are told by Chamberlain that Rivet intended to publish de Nájera’s work as part of his broader efforts to republish colonial-era works on South American languages. Eventually, Labouret and Rivet (1929) published a work that correctly identified Arda as an African language, a discovery they attribute to Maurice Delafosse.

Now we come to the second major part of the story — how did linguists come to believe that a language named ‘Arda’ was spoken in the Amazon? The answer, as suggested by a brief allusion in Ludewig and Turner (1858), is that Antonio de Alcedo mentions the Arda in his 1786-9 encyclopedia, which was subsequently translated by G.A Thompson and published in 1812 as The geographical and historical dictionary of America and the West Indies (but see the Alcedo’s orginal title below! They really knew how to title a book in those days.). In the translated version, the entry on ‘Ardas’ reads as follows.

ARDAS, a barbarous nation of Indians, who inhabit the s. of the river Napo, and the n. of the Marañon, in the province of Quijos and kingdom of Quito. They occupy the thickest forests, and are bounded by the Maisamaes. (p. 98)

The geographical distribution that Alcedo gives for the Arda corresponds exactly to that of the Peba-Yaguan group now known by linguists as the Yameo, whose language became extinct in approximately 1950. The fact that Alcedo uses an obscure name for this group is hardly surprising. The 17th and 18th century colonial records for this part of the Amazon Basin provide a bewildering variety of names for the indigenous groups of the region. Rivet (1913), for example, lists Nahuapos, Amaonos, Massamaes, Migueanos, Napeanos, Parranos, Yarrapos, and Alabonos as variant names for Yameo, and it seems fairly clear that Arda is simply another one.

So, the basis of the confusion seems clear enough from this vantage point: based on the assumption that Arda was an American language, either Stevens or Ludewig went prowling thought the historical/geographical/ethnographic materials available at the time, looking for a name that matched. Then, finding a match in Alcedo’s historical-geographical dictionary, they concluded that de Nájera’s (African) ‘Arda’ and de Alcedo’s (American) ‘Arda’ were one and the same.

So, is there any edifying moral to be drawn from this affair? If anything, I think it would have to be this: approach colonial-era names used by Europeans for Amazonian indigenous groups with great care. In fact, although the case of Arda is perhaps the most spectacular error of this type that I have run across, I’ve seen a few errors of this type by modern authors as well. But that’s a matter for a later post!

References Cited (Note that I have not been able to provide full references for all works.)

de Alcedo, Antonio. 1786-89. Diccionario geografico-histórico de las Indias Occidentales o America: es a saber: de los Reynos del Peru, Nueva España, Tierra Firme, Chile y Nuevo Reyno de Granada. Con la descripción de sus Provincias, Naciones, Ciudades, Villas, Pueblos, Rios, Montes, Costas, Puertos, Islas, Arzobispados, Obispados, Audiencias, Virreynatos, Gobiernos, Corregimientos, y Fotalezas, frutos y producciones; con expresión de sus Descubrimientos, Conquistadores y Fundadores: Conventos y Religiones; erección de sus Catedrales y Obispos que ha habido en ellas: Y noticia de los sucesos más notables de varios lugares: incendios, terremotos, sitios, é invasiones que han experimentado: y hombres ilustres que han producido. Madrid, Imprenta de Blas Roman, 5 volúmenes.

de Alcedo, Antonio and George Alexander Thompson. 1812. The geographical and historical dictionary of America and the West Indies. London

Campbell, Lyle. 1997. The American Indian languages. OUP.

Chamberlain, Alexander. 1910. Sur quelques familles linguisitiques peu connues ou presques inconnues de l’Amérique du Sud. Journal de la Société des Américanistes. 7 (1-2). pp 179-202.

Dalby, Andrew. 1998. Dictionary of Languages: The definitive reference to more than 400 languages. London: Bloomsbury.

Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. (ed.), 2005. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Fifteenth edition. Dallas, Tex.: SIL International. Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com/.

Labouret, Henri and Paul Rivet. 1929. Le Royaume D’Arda et son Evangelisation au XVII Siecle. Paris. Intitut d’Ethnologie.

Ludewig, Hermann and W. Turner. 1858. The literature of American Indian languages. London: Trübner and Co.

de Najera, José. 1658. Doctrina cristiana y explicación de sus misterios en nuestro idioma español y en lengua arda. Ms.

Rivet, Paul. 1913. La famille linguistique Peba. Journal de la Société des Américanistes. 10 (1). pp 119-171.

Sabin, Joseph and Wilberforce Eames. 1873. A dictionary of books relating to America, from its discovery to the present time. New York: J. Sabin and Sons.

Stevens, Henry. 1851. Catalogue of the Library of Count Mondidier.

Stevens, Henry. 1862. Historical Nuggets: Bibliotheca Americana. Whittingham and Wilkins.

I recently came across a vein of Peruvian linguistics blogs, which was very gratifying. When I was first getting Greater Blogazonia up and running a few months ago, I searched and couldn’t locate any, but I knew they had to exist.

My favorite among the blogs I’ve found thus far is Nila Vigil’s wittily titled Instituto Lingüístico de Invierno, which focuses on indigenous cultures, languages, and rights in Peru and neighboring countries. Best of all, she intermittently posts on matters of linguistic policy and education among Peruvian Amazonian indigenous groups. As far as I am aware, she is the only one doing this with any regularity in Peru. She also has a links page that will get you to several other Peruvian linguistics blogs, which serves as great entree into this community of bloggers.

I just learned (via the etnolinguistica.org list) that the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures (WALS) was recently made available online (here). This useful resource was formerly only available in book and CD format, and it cost several hundred dollars. It is now available for free, and in exploring the new online version, I actually found it easier to work with than the older CD version. At least on my Mac, the user interface for the CD version was fairly small, which gave it cramped feeling and made it a little pesky to use. The online version, however, makes much better use of the screen, and the layout and navigation seem improved to me.

In case you’ve never used or seen WALS, I encourage you to take a look. Basically, it represents an effort to collate typological information on a large number of languages (2500, they say), present it in a easily searchable manner, and display the results on a map. Each major typological parameter (say, grammatical number) is also accompanied by an essay, which lays out the basic definitions and distinctions involved. But the best way to know how it works is probably just to play around with it. I must admit that I find I just enjoy poking around WALS, even when I don’t have any real work to do with it. It has even helped combat my Amazonia-centric typological provincialism ;).

Today’s New York Times has a pretty decent article on recent developments in research on linguistic relativity. Given the mediocre treatment matters linguistic tend to get in the popular press, I was pleasantly surprised.

There is even an Amazonian connection in the article: Dehaene and colleagues’ work on Mundurukus’ use of core geometrical concepts in the absence of lexical items that denote them. The abstract for their original article can be found here.