Pirahã tribe - a real-life Abber nomad tribe?

[HuManBing]

I just read an article in last week's New Yorker magazine about a tribe that lives in the Amazon river basin, known to the outside world as the Pirahã (pronounced Pee-Da-Han). They have a language that defies most academic definitions of human language, lacking many abstract concepts. In addition to being fiendishly hard to replicate (some of its noises are clicks and whistles, and tonality is very important), it is a very unusual language for various grammatical reasons.

Perhaps the most interesting is a near-exclusive focus on the immediately and presently perceivable. Apparently, the tribe can only express concepts in terms of the present tense, and in terms that can be experienced first hand. The tribe has no collective recollection of anything earlier than living memory.

They have no general word for the color "red", for example. They describe colors in terms of what they look like, e.g. "blood-colored".

Wikipedia has an article here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_people

The print article is in the April 16, 2007 issue of New Yorker magazine.

This tribe strikes me as being very similar in outlook to the Abber nomads of the Nightmare Lands. One of the main problems that missionaries had in converting them to Christianity was that the people would ask "Have you met him?" whenever they were told about Christ.

[Stygian Inquirer]

About what you said about the word 'red' and the lack of colour terms, a lot of aboriginal languages have no adjectives period and instead just have a lot of nouns. Example, instead of the word 'tall' they have words for 'tall building', 'tall tree', 'tall person', etc. Just a little interesting linguistic tidbit.

[Rotipher of the FoS]

I don't recall the details, but I've heard of other languages which, at first, were thought to have no 'past tense'. On closer inspection, it generally turned out that they used extra verbs, instead of applying tenses to the ones with counterparts in other languages.

For instance, instead of "I do/I did", they'd have a verb for "doing" and a different verb for "remembering doing". The second verb served the same functional purpose as a past tense would, where living memory is concerned. For distant past events, they'd have to phrase things in a pretty awkward and convoluted way, like: "I remember my grandfather remembering his grandfather remembering seeing X" ... but they could talk about events from generations past.

[HuManBing]

Yeah, it's just interesting to me. There was even a hint of the "If I can't see you, you don't exist" psychology. I dunno if that's just me reading too closely into something that wasn't there, but that struck me as spot on, for the Abber nomads.