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Definition 2024


Pirahã

Pirahã

English

Alternative forms

  • Piraha
  • Pirahá (uncommon)
  • Pirahan (rare)

Proper noun

Pirahã

  1. An indigenous people of Brazil.
  2. The language of this people, having no extant relatives, with few phonemes, and controversially claimed to have no true numbers, no way of talking about history, and no recursive embedding.
    • 2005, Daniel Everett, ‘Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã’, Current Anthropology 46.4:
      The Pirahã language challenges simplistic application of Hockett's nearly universally accepted design features of human language by showing that some of these features (interchangeability, displacement, and productivity) may be culturally constrained.

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