Four Subjects

Four Subjects

Do not Sleep, There Are Snakes

Do not Sleep, There Are Snakes is written by Daniel Everett, who is a professor at Illinois State University. The book is about Pirahã Indians who live in the Brazilian Amazon. The author went to lie with the Pirahã in the late 1970s and lived with them for several years. He studied the culture and civilization of the Pirahã and analyzed the unusual language they spoke. Pirahã is a hunter gatherer tribe. One of the strongest values of the Pirahã people is no coercion. There s no social hierarchy, and they also have no social leaders. They are resilient people and are very independent. Another interesting thing about them is that they live in the present and do not plan ahead. They have almost no interest in the conveniences of the modern world, medicine and tools. They have a conservative culture and which has no creation myths. They also have no sense of history and consider their lifestyle and their tribe to be superior to all others.

The language that the Pirahã people speak is very different form all the languages that are spoken in the world. It only contains three vowels and eight consonants. The language also has no words for colors and numbers. The sounds are also, therefore, limited. They, however, use humming, whistling and singing for conversing with each other. The Pirahã lives in an entirely different world of their own (www.rhapsodyinbooks.wordpress.com). We are very different from them in all aspects of our lives. We have a different culture, we follow a religion that they do not follow we speak an entirely different and a rich language. One thing that they teach us is that we can live without all the modern facilities and still survive, which most of us think that we cannot.

Endangered Languages

There are many languages in the world, which have become endangered, even when there is a significant commitment to the language within the community of its speakers. One of such languages is the Apiaca language. It is also referred to as Apiaka and Apiake. The Apiaca people speak this language. They live in the upper areas of Mato Grosso, a place in Brazil. The language is a subgroup of the Tupi language. It is specifically related to the Tupi Gurani language. In 2007, there was only one remaining speaker of the language in the world, in ...