You should be extremely careful when citing Piraha for anything, because it’s highly controversial and the evidence is scant either way. For example, Everett found a phoneme in their sound system on his second or third trip that hadn’t been there on the previous ones—apparently the tribe doesn’t use that sound when talking to outsiders, because the other local tribes think it sounds silly. This isn’t to say that they’re hiding recursion from outsiders, only that there hasn’t been enough fieldwork done with them to say anything with a high degree of certainty.
True enough. But on the strength of what we currently know about the Piraha, would you agree that they don’t have rules which specifically ban or suppress or mention recursion in order not to use it? (That is, if the reports about the Piraha turn out to be true, would Normal_Anomaly’s argument be correct if we extend it to the Piraha language, that removing recursion/Turing-completeness “requires extra, arbitrary restrictions”?)
would you agree that they don’t have rules which specifically ban or suppress or mention recursion in order not to use it?
Yes, absolutely. I don’t even need to go past English to find structures that we don’t use for no apparent reason (ie. the structure will get marked as ‘odd’ but not flat-out wrong by native speakers, and the meaning will be completely intelligible), so it’s plausible to me that a culture might just not like recursion in their language for no apparent reason.
You should be extremely careful when citing Piraha for anything, because it’s highly controversial and the evidence is scant either way. For example, Everett found a phoneme in their sound system on his second or third trip that hadn’t been there on the previous ones—apparently the tribe doesn’t use that sound when talking to outsiders, because the other local tribes think it sounds silly. This isn’t to say that they’re hiding recursion from outsiders, only that there hasn’t been enough fieldwork done with them to say anything with a high degree of certainty.
True enough. But on the strength of what we currently know about the Piraha, would you agree that they don’t have rules which specifically ban or suppress or mention recursion in order not to use it? (That is, if the reports about the Piraha turn out to be true, would Normal_Anomaly’s argument be correct if we extend it to the Piraha language, that removing recursion/Turing-completeness “requires extra, arbitrary restrictions”?)
Yes, absolutely. I don’t even need to go past English to find structures that we don’t use for no apparent reason (ie. the structure will get marked as ‘odd’ but not flat-out wrong by native speakers, and the meaning will be completely intelligible), so it’s plausible to me that a culture might just not like recursion in their language for no apparent reason.