But the language itself is also fascinating and no outsider has ever really become fluent in it, not in the 30 years since missionaries first contacted them. The language is incredibly tonal, to the point where the consanants and vowels can be dropped and people can communicate by whistling or humming! It’s also an isolate (meaning not related to any of the other languages in Brazil).

Here’s an excerpt:

The Piraha, Everett wrote, have no numbers, no fixed color terms, no perfect tense, no deep memory, no tradition of art, and no common terms of quantification. His most explosive claim was that Piraha displays no evidence of recursion, the linguistic operation of embedding one phrase inside another. Noam Chomsky has argued that recursion is the cornerstone of a “universal grammar� shared by all languages. Steven Pinker calls Everett’s paper “a bomb thrown into the party.�

They also don’t keep reserves of food, care only about things that happened in someone’s living memory (i.e. during their own lifetime or the lifetime of the generation before) and when someone goes out of sight, they’ve “gone out of existance”. Same word for when a candle flame goes out. The “terms of quantification” thing means stuff like no fixed names for colors.

Pretty fascinating stuff, even when filtered through several layers of missionaries, linguists, journalists and language, and certainly food for thought when worldbuilding.

Gee, though, all this talk about linguistics really makes me feel ignorant and quite curious. I see some studying in my near future.

Most of the comments here are about the commenter’s own experiences; does anyone have additional recommendations of books in which the languages are integrated well?

When I invent language elements, I worry more about their sound as any true linguistic construction. I tend to use them to “evoke” a culture in the same way I use bits and pieces of art, custom, religion, manners, and so forth etc.

Carol

The kind of details you bring up are what fascinate me about languages, but they’re also insanely hard to work into a story. You can build them into a conlang, but that will be opaque to the reader unless you explain it in-text (or throw it up on your website as a bit of trivia, I suppose). And the occasions when it’s appropriate to explain it in-text are going to be limited.

What I’d love to be able to do is work that in for the pov language, the linguistic culture the story is taking place in, but Japanese speakers rarely stop to reflect on how in-group/out-group distinctions shift contextually, and Hebrew speakers rarely think about gender endings. Or, to give an example from my own language, while I’ll occasionally stop to note the differences between synonyms with Anglo-Saxon and Latinate roots (understand vs. comprehend, frex), that’s not exactly common, and it would feel obtrusive if a character did it. But I really do wish I could find a graceful way to do it, because language can reflect so much about gender, status, formality, perceptions of time, relationship to the natural world, and other fabulous things.

In Japanese, much is left unspoken. The idea is that the conversation is built on a shared understanding and lives in the space between both speakers. So:

Wakarimasu ka? Literally means “Understand?” The second person pronoun is absent. The grammar is clean. There are only two irregular verbs and everything conjugates the same for first person, second person, third person, plural and singular.

Odorokimasu. = I dance, you dance, he/she/it dances, we dance, they dance.

This echoes the simple beauty that has dominated traditional Japanese culture since Yoshimasa. The language on in-group and out-group reflect the culture’s values.

Hebrew is built on three letter word roots. It’s gendered. This makes sense for a language that takes meaning from the numeric value of words. Chai (Chet + yud) means life with a numeric value of 18, so most Jews consider 18 a lucky or blessed number. Gender differences matter and that’s reflected in the language. “Amerikai” and “Amerikait” for American depending on the gender of the person being spoken about. Verbs as well. “I understand” is “Ani mevin” or “Ani mevina” depending on if the speaker is male or female.

We can see some of the history of the English people in the language. Look at the words for animals and food. Cow — beef. Chicken — Poultry. Deer — Venison. In every case the animal is named from the old English word and the food is named from the French. This came in during the Norman Conquest where English-speaking peasants served French-speaking lords and ladies. The language of the field was English and the language of the table was French.

So how do your people think about communication and society. What has happened to change or distort their language over time?

Gods, Sherwood, may I steal that? Best summation of a recurrent problem in fantastic literature I’ve ever seen.