Documentary - The Amazon Code (2012)

This is a great film! See the producer's web site: The Amazon Code. In 2008 Daniel Everett wrote a book Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle.

I just don't get the fuss.  Universal Grammar  is a way of describing language, it doesn't need to be "encoded in the human genome", it just needs to be learned, and it may well be that it's easier for people who have learned to count to incorporate recursion into their understanding of grammar, but that doesn't mean that recursion is fundamental to all human language.

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In 2020 Daniel Everett gave a talk at a Long Now Foundation gig:


19:02 Interesting observation about language and music here, with a follow-up question at 1:05:35.

40:40 There is a beautiful example of the difference between a recursive grammar and actual English. Try parsing the next sentence without the context leading up to it: The farmer the dog the boy who was fishing owned bit got the gun. Discussion about the difference between written language at 1:08:33: sentences get longer when people learn to write. It is possible that the recursion in grammar follows from the innate use of ordinals in written symbols. At  1:17:50 on how recursion can be avoided using quotation.

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In 2023 he did a podcast and talked about AI:


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