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plus
-hi,
another marker similar to
-si:
“he is straight.”
Foreigner
meant “fork,” as in “fork in the tree branch.” And
foreign language
meant “crooked head.”
    I was making progress! But I was still only scratching the surface.
    What makes the Pirahã language so difficult to learn and to analyze are things that do not appear in the first few days of work, however cheerful one’s immediate successes make one. The most difficult aspect of learning Pirahã is not the language itself, but the fact that the situation in which the learning takes place is “monolingual.” In a mono lingual field situation, very rare among the languages of the world, the researcher shares no language in common with the native speakers. This was my beginning point among the Pirahãs, since they don’t speak Portuguese, English, or any language other than Pirahã, except for a few limited phrases. So to learn their language, I must learn their language. Catch-22. I can’t ask for translations into any other language or ask a Pirahã to explain something to me in any language but Pirahã. There are methods for working in this way. Not surprisingly, I helped develop some of those methods as a result of my ordeal. But the methods for monolingual field research were mostly around long before I came on the scene.
    Nevertheless, it is hard. Here is a typical exchange, after I had been there long enough to learn the Pirahã expression for
How do you say ———in Pirahã
?:
    “How do you say that?” (I point to a man coming upriver in his canoe.)
    “
Xigihí hi piiboóxio xaaboópai
” (The man upriver comes).
    “Is this right: ‘
Xigihí hi piiboóxio xaaboópai
’?”
    “
Xaió. Xigihí piiboó xaaboópaitahásibiga
” (Right. The man upriver comes.)
    “What is the difference between ‘
Xigihí hi piiboóxio xaaboópai
’ and ‘
Xigihí piiboó xaaboópaitáhásibiga
’?”
    “No difference. They are the same.”
    Clearly, from the perspective of a linguist, there
must
be a difference between the two sentences. But until I learned Pirahã on my own, I had no way of knowing that the difference was that the first sentence means “The man returns upriver” and the second means “I am an eyewitness to the fact that the man returns upriver.” This makes learning the language very rough going indeed.
    Another thing that makes the language hard to learn is something already mentioned—Pirahã is tonal. For every vowel, you must learn whether the pitch on the vowel is high or low. Many of the languages in the world are like this, although this number includes almost no European languages. English is not tonal in this sense. I had already decided to write vowels that had a high pitch with an acute accent () over the vowel and vowels with a low tone with no mark over the vowel. This can be illustrated by the simple pair of words meaning
I
and
excrement: Tií
(I) has a low tone on the first
i
and a high tone on the final
i.
Impressionistically, this would be “tiI.”
    Tíi
(excrement) has a high tone on the first
i
and a low tone on the second
i
—“tIi.”
    The language is hard to learn too because there are only three vowels (
i, a, o
) and eight consonants (
p, t, h, s, b, g,
the glottal stop, and
k
). This small number of sounds means that the words of Pirahã have to be much longer than in a language with more speech sounds. To have short words each word needs enough sound differences to tell it apart from most other short words. But if your language has only a few sound differences, like Pirahã, then you need more space in each word, that is, longer words, to be able to tell the words apart. The effect for me at first was that most Pirahã words sounded the same.
    Finally, the Pirahã language is notoriously difficult because it lacks things that many other languages have, especially in the way that it puts sentences together. For example, the language has no comparatives, so I couldn’t find expressions like
this