A very long and very interesting article concerning the Pirahã Amazonian tribe and their language. The article follows a lapsed American missionary as he continues to work with this tribe's linguistics, hoping to fully understand everything that makes up such a hard to understand language. The problem lies in the tribe's resistance to anything outside of their experience, or anything outside of what they know. As such, they don't follow traditional linguistic patterns that most languages follow. Yet the most interesting parts, to me, were the talk of the tribe's resistance to Christianity as there were several missionaries dispatched to evangelize the tribe.

Everett, the American linguist/ex-missionary, explains that the tribe lives completely in the "now." They don't have any concept of abstract ideas, and it's not that they can't think about abstracts, it's because they don't want to. They stick with what they know and experience instead of philosophy. So when a person walks out of sight of the tribe, that person is deemed "out of experience" instead of gone. Any sort of talk of Christianity and its ideas fall on deaf ears as it's hard to get the Pirahã to understand it as an "experience."

Everett's ex-wife still works with the tribe as a missionary trying to figure out the language enough to translate the gospel. She's found that the key to understanding the language may be in their songs.