@TL
The first Western insights into the peculiarities of the language came from successive teams of missionaries sent to live with the Piraha over the past 5 decades. The first couple said that it took a couple of years to even acquire the beginnings of a grammar. They eventually managed a crude translation of a Bible story, the “Prodigal Son”.
After 6 1/2 years, they were replaced by another couple. The husband was a trained linguist, who began to communicate his odd findings back to American linguists. His consultants insisted that he must simply have been overlooking key elements of the language and urged him to dig deeper. After 10 years with the Piraha, he was overcome by anxiety at his slow progress, and ceded his post to a new couple.
This next pair, the Everetts, are really the source of almost all we know about Piraha. Dan Everett is considered something of a linguistics prodigy. According to one acquaintance, after about twenty minutes of listening to an unknown language he can outline its basic structure and how its grammar works. They have been working with the Piraha for over thirty years now, and are the only Westerners to have acquired anything approaching proficiency in the language (she still lives with them, I think, and he’s also teaching linguistics at Northern Illinois University).
Through Everett’s connections with the linguistics establishment, several linguistics gurus have trekked to the tribe to study specific aspects of the language, using Everett as interpreter. Some used simple tests to understand their numerical concepts, such as putting nuts under a can, removing them one by one and asking if there were any left in the can (they could manage this with up to 3 nuts). Others used software-based tests that are employed universally to measure and rank linguistic traits. These are tests that can even be administered to apes. The tests use simple syllables to attempt to teach the subject increasingly complex forms of grammar, the most basic of which are extremely intuitive (unless, apparently, you’re Piraha), Only one Piraha subject, a 16 year-old girl, was able to grasp “phrase-structure” grammar, considered to be a minimum threshold for human language.
All researchers insist that these anomalies aren’t indicative of a general lack of intelligence. There’s plenty of evidence of their ability to solve problems and perform complex tasks.
Just as an aside, I was amused by the following anecdote: Keren Everett, after many years, finally managed to translate the New Testament into Piraha. This accomplishment was met with zero interest on the part of the Piraha, which would be in keeping with their general disinterest in the historical and non-empirical. They responded to the accounts of Jesus by persistently asking “But have you seen this?”. It’s perhaps no coincidence that Dan Everett is now an avowed atheist.