Daniel Everett

That is, until a young American missionary in his mid-20s turned up.

He's called Dan Everett.

And actually, he's one of the voices you can hear

now.

He was the sweetest, most patient teacher that I've ever had.

I miss him terribly.

That was Dan Everett.

My huge thanks to him and to you for lending us your ear.

If that's what recursion is, then the fact that it's absent in a language means that this language is fundamentally different.

That was from Daniel Everett, a linguist with decades of experience in the field.

His work has been at the forefront of pushing back on Chomsky's notion of universal grammar.

I just wanted to put something in here to counter the Chomskyan tendencies of modern linguistics.

What was the first religion that you looked into? And did you have any of those specific moments where you're like, wait, this isn't just different than what I was used to, but it's an entirely different paradigm?

Yeah, well, before, real quick, literally today, I had just heard of this guy, Daniel Everett, who is a famous linguist, and he was an evangelical Christian missionary to this tribe.

I don't remember the name of the, it was the Piraha tribe.

And the language of this tribe is completely like here and now and built into their language.

Or he went fishing, I heard about it.

Or X, Y, Z, like that, like it's built into their language.

So, Daniel Everett, when he was young and this missionary, he tried to think of how to possibly teach the gospel of Jesus who lived 2,000 years ago to these people.

And it was just built literally into their language of, why should we care about this Jesus guy? No one saw him.

It seems like they borrowed some pronouns, but they don't really use pronouns.

Um, there's this guy, this linguist, Dan Everett, who worked with them for a couple decades.

Um, and he, yeah, he, he tried to teach them to count for, [chuckles] for like a year.

He, every week or a couple times a week, there were classes and nobody got past three.

Almost definitionally, I think you have to accept that a spirit world would use the physical world as a medium to express itself.

I mean, there, there's, there's this book that I actually think is really important to my thesis in Fourth Wall Phantoms by Daniel Everett, who was recently on The Joe Rogan show, um, and got a lot of attention for all the wrong reasons.

'Cause I actually think he's a smart guy, but he said some sort of knuckleheaded things.

Well, it is Joe Rogan.

I, I was, uh...

Before I, I be- reconverted back to atheism and, uh, gave up my Christian faith, I was Reverend Dr. Daniel Everett.

Um, and I studied the Bible, and I was interested in the ancient texts.

Um, my research moved on then to Amazonian languages and then the nature of human language.

But still, people do say that.

Well, the interesting thing is if you believe Dan Everett, not every human language actually has recursion.

And if you also look at the work of Jane Ellen Huttenlocher, who looked at young children, she was working at the University of Chicago, and she could look at children from the slums around Chicago and then look at the children who were basically their parents were University of Chicago graduate students or faculty.

And she found that the children in this low socioeconomic situation Their parents didn't use recursive sentences with them, and they didn't have recursion in their repertoire.

I feel like there's so much we could learn from these cultures and so much we've forgotten along our relentless march towards progress.

My guest today, linguist and anthropologist Daniel Everett, spent four decades studying and living among the Piraha of the Amazon.

And he has stories to tell.

Daniel is the author of over a dozen books, most recently Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes.

Please welcome this week's Fresh Face in Hell, Daniel Everett.

Daniel, thanks for joining us.

Great to be here with you.

And I've seen so many horrible injuries where people didn't show much pain at all.