Source: “Monolingual Fieldwork” Demonstration - Daniel Everett (YouTube)
Summary from UWElingo blog post:
In this video, Dan Everett is doing a ‘monolingual fieldwork presentation’, something quite impressive: he works with a speaker of a language that he doesn’t know (and which was chosen in secret by others, so he couldn’t prepare for this). Dan is showing that without having a language in common, it is still possible to do Linguistic Fieldwork. In this case, Dan is speaking Pirahã, to ensure that the lady he is working with won’t get any additional clues through his language use.
This is a great example of how you can do monolingual fieldwork – in particular how to start monolingual fieldwork.
After the presentation, there are numerous questions from the audience (again: really helpful in showing how this works). Also, it is revealed that the language is [REDACTED]!
Is there any Reddit comment search that still works? I want to bring over the Daniel Everett copypasta.
I think is this one:
daniel everett is the guy who worked on pirahã. he has all sorts of fantastical claims about the language but chief among it is the idea that the language doesn’t include recursion because the speakers avoid relative clauses (not what recursion means in this context but ok). the papers are basically unfalsifiable because the pirahã people distrust outsiders, rightly so, and he steers very close to outright calling the people primitive savages, which is very uncomfortable. if you call him out on his shit he just calls you a chomsky shill. super toxic guy.
I find it funny that it’s from the same user that wrote this comment in another meme I posted about it:
everett’s papers are incoherent and contradictory
yes we should be skeptical of any theory. but finding proof that one part of a theory might be wrong does not make the entire theory wrong (also evidence keeps emerging that everett had an incomplete understanding of pirahã as for example didn’t someone prove that recursion is actually possible in pirahã, just marked by prosody rather than syntax?). and then framing it as “fuck chomsky” rather than “fuck universal grammar” is disingenuous at the very least.
i dunno i could say more but i won’t. i will say though: the way that everett frames this discussion as being either with him or with chomsky is frankly delusional
Found with new Reddit’s comment search:
https://new.reddit.com/search/?q=Daniel%2BEverett%2Bcopypasta&type=comment
He may be speaking Pirahã, but he’s taking notes in English on the chalkboard, and the woman he’s talking to appears to be reading his notes and adjusting what she’s saying as a result.