A New Class War: Democracy & Managerial Elites

HOW do we interpret the recent 'STORMING of the US CAPITOL'? How does it compare with, for example, The Storming of the Bastille in 1789 in Paris in 1789 or The Storming of the Winter Palace in Petrograd in 1920? Perhaps it's too early to tell!

DO ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS?

My departmental supervisor at Manchester Poly, John Phillips (Oxford), claimed when I did my thesis on conversational analysis argued that J.L.Austin, who had developed a theory of speech acts, that he had overlooked the alternative arguement that there was a case that there were also acts that could say some thing: 'words' may be able to do some things but 'acts' may be able to say some things. John Phillips gave as an example an episode in 'Shane' in which Shane played by Alan Ladd accounters a dirt farmer in the first scene, and without a word being uttered a conversation of actions take place in which the actor's recognise what is require and what is understood by the participants.

At the time I think we'd been studying language and conversational analysis in particular John Langshaw Austin (26 March 1911 – 8 February 1960), who was a British philosopher of language and leading proponent of ordinary language philosophy, perhaps best known for developing the theory of speech acts.

John Phillips was at the time in the 1970s keen to stress that actions can speak louder than words. In this context perhaps the storming of the US Capitol on the 6th, Janauary 2021, may well serve to speak volumes hisorically just as the earlier storming of the Bastille and Winter Palace did.

CHOMSKY on 'The FRAGILITY of AMERICAN DEMOCRACY'

To help us grasp what's going on in the US perhaps we should consider an interview on the 26 November 2020 with Noam Chomsky: 'Trump Has Revealed the Extreme Fragility of American Democracy' in what was presented as an exchange with C. J. Polychroniou Chomsky stated:

'Speculation of course, but I’ll indulge in a bad dream — which could become reality if we are not on guard, and if we fail to recognize that elections should be a brief interlude in a life of engaged activism, not a time to go home and leave matters in the hands of the victors.

'I suspect that Trump and associates regard their legal challenges as a success in what seems a plausible strategy: keep the pot boiling and keep the loyal base at fever pitch, furious about the “stolen” election and the efforts of the insidious elites and the “deep state” to remove their savior from office.

'That strategy seems to be working well. According to recent polls, “Three-quarters (77%) of Trump backers say Biden’s win was due to fraud” and “The anger among Trump’s base is tied to a belief that the election was stolen.” Rejection of the legal challenges with ridicule may please liberal circles, but for the base, it may be simply more proof of the Trump thesis: the hated elites will stop at nothing in their machinations.'

This conclusion by Chomsky that the 'Trump thesis: the hated elites will stop at nothing in their machinations' fits in with the concept that Trumpism is conceived as challenging the established liberal managerial elites. Chomsky himself has long complained that the politics in the US has been simply a choice between Coka Cola and Pepsi Cola.

Now we have Trump and Trumpism, did this break the mould of the managerial elite or not? Were the Clintons corrupt as many of the invaders of the Capitol complained? Does democracy need to be rescued from the managers, and is even Professor Chomsky part of the managerial elite as a dominant figure in the US community of scholars?

The Managerial Elite & American Politics

Perhaps we should examine these considerationa further by examining a review in October 2020 on the Chronicle's website, in which Pedro Gonzalez commenting on 'The New Class War: Saving Democracy From the Managerial Elite' by Michael Lind, writes:

'As Lind sees it, the country’s political institutions are a façade for the corporate state, while our government is merely an instrument for the rootless transnational elite and avaricious politicians, both of whom are aided by a vast army of bureaucrats teeming with resentment for those whose lives they manage. The managed—that is, the rest of us—are lumped into a racially divided, proletarianesque working-class, with a largely native-born, white core.'

Gillian Tett in her column in this weekend's Financial Times has argued that Western elites tend to assume that their way of thinking is the only valid mode of thought'. She quotes from Joseph Henrich, the evolutionary biologist and anthropologist, who in his book 'The Weidest People in the World' comparing to the mentality of Western, Educated, Industrialised. Rich and Democratic people against other more tribalistic groups.

Hendrich believes most societies throughout history have used different mental approaches: they see morality as context-based, presuming that someone's identity is set by family and, adopting a "holistic reasoning" rather than "analytical reasoning". "Analytic thinkers see in straight lines," Hendrich writes "Holistic thinkers focus not on the parts but the whole... and expect time trends to be non-linear, if not cyclical."

Gillian Tett concludes Trump has captured the tribal 'non-linear' approach of those who resent what they see as the elite managerial class and she writes:

'Here lies the epistemological split - and the futility of elites invoking "reason" to persuade Trump voters to rethink their convictions. Words alone will not heal America. Neither will the law, nor logical analysis of the constitution. What is desperately required is empathy... You can only counter the legacy of Trump if you first grasp why he was so potent to start with.'

Was Trumpism really a threat to what Chomsky use to call the Pepsi Cola and Coca Cola tradition of American politics? Whatever was the case, Professor Chomsky recently urged the public to vote for Joe Biden. Perhaps he prefers the Status Quo after all?

********************************************

'Wild West' Approach to Apprenticeships in the UK

by Brian Bamford

CAMILLA CAVENDISH writing in the FT on 4th, October, wrote: 'The gulf between academic and vocational education in the UK has depressed productivity and exacerbated skills shortages.' She added that: 'Many of the largest shortages reported by employers are in sectors such as construction, health and IT.'

Meanwhile, in the UK only one one in ten adults hold a higher technical qualification as their highest qualification compared to about one in five in Germany and one in three in Canada. Camilla Cavendish estimates that 'as much as 20% of the UK workforce will be significantly under-skilled for their jobs by 2030'.

In this country the government wants to bridge the gap, and according to Ms. Cavendish 'create a "world-class, German-style further education system".' The government has promised a 'lifetime skills guarantee' with the offer of free further education courses to adults without A-levels or the equivalent. Yet Ms. Cavendish insists 'The challenge [for the government] is to make them good enough ans to offer people who didn't enjoy school something better the second time around' and she says: 'Until now, the UK has not done this well.' And she argues that in the 'UK ministers must fight their urge to centralise'.

The trouble is that anyone in the UK can set-up as a joiner without any qualifications. Yet in Germany you can't be a carpenter or plumber unless you have mastered a trade doing an apprenticeship of about three years, often followed by evening classes. The handwerk curriculum is also guided by master craftsmen who know the job, and not what Ms. Cavendish calls: 'pseudo-academics'.

She viciously compares the two systems saying: 'In contrast, vocational training in the UK is a Wild West. There are a bewildering array of more than 12,000 different qualifications. Students are often jammed through courses in which "competition", not actual learning, commands the fee. Sub-contracting is rife, making it hard to monitor quality. There are some excellent courses; but also mis-selling. Good further education courses have also been denuded of funding with their teachers paid less, on average, than their counterparts in schools.'

It may be argued that the German guild system is a bit 'inflexible', and it could opperate a bit like closed shops. Also in the rapidly shifting situation even a gold standard apprenticeship may not last a lifetime. Yet surely it offers a better set-up than we've got now with all kinds of chancers and scallwags passing themselves-off as tradesmen in this country. This decline in workmanship was brought forward with Margaret Thatcher's attack on the trade unions in the 1970s and 80s, and the replacement of the one-to-one traing on the job with the 'pseudo-academics' and the prioritisation of classroom learning.

The 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was clearly aware of this vast gulf between practical know-how on the job and speculative classroom efforts to solve problems when he remarked to his student Maurice Drury: 'You think philosophy is difficult enough but I can tell you it is nothing to the difficulty of being a good architect. When I was building the house for for my sister in Vienna I was so completely exhausted at the end of the day that all I could do was go out to a "flick" every night.'

Based on his own building site experiences and observations, Wittgenstein noted the language games employed by building workers giving orders and obeying them in building a wall: such as for example shouting 'brick' and not 'bring me a brick' and so forth to his mate (see his Philosophical Investigations). Classroom learning creates a completely different language game which somehow lacks the quality of the practical situation. In Wittgenstein's terms they are two distinct 'forms of life' and two different 'language games'.

The snobbery of the middle class will naturally continue to prefer the full time graduate degree as the ideal. But it will still not help when we want to get the roof fixed.

*********************************************

Orwell's Politics and the English Language

From THE LANCETT:

Richard Horton

ALSO ON THE THE ORWELL Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/TheOrwellSociety

The Orwell Society - Home | Facebook The Orwell Society. 1.4K likes. The Orwell Society aims to promote the understanding and appreciation of the life and work of George Orwell. Join here:... www.facebook.com

GEORGE ORWELL, in his 1945 essay Politics and the English Language, wrote that “to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration”.

The Moscow press briefing held last week on the Russian COVID-19 vaccine quickly turned into a platform for national rivalry. The research, led by scientists at the N F Gamaleya National Research Centre for Epidemiology and Microbiology, found encouraging evidence of an immune response using their prime boost strategy of a two-component, human recombinant adenovirus vector-based vaccine. The study was small, non-randomised, uncontrolled, and did not include those most at risk of severe disease. The Russian team recognise these limitations and are proceeding with large randomised trials. The first results were released by Russian President Vladimir Putin on Aug 13. “I know that it works quite effectively”, he said, “forms strong immunity, and I repeat, it has passed all the needed checks”. At last week's event, more big claims were made. The “poorly researched approaches” by “western” nations were criticised, and one speaker challenged western governments to respond to these alleged concerns—“would you please show your citizens” evidence about the safety of western vaccine candidates given the “poorly developed platforms” you are using, he said. “It doesn't make any sense to use poorly researched approaches”, he argued. His view was that a human adenovirus vector was safer than a chimpanzee adenovirus vector (the basis for the Oxford COVID-19 vaccine, for example). A press conference to present the results of a scientific study became the venue for renewed Cold War conflict.

Russia isn't the only country to use COVID-19 as a tool to fight perceived adversaries. US President Donald Trump routinely refers to SARS-CoV-2 as the “China virus”. He is seeking to amplify the American public's fear of China to wound his opponent in the current presidential campaign. In Latrobe, PA, on Sept 3, President Trump suggested that, “Joe Biden wants to surrender your jobs to China”. The message is clear—China is America's enemy, it is the cause of a pandemic that has destroyed the US economy, and the policies of the Democrat candidate will only strengthen America's chief international competitor. There is not one shred of evidence to support these claims. The twisting of language in public discussion of the pandemic is now standard fare. “Thanks to the efforts of Operation Warp Speed”, said President Trump in Wilmington, NC, on Sept 2, “we remain on track to deliver a vaccine very rapidly, in record time”. He has suggested a vaccine might be available by the end of October—an important claim given that the US election will take place on Nov 3. Yet there is no possibility that a COVID-19 vaccine will be ready for public use before the US election. Orwell's reflection that language is used “with intent to deceive” in “the sordid processes of international politics” could not be more apposite.

***********************

English speakers: Grappling with the Grammar

 by Brian Bamford

SOME time ago my co-editor, partly-what jokingly, questioned my spelling and grammatical abilities, and I was reminded of this when more recently a commentator and meticulous Marxist complained in a P.S. 'You can at least take the trouble to spell my name correctly.'
 

The name, Charles Charalambous, had a French ring to it and, to be honest, I had some trouble getting it right.

 'FORGET GRAMMAR' & start 'acquiring a vocabulary'

As it happens I'm just reviewing a book entitled 'The Conspiracy of GOOD TASTE', and I was researching what the art critic Wyndham Lewis had had to say about vulgarity, slang and what he calls slum city English, as well as his thoughts on art and architecture.  On this very subject of the English language Lewis in his essay 'MEN WITHOUT ART' commenting on H.L. Mencken's treatise, The American Language, had cause to write:

'English is of all languages the simplest grammatically and the easiest to make into a Beach-la-mar* or pigin tongue.  Whether this fact, combined with its "extraordinary tendency to degenerate into slang of every kind," is against it, is of some importance for the future - for it will have less and less grammar, obviously, and more and cosmopolitan slang. - Mr Mencken is of the opinion that a language cannot be too simple - he is all for Beach-la-mar.  The path towards analysis and  the elimination of inflection, has been trod by English so thoroughly that, in its American form, it should today win the race for a universal volapuk.  Indeed, as Mr Mencken says, "the foreigner essaying it, indeed, finds his chief  difficulty, not in mastering its forms, but in grasping its lack of form.  He doesn't have to learn a new and complex grammar; what he has to do is forget grammar.  Once he has done so, the rest is a mere matter of acquiring a vocabulary".'

I suppose that I became more aware of the limited forms of English grammar, my mother tongue, not at school but while living in Spain and trying to get my head around Castillian Spanish using a book entitle 'Colloquial Spanish', while at the same time working among people speaking Valenciano [a form of Catalan] in the 1960s, yet I hadn't realised that English has this special quality through its limited grammatical form which lends it a vitality and richness that adds to its universality.  Wyndham Lewis warns 'There is, it is true, the difficulty of the vowel sounds'  It seems that according to him 'Standard English possesses nineteen distinct vowel sounds: no other living European tongue except Portuguese', so Mr Mencken says, 'possesses so many'.  Modern Greek, it seems, 'can boast only five'.  The answer, according to Lewis, is the neutralised vowel, which he says 'supported by the slip-shod speech-habits of the native proletariat, makes steady progress' in America.  

Perhaps, it occurs to me, this formless grammar of English may explain why the Brexit lobby triumphed in the referendum.  Wyndham Lewis writes that:  'Watch your vowels should be our next national slogan!'  And he adds, 'The fatal grammatical easiness of English is responsible, however, for such problems as these, as much as the growing impressionability of the English nation, and the proletarianization, rather than the reverse of the American.'

Hitherto, while England was a powerful empire, run by an aristocratic caste, its influence on speech and even the psychology of the American ex-colonies was paramount.  Yet today, the tables have been turned and cultural domination has for long been coming from Hollywood and elsewhere across the pond.  Lewis foresaw this in 1934 saying:  'the cinema brought the American scene and the American dialect nightly into the heart of England, and the "Americanising" process is far advanced, "done gones," "good guys" and 'buddies' spout upon the ips of cockney children as readily as those to the manner born of New York or Chicago: and no politically-powerful literate class any longer now, in our British 'Banker's Olympus,' to confer prestige upon an exact and intelligent selective speech.'

BREXIT, 'Airstrip One' & '1984'

Wyndham Lewis well understood the proletarianision of the anglo-saxon people in which he grasped, in the 1930s, that '...if America has come to England, there has been no reciprocal movement of England into the United States: indeed, with the new American nationalism, England is deliberately kept out: and all the great influence that England exerted formall - merely by being there and speaking the same tongue and sharing the same fundamental political principles - that is today a thing of the past.' 

It would seem that this process is now well developed and should progress further as we associate  ourselves more closely with the United States and Trump and his cultivation of American Nationalism.

Later than this in the 1940's George Orwell he portrayed England as 'airstrip one'.  Air  part of Oceania covers the entire continents of America and Oceania and the British Isles, the main location for the novel, in which they are referred to as ‘Airstrip One’.   Within the novel, London is the capitol of the province called Airstrip One, which is itself part of the nation of Oceania. Oceania is one of three world powers, and is composed of the Americas, the Atlantic islands including the British Isles, Australasia, and the southern portion of Africa.  In this novel unofficial language of Oceania is English (officially called Oldspeak), and the official language is Newspeak.

************************************

*   C19: quasi-French, from bêche-de-mer (trepang, this being a major trading commodity in the SW Pacific; hence the name was applied to the trading language)

**  commenting on 'Air Strip One' one commentator writes:  'I'm pretty sure it's a satirical jab at the perceived takeover of Britain by the United States.  Just as in real life the US has filled Britain with its airbases, in the world of 1984 the entire country is seen as just a minor offshoot of US military power, a mere "airstrip" for the USAF to launch their warplanes from. We already know that the United States has taken over Britain; this is stated explicitly at the very start of Chapter III (War is Peace) of Emmanuel Goldstein's magnum opus:'

SNOWFLAKES IN AUTUMN!

by Brian Bamford

THE pears are ripe early this year and are already falling from the trees in the orchards and it's only just Harvest Festival, yet in the political world of the 'loco left' the snowflakes are already drifting all around us.  Someone called Ms. Maria Beatrice Giovanardi has launched a petition online calling on the publisher of the Oxford  University Press to delete words which she, and 30,000 others who have signed the petition, regard as offensive to women.

According to a Daily Star editorial yesterday:  'They want all the slang terms for women banned from the English dictionary,  This includes words such as "bird" and "biddy".'

Logically the Daily Star editor argues:
'Of course there will be those who find terms like these offensive.  But many others - both men and women - will not. 

'And the simple fact is these words are part of our everyday language. 

'You can't start axing them just because they give a select few the hump.' 

The Star editor has a point, because to start axing everyday words would impoverish  the English language.

A nephew of mine has sought to keep certain concepts and words away from his children by strictly censoring the our language and utterances when his kids are anywhere near within earshot. 

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein writes in Philosophical Investigations that the meaning of a word is its use in a language (Wittgenstein 1953, I, sec. 43):

'Words get their meaning by virtue of their relationships with other words and their use.'

Words are tools for expressing meaning in the everyday world.  Those with a schoolmaster mentality may not like that, and they may wish to control our use of language by some centralised diktat, but they will just have to lump it!

Yet the Snowflakes themselves are utterly naive if they think they can destroy disagreeable thoughts by expunging slang words they don't take a shine-to from the dictionaries; words are tools which we use to express our thoughts and meanings in the world.  Words exist independently of their dictionary definitions.  Indeed, Katherine Connor Martin from the Oxford University Press said in response to these detractors that a word 'will not be excluded from the dictionary solely on the grounds that it is offensive or derogatory', adding 'our dictionaries strive to reflect, rather than dictate language.'

Dictionaries in the natural course of things have to be constantly updated to keep up with changes in use of language.  In other words dictionaries follow the meanings and use in the real world, not the other way round.

***************

Di Canio, Football, Fascism & meaningless words

GEORGE Orwell in a section on 'meaningless words' from his essay 'Politics & the English Language', written in 1946 for Horizon, wrote:
'The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies “something not desirable”.'

In the same essay he maintains:
'The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another.'

What follows from this is that a word like 'democracy' is a praise-worthy word, while 'fascism' is a foul-mouthed word. Today, all manner of régimes would want to embrace the title 'democracy', while few nation states, political parties or individuals would embrace 'fascism' as a label. That's what makes the Italian footballer, Paulo Di Canio's statement in 2005 that 'I am a fascist, not a racist' so remarkable, at least to an Englishman. Does it mean that Italians are more honest in their political language or braver or more brash than the English? Di Canio has 'Dux', the Latin for Il Duce, another name for Benito Mussolini, tattooed on his right arm, and is said to have a lot of books about Mussolini on his bookshelves, and in his autobiography he is said to have described Il Duce as 'a very principled individual'. Oh yes, and in 2005 he gave two straight-arm salutes to fans at Lazio, the football club where he was playing at the time.

The appointment of Di Canio to coach Sunderland has certainly upset some folk, and the Blairite MP and former Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, has resigned on Sunday as vice-chairman of Sunderland football club in protest against Di Canio's politics and Durham Miners' Association is about to ask for its Wearmouth miner's banner back from the Stadium of Light. Orwell, in writing about political language, was concerned about people using words such as democracy 'in a consciously dishonest way'. Yesterday, Michael Walker writing a column in the Daily Mail wrote:
'Sentences (in Di Canio's autobiography [2000]) such as: “Perhaps it's because I am right wing, I fascinated by Benito Mussolini”, left Miliband no alternative but to resign from Sunderland's board on Sunday night.' It seems that 'it's a big stride, even for a politician ... though the New Labour man was comfortable with a venture capitalist (Ellis Short, a hedge-fund dealer from Texas) in control of the club'.

Is Di Canio's politics grounds for sacking him? 

This week, co-incidentally, it is 75-years since on March 31st, 1938, the McNaboe-Davaney anti-Communist bill was vetoed by Governor Herbert H. Lehman. That bill, if enacted, would have barred from teaching and civil service positions in New York State all persons advocating the forcible overthrow of organised government, all adherents to Communism or criminal anarchism. If you strive for consistency, believe in liberty and don't enjoy a twisted logic; if like Northern Voices, you've fought against blacklists in the building trade since 2003; or more recently censorship of small publications like NV; and restraints on free speech generally, then it is hard to see how it is legitimate to sack even a bloke like Di Canio because of his politics. 

Whatever happened to Chomsky's Critics?

From Manchester to M.I.T.: How Dr. Rupert Read & Dr. Everett Challenged Professor Chomsky

OVER a decade ago some Manchester sociologists and northern anarchists tried to publish a booklet critical of Professor Noam Chomsky's linguistics, but praising his politics, through the anarchist publishing outfit Freedom Press*. It was going to be entitled 'Chomskys Critics' and had essays by Dr. Rupert Read, Dr. Wil Coleman, John Lawrence, Pro. Wesley Sharrock, Dr. David Francis, Derek Pattison and was edited by Brian Bamford; Harold Sculthorpe, then a member of Friends of Freedom Press, was also involved in the publication and Milan Rai, Chomsky's former political secretary, was asked to contribute; several of these profess to be anarchists of one form or another. The material sent in at first appeared to have been accepted to be published in the anarchist Raven journal by Charles Crute (then editor of Freedom) and an essay arrived from Milan Rai. In order to add interest Professor Chomsky was invited to read Rupert Read's critique and comment upon it, which he duly did in a 3-page letter to the editor Brian Bamford denouncing Dr. Read and the whole project.

Freedom Press was alerted to Chomsky's displeasure and withdrew from the project arguing that the material was 'too academic' and unsuitable for publication by Freedom Press a political publishing house: it is not known if any pressure was applied to Freedom and Professor Chomsky was ambivalent about Freedom's decision when asked. Later the material was published independently by the northern anarchists and Manchester academics as a booklet entitled 'Chomsky & his Critics'. This is now retailing on AMAZON at £45. Two years ago in a public confrontation at the London Anarchist Bookfair, Professor Chris Knight, the radical anthropologist, raised these issues before Milan Rai, along with other misgiving he has about the Chomsky project in linguistics. Northern Voices has been asked to agree to reproduce the original booklet which is under consideration.

Last month, The Global Edition of the New York Times published an article by Jennifer Schuessler entitled 'The linguist who took on Chomsky' about Dr. Daniel Everett a linguist who spent time with a group of people called the Pirahã**, whose members are an isolated group of hunter-gathers who he first visited as a Christian missionary in the late 1970s. Jennifer Schuessler writes: 'In 2005 Dr. Everett shot to international prominence with a paper claiming that he had identified some peculiar features of the Pirahã language that challenged Noam Chomsky's influential theory, first proposed in the 1950s, that human language is governed by "universal grammar," a genetically determined capacity that imposes the same fundamental shape on all the world's tongues.' Thus, Everett became a bit of a popular hero, and was portrayed in the press as a giant killer who felled the mighty Chomsky, after his paper on the Pirahã was published in the journal Current Anthropology.

Dr. Everett's paper, published in 2005, claims that the Pirahã language lacks recursion, along with colour terms, number terms, and other common properties of language. This claim flies in the face of Chomsky's much-cited 2002 paper that insisted that recursion is the crucial feature of universal grammar, and that it was the only thing separating human language from its evolutionary forerunners. Chomsky is an emeritus professor of linguistics at MIT, who wrote the paper with Marc D. Hauser and W.Tecumseh Fitch.

Dr. Everett says 'I'm a small fish in the sea, I do not put myself at Chomsky's level.' Yet, his most recent book, published in March 2012, is 'Language: The Cultural Tool' and he writes: 'I am going beyond my work with Pirahã and systematically dismantling the evidence in favor of a language instinct.' Now there have been even echos of what we experienced over a decade ago with our modest booklet 'Chomsky & his Critics', and now a documentary 'The Grammar of Happiness' accuses unnamed linguists of improperly influencing the Brazilian government to deny Dr. Everett's request to return to the Pirahã territory, either with a film crew or with a research team from M.I.T., led by Ted Gibson, a professor of cognitive science: this is scheduled to run on the Smithsonian Channel in May 2012.

Migual Oliveira, an associate professor of linguistics at the Federal University of Alagoas and the M.I.T. expedition's Brazilian sponsor, said in an interview that Dr. Everett was widely resented among scholars in Brazil for his missionary past, anti-Chomskian stance and ability to attract research money. Dr. Oliveira claimed: 'This is politics, everybody knows that.' Dr. Everett himself has said that he has no evidence of any intrigues against him.

Jennifer Schuessler in her Global New York Times essay writes:
'The debate remains stymied by a lack of fresh, independently gathered data. Three different research teams ... have published papers supporting Dr. Everett's claim that there are no numbers in the Pirahã language. But efforts to go recursion hunting in the jungle have so far yielded no published results.'

Our unsavoury experience in Manchester with a few local scholars and anarchists, around the start of the new millennium, to produce a modest critique in booklet form of Chomsky's theory of language, was so like what Dr. Everett and his colleagues are now experiencing over access to the Pirahã that it may well have been the tip of an iceberg.


* Freedom Press, an anarchist journal and publishing house believed to have been set up over 125 years ago by the famous anarchist and geographer Peter Kropotkin.

**Pirahã (also spelled Pirahá, Pirahán) is a language spoken by the Pirahã. The Pirahã are an indigenous people of Amazonas, Brazil, living along the Maici River, a tributary of the Amazon.

Pirahã is believed to be the only surviving member of the Mura language family, all other members having become extinct in the last few centuries. It is therefore a language isolate, without any known connection to other living languages. It is estimated to have between 250 and 380 speakers.[1] It is not in immediate danger of extinction, as its use is vigorous and the Pirahã community is mostly monolingual.

The Pirahã language is most notable as the subject of various controversial claims;[1] for example, that it provides evidence for the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.[2] The controversy is compounded by the sheer difficulty of learning the language; the number of linguists with field experience in Pirahã is very small.