Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes

Part memoir, part linguistic bombshell. Everett arrived among the Pirahã of the Brazilian Amazon as a missionary and stayed for decades as a linguist. His claim -- that Pirahã lacks recursion, the property Chomsky declared the defining feature of all human languages -- detonated a controversy that reshaped the field. The book is also a remarkable ethnography of a culture organised around the "immediacy of experience principle," with no creation myths, no number words beyond rough approximations, and no desire to adopt outside knowledge. Whether Everett is right about recursion remains debated, but the challenge he posed to Universal Grammar forced the nativist camp into a sustained defensive response that has not fully resolved.