johnaugust.com

Great, long, and possibly outdated article in the New Yorker about a tribe whose language doesn’t fit the Universal Grammar commonly believed to be hard-wired in humans. They seem to lack fundamental concepts about anything outside of their immediate experience, which raises chicken-and-egg questions about culture and language.

The article takes on faith the researcher’s prediction that a child of the tribe raised elsewhere would develop normally. I’m not convinced. Cultural and genetic isolation often go together, and it seems reasonable to wonder if the tribe’s extremely atypical language is matched by atypical brain development.