Review of the book How Language Began: The Story of Humanity’s Greatest Invention:
In grad school, I remember hearing about Daniel Everett as a controversial and somewhat heterodox figure in the world of linguistics, but until now I had never read any of his work.
Everett’s controversial claim is that a lot of the structural and especially syntactic features of human languages that are commonly thought to be universal, and without which language would be unimaginable, are actually not universal and not fundamental at all.
He bases this claim on his observations of the languages spoken in the Brazilian Amazon, especially Pirahã. Continue reading Did Homo erectus have language? According to Daniel Everett, they invented it