Amazon adventure and the origins of language

It's hard to describe Daniel Everett, so here are some facts about him. He's American. He was a Christian missionary. His goal in life was to tell people about Jesus. He spent 25 years, on and off, in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, talking to a tribe of hunter-gatherers called the Piraha. This is one of the most remote, undeveloped places on earth. The Piraha did not want to know about Jesus. Not even a bit. Everett could not even begin to convert them.

Instead, they converted him, in a way. He began to speak their language, a language that is unusual to say the least. He wrote books about them. He made what he thinks is a key anthropological discovery.

And now, because of this, he's in the middle of a bitter row with one of the world's premier intellectuals, the formidable Noam Chomsky.

Everett is 60, but looks a bit younger - sort of like Russell Crowe's older brother. He's stocky, with red hair and a beard. As I shake his hand, I think of all the terrible, wrenching things this man has been through. Something awful happened to him when he was 11 years old. Two dreadful things happened to him in the rainforest. One ended well, the other very badly. Perhaps the worst thing of all happened in a flat in the middle of Manchester. Something had been nagging away at Everett for a long time, and he decided to share it with his wife, Keren. The moment he did, his life fell apart, and would never be the same again.

He doesn't talk, or act, like a celebrated intellectual. You'd think he was a lumberjack or a farmer. In fact, his father was a real-life cowboy. He grew up in Holtville, California, a desert town on the Mexican border. "Very remote," he tells me. "It's an extremely hot place. Everyone knows everyone." He says that, in Holtville, people can have a very parochial attitude. "My brother fears the rest of the world," Everett tells me. "He sees plane wrecks, terrorism, and all sorts of things happening that don't happen in Holtville. He's never understood why I travel. He's never understood why I go to the Amazon.

"The first time I showed my family pictures from the Amazon, they said, why in the hell would you want to do that?"

Actually, Everett's childhood was far from easy. His parents, who were teenagers when he was born, split up when he was "less than two years old". His father drank heavily. One day, when he was 11, his mother, who was a waitress, fell on the floor during an evening shift.

"She was carrying a plate of food, and had an aneurysm," says Everett.

He talks about his father. "He started drinking when he got up, and didn't stop until he went to bed," he says. "When I was a teenager, we spent our weekends in Mexico, drinking and doing whatever we wanted." I pursue this line of questioning. He says he lost his virginity at the age of 14, in a Mexican brothel. "It was about 10 dollars," he says. "It was really very strange. The first time, it was my father who introduced me to the person. He kept banging on the door, saying hurry up."

Everett took his mother's death hard. "It's marked me more than anything else in my life," he says. "There's not a day goes by that I don't think about it. November 22 1962." She was in a coma for three days. He was not allowed to visit his mother in the hospital. "They had the idea that I shouldn't be able to do that. So I never saw her again after she went to work that day."

As a teenager, Everett drifted west, to San Diego. He found himself dropping acid and walking into a church, to see what it felt like to be tripping in a church. He met the Grahams, a family of missionaries.

They had a teenage daughter, Keren, who wanted to be a missionary herself. Everett fell in love with Keren. When he was 18, they got married. They had three children in quick succession. When he was 26, Dan and Keren Everett, and their children, Shannon, Kris, and Caleb, were on their way to the heart of the Amazon to spread the word of God.

The Everetts were assigned to the Piraha (pronounced pee-da-han), a tribe whose lifestyle was very close to the way they would have lived thousands of years ago. They ate fish, monkeys, insects and rats. They gathered manioc, a type of tuber, but they had no system of organised planting or farming. They had very little idea of the past or the future - they lived in the moment. Their life expectancy was short - 40 or 45. Lots of them died of malaria. But, Everett noticed, they seemed to smile all the time.

Over the next few years, Everett began to speak the Piraha language. It was incredibly hard work, because, to learn a language, you have to be able to think like the people who speak it. And, for a Westerner, it's hard to think like a Stone Age hunter-gatherer. At one point, Keren and Shannon became delirious with malaria, and Everett had to put them in a boat and try to get them to a doctor, many miles away.

He was desperate. As he cast off, the Piraha kept asking him if he could get them some tinned meat. He couldn't believe it. He managed to get his wife and daughter to a doctor. They lived, but it was touch and go.

Another time, a young Piraha mother died, leaving a baby. "No other woman would nurse the baby," says Everett. "So we decided to take care of her." He fed the baby cow's milk. "She seemed to be getting better after several days. The father came. He said, 'I want to see the baby'. We said OK. We went for a walk. So we came back to the house after our walk, and smelled alcohol very strongly, and the baby was dead. And I asked what happened. And they said they gave it alcohol, because it was in a lot of pain, and they didn't want it to feel pain any more." Everett clears his throat. "That was really hard, and upset me at various levels emotionally. But as I thought about it, it's just… life is hard out there. They're better at recognising when a person has passed the point of no return. There's no buffer between them and death. They see everyone die." He says, "I think they decided that she was suffering, that there was no one to take care of her, and that our efforts were against nature in some way. And so they ended her life. It's not a decision that we would make in this culture. But I think they thought they were doing the right thing." For a while, Everett kept on telling the Piraha about Jesus. But the fact that he had not met Jesus proved to be an impediment. Because the Piraha live in the present, they can't get excited about the past.

They have no creation myth of their own. They have words for grandparents, but no words for great-grandparents, because they never live long enough to meet their children's children's children. "One day," he says, "a group of the men came to the house and said we know why you're here. You want to tell us about Jesus. He said that other missionaries before me had tried to tell them about Jesus. He said we don't want to be Americans. We are Piraha. We don't want Jesus. We want to drink and we want to have many women, and we don't want to live like you. But we like you, so if you want to stay here, you can stay here. But just don't talk to us about Jesus." After this, something strange happened. Everett began to think that perhaps the Piraha were "morally superior" to Westerners like himself.

They were happy, fatalistic, at one with nature. He began to lose his own faith in Jesus. At the same time, he studied the Piraha language with fanatical intensity. No Westerner has understood it as well as Everett. In fact, it's entirely possible that no Westerner has ever got as close to a hunter-gatherer tribe as Everett. He says it's an incredibly hard language to learn, because you have to think in an almost completely alien way. The Piraha have only three vowels and eight consonants. They have no words for colour, no comparatives (like bigger or smaller) and almost no words that relate to the past. Their sentences are very short. They get straight to the point. They have to. This deep in the jungle, doing anything else would be to court danger. They call their own language "straight head". They call other languages "crooked head". Everett began to write about the Piraha language. As part of his missionary training, he'd studied linguistics in Brazil and the United States, and had believed Noam Chomsky's thesis that all human languages were similar to each other because they were hard-wired into our brains, and that the way they differed from animal communication was that humans used constructions known as "recursives" - concepts within concepts. If I say: "Dan Everett, the man I'm talking to, the man who went into the jungle and tried to teach the Bible to the Piraha, and ended up losing his faith, is sitting opposite me," I'm using language recursively.

Try as he might, Everett could find no evidence of recursive constructions in the Piraha language. They never placed one concept inside another. Think of a passage from a James Ellroy novel: "I talk to Dan right now. Dan, he went in the jungle. I saw him. Dan said he loves Jesus. Then Dan said he doesn't love Jesus." Chomsky, the Freud of the linguistic community, maintains that all human languages contain recursive constructions - that they are part of our "universal grammar", and that this is what defines us as human. But the Piraha just don't seem to think like that. "Either Chomsky is wrong," Everett tells me, "or they are not human." In 2002, Everett took a research post in linguistics at the University of Manchester. One day, he decided to tell his wife about the thing that had been nagging away at him - he no longer believed in God. "I remember when I finally said, 'I just don't believe in this stuff at all any more', and she immediately got up from the table, walked over to the phone, and called our children. She left me three weeks later. I had to go to Germany. I came back, and she had left. This tension was never resolved. We got a divorce."

 For a while, two of his children did not speak to him. One daughter "would come and go". After almost two years, Everett's phone rang. It was his son. He now talks to his family again; his wife and both daughters are missionaries. Everett logged on to PerfectMatch.com, where he met his second wife, Linda, a lawyer from Tennessee.

He's still battling it out with Chomsky. "I think that he has allowed himself to wall himself off from anything that contradicts what he's saying," says Everett. "He thinks that I am a shallow intellect and a charlatan. He has used exactly those phrases. I don't like it. But, you know, if I were to say, well, you're also a shallow intellect and a charlatan, then it just becomes name-calling. I would never say anything like that about him. I would say that he's an extremely intelligent person who's done a lot of good for making thoughts about language more rigorous, but that his ideas have passed their sell-by date."

Meanwhile, Everett is spreading his own ideas like mad - in his memoir Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes, his recent academic treatise Language: The Cultural Tool, and a forthcoming documentary, The Grammar of Happiness, for which he has returned to the Amazon. In any case, this spat with Chomsky doesn't seem like much of a fight. "My father was a very tough guy - he loved to fight all the time," says Everett. "And I haven't sought out controversies. But as I get into controversies, I figure these are pretty tame by the standards of his fights."

'Language' by Daniel Everett is published in Britain by Profile Books, RRP pounds 14.99

How to speak Piraha

The Piraha have no words for colours. Instead they have phrases like biisai ('it is like blood' - red) and xahosai ('it is unripe' - blue or green).

The word xaooi (pronounced 'owee,') can mean skin, foreigner, hand or Brazil nut.

The Piraha can tell stories or recount jokes simply by using different forms of whistling. The tribe call this Xapogaopisai ("high-speaking").

Socially emollient words such as "hello", "thank you" and "sorry" do not exist in Piraha.

The Piraha make a sound not found in any other language: the linguolabial lateral double-flap. To do this they vibrate their vocal chords, 'flap' their tongue across the roof of their mouths, and pass it between their teeth. This can denote 'milk', for example.