Piraha - a unique language?

The linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky is best known for his thesis that all languages share an underlying common grammatical structure. Languages do of course differ in their 'surface' grammar. When you learn French or Spanish, you have to learn a whole new way of adjusting the new words you learn to make correct sentences. Chomsky claimed that, despite this, all languages were variants on a theme, having in common certain types of grammatical features. For example, one such alleged feature is recursion. A recursive language is one that allows you to embed structures in other structures. For example, you can have "John has a nice house", "John's sister has a nice house", "John's sister has a nice house which she bought recently", and so on.

According to the linguist Daniel Everett, the Piraha language lacks even this basic feature along with words for numbers and colours. In this short video, you can find out more. For those interested, here's a long article from the New Yorker magazine with more details.