DON'T SLEEP, THERE ARE SNAKES

Although Daniel Everett was a missionary, far from converting the Pirahas, they
converted him. He shows the slow, meticulous steps by which he gradually mastere
d their language and his gradual realisation that its unusual nature closely ref
lected its speakers' startlingly original perceptions of the world. He describes
how he began to realise that his discoveries about the Piraha language opened u
p a new way of understanding how language works in our minds and in our lives, a
nd that this way was utterly at odds with Noam Chomsky's universally accepted li
nguistic theories.