Wes Phillips

"The Interpreter" in The New Yorker, about Dan Everett's work on the Pirah, has generated a lot of discussion on the Interwebs. The MIT linguists, who subscribe to the Chomskyan universal grammar theory, fired back. Now, Vera da Silva Sinha and Chris Sinha, two anthropologists who have done fieldwork with another Amazonian community and who have visited the Pirah, chime in.

It is said that academic fights are so nasty because the stakes are so low, but this one, while spirited, strikes me as fascinating and reasonably civil. Of course, I don't have a dog in this fight.

Via Language Log.