User:John Yunshire

A useful thing to consider:

“Ask him to point to where he thinks the monkey is going to go.”

“They don’t point,” Everett said. Nor, he added, do they have words for right and left. Instead, they give directions in absolute terms, telling others to head “upriver” or “downriver,” or “to the forest” or “away from the forest.” Everett told the man to say whether the monkey was going upriver or downriver. The man said something in reply.

“What did he say?” Fitch asked.

“He said, ‘Monkeys go to the jungle.’ ”

— John Colapinto, The Interpreter - Has a remote Amazonian tribe upended our understanding of language?, The New Yorker, April 16, 2007