Piraha

A very important part of rainforests are the tribes that live within them. Dan Everett, beginning in 1977, started studying the language of the Piraha, 'a small Amazonian tribe'. He went there as a missonary, and after he was able to converse with the Piraha, they ended up enlightening him on religion. While working with the Piraha, Everett realized that linguistics was something that he had a passion for, and he continued to study it, gaining higher levels of degrees within it.
Through his study it has been discovered that the Piraha language has a very small amount of consonants, but ranges widely in tone and emphasis. The thing that is difficult about this language is that there are no words for colors and numbers, and even more difficult is that the language does not have recursion. This means that the words cannot be used in the form of sentences. This seems extremely complicated, and I know that this would be something that would prevent me from having the capability to learn such a language. While I do not look down on the Piraha language, I am glad that the languages that I do know, english fluently and spanish partially, have specfic words for color and numbers. Although it is a lot to remember, I love descriptive words.