Christopher Ryan wonders after reading Dan Everett's book on an Amazonian language:
The Pirahã language is free of expressions like hello, goodbye, how are you?, I'm sorry, you're welcome, and thank you—utterances that, as Everett puts it, "don't express or elicit new information about the world so much as they maintain goodwill and mutual respect." Rather than a verbal expression of appreciation for a favor or gift, "The expression of gratitude can come later, with a reciprocal gift, or some unexpected act of kindness…" Similarly, Everett says, "They have no words for I'm sorry. They can say, 'I was bad,' or some such, but do so rarely. The way to express penitence is not by words but by actions."
Ryan's conclusion:
[W]e're taught from a very young age to, "Say you're sorry!" even when we're not at all sorry for hitting that snot-nosed kid who stole our lunch money. The 6-year-old who learned to apologize on command later has little compunction about stepping up to the microphones to beg forgiveness from God and country ("and my lovely wife, who deserves better") when circumstances require the appearance of contrition. There are times, lots of them, when saying sorry and being sorry are mutually exclusive.
Barbara King's takeaway from Everett's new book, Language: The Cultural Tool:
There's no language gene. There's no innate language organ or module in the human brain dedicated to the production of grammatical language. There are no meaningful human universals when it comes to how people construct sentences to communicate with each other. Across the languages of the world (estimated to number 6,000-8,000), nouns, verbs, and objects are arranged in sentences in different ways as people express their thoughts. The powerful force behind this variability is culture.
The Dish 