Grammar of Happiness

A documentary about linguist Daniel Everett and the Pirahã tribe of Brazil's Amazon basin, whom he first encountered as a missionary during the 1970s. The Pirahã tribe has about 300 members and rejects outside influences. Everett, who has studied them since his introduction to them, contends that their language has no words for colors or numbers, and that it does not employ recursion (building sentences into sentences). He also claims that the Pirahã have no collective memories of ancestors.