About the (semiotic) limits of the human language: Discussing the case of Pirahã

On 21 February 2017, the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow hosted a conference devoted to the discussion of the book by Daniel L. Everett that had been published in Russian in 2016 under the title Ne spi – krugom zmei! Byt i yazyk indejtsev amazonskih dzhunglej (Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes [Around]: Life and Language [of the Indians] in the Amazonian Jungle)2. After the conference, video recordings of all presentations made during the conference were posted at the website of the Institute of Linguistics3. This provided an opportunity even without attending the conference to reflect on it in the light of a possibility to understand better the current situation in the humanities, on the one hand, and the relationships between various disciplines (including linguistics and biology) in the historical aspect, in particular in the context of an interest in the problems of semiotics, on the other hand. Several Russian linguists from different cities took part in the conference – most of the participants were from Moscow, but some scholars came to the conference from St. Petersburg, Irkutsk and Kazan. All papers were presented, and discussions conducted, in Russian. This survey will allow the scholars who do not speak the Russian language to get acquainted with the conference materials in the light of the interdependence of the different disciplines mentioned above, in a historical context. Already in the “opening remarks” to the conference (“Opening address: Why does the book have such a resonance?”) – which, de facto, were the first report4 – the then Head of the Institute of Linguistics Vladimir Alpatov stressed that the