Last year, translationebuzz.com first mentioned the amazing discoveries of language associated with the Amazonian Piraha tribe. In the Chicago Tribune this week, the main linguist behind the discoveries is profiled and these discoveries are contrasted with commonly accepted linguistic theory. In short, the Piraha tribe doesn't have in its language what was believed to be a universal trait of human language--the use of recursives.

A Scottish professor illustrated that at a recent gathering with a nursery rhyme: "This is the cat that chased the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built."

In those lines, the word "that" is what linguists call a recursive device. Recursion allows humans to link various parts of our experience: to direct others to not just any cat, but to the one that chased the rat.

The device enables humans to pool knowledge and skills, share hopes and ambitions, build sophisticated societies and elaborate technologies.

As this has the potential to change the way linguists think about language, it also has the potential to affect the way developers of machine translation and natural language processing solutions think about language.