Piraha Language and Crackpot, Academician as Charlatan

there's a language Pirahã language

associated with it, is a charlatan Daniel Everett, who makes all sorts of claims about this language. Like, he discovered that earth is flat.

Everett eventually concluded that Chomsky's ideas about universal grammar, and the universality of recursion in particular, are falsified by Pirahã. His 2005 article in Current Anthropology, titled “Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã,”[3] has caused a controversy in the field of linguistics.[2][4] Though a supporter of Everett in the early part of Everett's career, Chomsky refuses to further discuss Everett's works and has called him a charlatan.[5] The June 2009 issue of the Journal of the Linguistic Society of America, Language, contains a nearly 100 page debate between Everett and some of his principal critics.

charlatan, that's right. The citation of that remark is “Folha de S.Paulo, 1 February 2009.”, which is a newspaper in Brazil.

in academia, there are lots charlatans. The driving force, is, of course, to put yourself forward.

in fact, charlatans are academician almost by definition. A con artist in the intellectual arena.