Slashdot Mirror
One, Two, Many - Language Shapes Thought
Chuck1318 writes "The Piraha tribe in the Amazon has only three words used in counting, that mean one, two, and many. A psychologist testing them has found that they are unable to accurately perform tasks involving quantities as few as four or five. He says that this shows that, at least for numbers, language shapes and limits how people can think." I can't help but be reminded of the gully dwarves from Dragonlance when reading this.
"We have it...on the authority of African explorers that many Hottentot tribes do not have in their vocabulary the names for numbers larger than three. Ask a native down there how many sons he has or how many enemies he has slain, and if the number is more than three, he will answer 'many.'"
[ George Gamow, "One, Two, Three...Infinity" 1953 ]
my computer can only count to one, that never stopped it
When I tell an object to delete this, am I killing it or telling it to kill me?
Beings aspergers AND pulling chicks... I enjoy the challenge!
"One. Two. Many. Lots."
Of course as soon as I saw the title all I could think about was Detritus the Troll.
Or the Detritus the troll of Discworld. But once he learned binary, he had an easier time.
the second language i'll teach my kid is hexadecimal.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
... can top that: they have one, two, many, lots.
I always suspected that the native name of your town, and the local features affected your accent (explains Liverpool and Stoke)
Perhaps they are not used to takss involving more than 3 items because usually it goes like this:
Hunt
Kill
Eat
Bang over head
Shag it
Sleep
Now I think some of thier ways of going about business is even more refined than ours.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
So, let me get this straight. These people have no concept of numbers, and upon testing them for mathematical skills, you found them lacking?
Why does that not surprise me.
It's not so much that language shapes thought, it's entirely the other way around. If you and your tribe have never discovered mathematics, it's only natural that you have no words to express them. These people are making it sound like if we recite a list of number names we will become genius mathematicians.
"One, Two, Many, Many-one, Many-two, Many-many, Lots!" -Detritus (might be in Guards! Guards!)
Karma: Good! Napster: Baad!
Or one, two, three, many, many-one, many-two, many-three, many-many, many-many-one...
It's its. They're their, there. You're your. Who's whose? A looser loser, though those two too threw through the trough.
. . . after all, all they have is CAR and CDR.
1. Locate sub-average intelligent tribes in the deepest jungles
2. Learn their language
3. Propose and conduct some humiliating "research" that even a monkey could succesfully complete
Many. ??
Many. ??
Many. Profit!
The Incas (I believe) were the first people to come up with the concept of Zero. Before that, (and during that time) nobody else could understand no objects. They were the first ones to come up with the word, but that was due to being the only ones who understood it. Intersting question now that I think of it is do these tribes understand zero?
There are 0 spoons
Please no more replies I just can't keep track of them all.
Good thing that these people don't compete in the Games ... I'd hate to be the one that comes in Many-d
Exercise caution when modding this message up: the author acts like a jerk when his karma is excellent.
We need to teach more women the french phrase "Menage A Trois" early on in life.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
This idea has been around for a while, originally, insofar as I know, called the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. It's neat to see it strongly confirmed in some capacity, though.
I have discovered a truly remarkable sig which this margin is too small to contain.
Well....I guess they couldnt tell me what post number this is....
Momma told me that sigs are for the devil
Terry Pratchett: Men at Arms, page 132, footnote:
"In fact, trolls traditionally count like this: one, two, three...many, and people assume this means they can have no grasp of higher numbers. They don't realize that many can be a number. As in: one, two, three, many, many-one, many-two, many-three, many many, many-many-one, many-many-two, many-many-three, many many many, many-many-many-one, many-many-many-two, many-many-many-three, LOTS.
All we really need is '0' and '1' - they are wasting their time with "many." :)
if you want to have the same kind of fun these guys did, try out some of his thought experiments.
Obviously, this should be self-evident. Sadly, it seems this is not the case.
The Mean One
Two
???
Many
--- and then another '???' for them?
Access to information and the willingness to acquire information shapes how you think.
/. article if the author is relating all this to intelligence or not. I do believe that willingness to learn is what creative thinking is about.
This tribe has no access to information and is therefore secluded (in thought and potential for creative thought). Creative thought EXPLODED upon the advent of the printing press - and actually before that with monk transcription.
You could say it takes language to be able to assemble the ability to access information, but I don't see that.
I can't quite understand from the
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
of course langauge shapes thought. it is almost impossible for assembler programmer with 10 year experience to grasp lisp. Oh well.. even switching from C to ocaml is pretty hard.
#
#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
#
Language is the uniting factor in society because it is the basis for complex thought (just try to plan out your day while thinking abstractly); different languages, and dialects, have different grammatical structures that lead thought patterns to be constructed in different ways. Even for me, with German as a second language, I still notice that when i am in Germany (currently i Berlin), and think in German I compose thoughts and analyze my environment differently.
:)
I can only imagine that one in a completely different society would have a very different thought pattern. The common roots of Western languages indicates a similarity in thought, and people who learn foreign languages are far more adept at understanding and integrating with that society.
Similarily, in computer languages different grammatical structures lead different programmers to analyze and solve problems differently: i.e. functional vs imperative. Add the context-sensitive nature of human languages, and this becomes substantially more complex.
Ok, thats longer than my normal post, but this is a really interesting topic
Language in this case has certainly limited their ability to express concepts. Their brains, however, will still recognize the existence of four or five things. Unfortunatly the limitations on their language will keep them from expressing verbally that knowledge. It could even bar their comprehensive abilities.
the byproduct of years of oppression by the white man
Actually I think its the other way around. Thought shapes language. They don't think about numbers other than 1, 2 or many, so the language they developed only contains these specifiers. And in a sense, 2 and many are probably the same thing to them, depending on what units your counting (2 tribes is the same as many people). I wonder how they trade or use money with only 1, 2, or many.. Does the article say if they have a zero? (I didn't RTFA)
there's no ogre -> try troll instead (or invasion force in itself)
"Nae Kin! Nae Quin! Nae laird! Nae master! We willna be fooled again!"
There are FOUR lights!
10: PRINT "Everything old is new again."
20: GOTO 10
I find it a bit amusing that in College on our physics class we were teached exactly that, "one, two, many molecules" when simplefying gas environments etc...
But theyre pretty good at fooling earnest anthropologists who only want confirmation of their pet theories ...
If we are every told we can use the registered name Spam for junk mails always "Piraha". How many junk mails did you get.... many.
Crows can distinguish one, two, three, many. Crows are able to count hunters entering an area, unless you bring "many" people in, in which case the crows forget after a few of them leave, that there are more around.
Thank you, nameless Arabic and Central American mathematicians, for inventing the zero!
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Training yourself in mathematics, in particular Goedel type reasoning, will really give you notions on limitations of normal language.
Anyone?
Obligatory HHGTTG reference "The best way not to be unhappy is not to have a word for it" If you can't be bothered to say 'the other Sheltenach's Juple-berry bush is a more mauvish shade of pink' then you don't care!
You see, in American English, you have only one word for Indians, unlike in other languages where they can actually tell the difference between Native Americans and the people who invented the decimal system, grammar, and many other useful things, like "Karma".
The article states he wasn't testing them for mathematical skills--just their ability to remember four or five items, or remember how many lines were on a piece of paper. They couldn't do these things accurately in quantities greater than three. It is surprising. I'd think that just visually people of any language could group items up to six at least.
I have seen same problem in (US) English also when words do not represent what exactly supposed to be.
With us or with them; there is no neutral ground.
Credible threat; How credible (little, none highly)?
Imminent danger; Like Hurricane Charly or collision of earth and moon
Coalition of willing; How willing or paid
...
I'm surprised nobody's made the "reduced language = reduced ability to form mental concepts" link with Orwell's '1984'. This seems like some strong evidence that it might actually work.
=Smidge=
So in essense this seem to support the Sappir-Worph hypothesis (http://venus.va.com.au/suggestion/sapir.html) that the language strongly affect our ability to think.
This makes one wonder if a another language would give us the ability to better reason about other things. Would we be smarter if we had a better language in which to think?
There is an artifical language called lojban (http://www.lojban.org/) based on predicate logic but which is meant to be used as other "real" languages (compare with eg. esperanto, interlingua and swahili). The question is, would native speakers of lojban be better a rational thought? As far as I know there are no native speakers of lojban but what would happend if I raised my (hypothethical) children to speak if from birth?
Mathias
"were unable to reliably tell the difference between four objects placed in a row and five in the same configuration, revealed the study."
The items used were 2 mini Ipods, the new iPod, an iPaq and a miniDisc Player.
They were then asked if they preffer ATI or NVidia cards, and what FPS would you get if you enabled 4xAA on a GF3 running at 1024x768 Doom3 will full detail, demo 1.
I would like to see when of those researchers get bitten by something really wierd in the jungle, see who can find the plant that will save his life then.
Forget protecting the rain forest, how about protecting these people from the advanced of these researchers with nothing better to do than subject them to numeracy tests.
1 dangerous animal, 2 dangerous animal, lots, run!
You see, don't need more than that.
Does this overthrow the idea that we can cope with 10 items because we have ten fingers? Maybe fingers moulded the language which moulded our own capabilities. If we counted in base 100 would women finally remember their own mobile phone numbers?
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
For some reason, I just picture this owl on a tree being asked "How many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie pop" and the Owl replies:
"One, two, many. Crunch, many"
"One, two, and a shit load." - Darrel Hammond
Many fluently multilingual people will tell you that they are a slightly different person when they speak a different language.
I'm fluent in English and Japanese, and I can attest to this. In fact, there have been occasions when I was out of touch from Japanese speakers for a long time, and I began to miss my "Japanese self" because it hadn't had a chance to surface for so long.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
In this 1949 book, the "Newspeak" language is designed exactly for that purpose. For example, they don't have a word "bad" - only "not good" (which is supposed to be the opposite of bad, but isn't).
They use language control for thought control.
" he sat opposite an individual and laid out a random number of familiar objects, including batteries"
I think we may have already gone to far... must be using them to power their HP RPN calculators that they need now they realise what dunces they are.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
If this tribe calculated 0, 1, 2, many, many 1, many 2 or something like it there would be no trouble. Just confusing for base 10 users.
But it seems this tribe doesn't have/need the concept of higher numbers.
What I would like to know if they understand the concept of zero. The invention of 0 is a usually considered a pretty big step in western culture and one arabs like to claim as their contribution to the world. If this tribe wich can only count to 2 understands 0 then it would make an intresting find.
They may not have a need to count higher numbers but me thinks it is very important to know the difference between 1 fish and 0 fish.
What may also be intresting is that if you need language to count and animals can count does that mean that all animals that can count have a language. And not just a language of "food" "danger" "sex" but a language with "1" "2" "3" etc?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I've heard stories of tribes in Australia having the same "problem".
They couldn't count above 3, but if they had 200 sheep they could instantly tell if one was missing.
Maybe they know exactly how many sheep they have, but no way to verbalize it. Simply because they have no need to.
1. One 2. ??? 3. Profit!!!
In that case everyoune should get a broad language set.
Something like:
English(unstructured), Latin(very structured), Japaniese (More contextual)
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
And I'm sorry you're such a nerd
(kidding! I play DnD too!)
Read jack phelps dot net
But later in the same article we find this: "There are not really occasions in their daily lives where the Pirahã need to count,"
This statement is in direct opposition to the stated theory. In this quote, the scientist is saying that the causitive arrow points the other direction. They don't have much need to count -> their language doesn't contain those words.
To my mind, their failures on the tests are more parsimoniously explained by their simply not having had much practice with a technique (counting) they don't use much and their language merely reflects this.
Hm,
watching the language wars (and even more the procedural versus oo versus functional versus aop versus what ever wars) its obvious that the programming language you use most forms your thought.
People not using perl likely don't like perl, likely because they can not think in perl.
Same for any otehr programming language.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
This is not surprising; several studies on language have had similar findings. For example, a article I read last month in an issue of Discover ties the level of technological advancement with an increasing need to define more colors.
For example, in 1st world countries, the basic ROYGBIV colors are defined as well as variations within (Gee, honey, magenta or fuschia curtains? Chartreuse or pea soup, even!). In one South American tribe, there are only two words, those essentially describing "hot" and "cold" colors.
What I find most intriguing is whether or not it is the language that limits the culture, or the culture that limits the language. After all, as a culture, civilization grows and comes into contact with others, it is only reasonable that some things are assumed by each. Language is always one of the first aspects of a culture to change.
Gully Dwarves! Now that's a nice callback. The human mind is quite powerful. Even if the language of the local culture maybe limiting, the mind works within that framework at an amazing pace. Try this exercise: THE PAOMNNEHAL PWEOR OF THE HMUAN MNID Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?
"Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity." - David Gelernter
Seems like these guys are the masters of Newspeak! War is peace! Freedom is slavery! Ignorance is strength! Oh wait, they don't even have the words for the party slogan...
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
I'm not a psychologist, but to me there's nothing earth-shattering here. There are other instances of people who have words for a wide variety of shades of green (that normal Americans can't differentiate) but who use the same word for the colors we call orange and red.
But, even knowing that, is anything so dramatic going on? "Western" people with the proper training and experience could tell the difference at a glance between a screen full of C programming and a screen full of FORTRAN. My grandmother would struggle with that task. It would just all look like gibberish to her. Likewise, someone experienced in wine tasting can describe in detail the differences between two wines most of the rest us couldn't even tell apart.
A lot of what's necessary (or at least very helpful) in learning about programming or wines is the specialized language. When I'm told that the difference between two wines is that one is "fruitier" than the other, I've got something to look for. The nebulous and complex experience of tasting wine is brought into my understanding a little because I can now use a word to identify a part of what I'm sensing.
My point is, the idea that language affects how we think and what we perceive is not really all that novel.
If you live in Eden and pick some fruit when you get hungry, the concept of harvesting quanties of fruit, trading them for other items or currency, amassing wealth of stuff...all of these things would be foreign.
It boils down to one mango, two mango, an extra mango for you, more than I can carry...I think I'll take a nap.
So who are the dummies?
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
She could count to 3.
o.O Must be the British humour. 'Shag' is too British a word, I should have used 'fsck' or:
:-) aaah well, Flamebait it is. :-/
unzip
fsck
sleep
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Me> wait!? The fourrrthhhhhhhh thing? That's crazy talk! Which 3 should I do?
Seems like no-one takes the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis serious these days, but I always thought it makes sense.
Why? It seems to me that all manner of spontaneous word creation (and outright theft from other languages) is hobbled if it were true. I mean, if thoughts of 0 or 3+ things were important to these people, they would have that thought long before they came up with a clean word to express it. As another poster joked, a computer isn't hobbled by only having 0 and 1 at its disposal. I think it is more correct to say that these people are not Turing-complete (for whatever reason) rather than blaming the language.
thats grammar nazi to you...
doubleplusirrelevant
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Did it never occur to them that the reason for this is the other way round??
It's imaginable that the reason they only have these three words for quantity is that the whole tribe - genetically similar and all - carry a common hereditary disposition which deprives them of understanding larger quantities in the first place.
That would naturally lead them to not contrive more ordinal numbers.
One of my favourite examples, as a Norwegian stranded in the UK, a country where people simply does not get the concept of candy with ammonium chloride, is how to talk about it.
In the UK, the word "candy" has mostly gone out of use, and usually refers to brown sugar or alt least "old fashioned" sweets based on brown sugar. Instead you'd refer to the different types of confectionary directly, with most of the sugar based confectionary grouped under "sweets".
Now, ammonium chloride based candy is most definitively not sweets. Though it is always fun to trick Brits into chewing Turkish Pepper or some other Scandinavian ammoium chloride based candy... :)
The word "confectionary" similarly doesn't really cut it - it's recognised as a grouping, and if you asked people if thy wanted any confectionary they'd wonder what kind you were talking about.
Scandinavian languages on the other hands have words for this, since it's an integral part of our culture. In Norwegian you'd talk about "godt" or "smaagodt", referring to small sweets, bits of licorice, small chocolate pieces or candy full of ammonium chloride, as well as assorted sour stuff.
But what would a usable equivalent be in the UK? I usually end up resorting to candy, but Brits then tend to assume that since I'm foreign I'm probably resorting to US English, and talking about sweets...
The idea that your language determines the way you see the world (the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) has been around for many decades, and has been the subject of many experiments and much discussion. Language has generally not been shown to affect perception or thought, altho there are occasional special cases where there does seem to be an mild effect.
Example #1: Different languages divide up the color space differently. For example, Russian divides the color space covered by the English word "blue" into two separate color terms. However, language doesn't appear to affect the way people perceive color. For example, when researchers ask informants to judge color chips as "same" or "different," there appears to be no effect at all from the division of color space in the informant's native language.
Example #2: Chinese doesn't have a way of marking counterfactual or hypothetical statements as some languages do. One researcher (Bloom) had speakers of English and of Chinese read the same story in their respective native languages, and the speakers of Chinese did in fact have trouble answering whether such-and-such really happened. Bloom took this as evidence that language strongly affects thought. But another researcher said that the problem was just a bad translation into Chinese, and repeated the experiment with a better translation. Now the Chinese speakers had no difficulty saying "Of course such-and-such didn't happen."
On the other hand, the tense/aspect system of Russian does appear to have an effect on the way that speakers evaluate the temporal relationships in non-linguistic pictures of events. So it is occasionally possible to tease out a case where language does seem to have an effect on non-linguistic thought.
In sum, a blanket statement that "language determines thought" is much too strong. Even if the finding of the article mentioned above is accurate, the weight of the evidence seems to be that these cases are the exception, not the rule.
BTW: I'm sure that somewhere in this discussion, someone is going to bring up the idea that the Inuit (Eskimos) have some huge number of words for snow. That claim almost always gets trotted out in this kind of context. This is a kind of academic urban legend that just won't die. The linguist Geoff Pullum thoroughly debunked this whole fable some time back, and traced the series of misunderstandings and exaggerations which had given rise to it. In fact, it appears that Inuktitut has just two words for snow.
Samuel Delaney's classic SF book "Babel-17" explored how language shapes behavior. A clandenstine group who wanted assassins who wouldn't question what they were doing created an artificial language and raised children in it. The language had no word for "I" or "no". It was all commands, such as "You will do this." They had no way of saying "No, I won't.", because the concept didn't exist in the language. I recently re-read it after many years and it's still an incredible read.
There's a lot more that's interesting about the Piraha (pronounced "pee-da-HAN") language and culture. See the paper "Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Piraha" by Daniel L. Everett.
Everett argues not so much that language influences thinking, but that cultural values influence both. He's a strong proponent of preserving endangered languages in order to preserve cultural knowledge.
Researchers also reported that the sunjects had great difficulty singing along to rock around the clock, and couldn't remember which Rocky movie was which.
You can only dupe this one more time before it becomes many.
click me
Maybe their brains are not capable of numbers greater that 2. Therefore their language reflects that limitation...
...use this numbering system:
Goatse, Natalie Portman covered in hot grits, Beowulf Cluster, Alot*.
* Note the spelling.
That's why you should never hesitate to invent your own definitions if the current ones don't fit your needs. People desperately need to learn not to look at the dictionary as a bible. It's the key to true intelligence.
ok, so maybe they don't care for the difference between 4 and 5 or 4 and 7 - its all just 'many' a kind of antifloccinaucinihilipilification if you will
One to Many... hmmm, Does this mean that the Piraha tribe are wise in the ways and can conceptualize with ease relational databases and one-to-many relationships in lookup tables for example?
Common Lisp people seem to behave in a way that is akin to the Borg:
they study the various new things that people do with interest and then
find that it was eminently doable in Common Lisp all along and that they
can use these new techniques if they think they need them.
-- Erik Nagggum
languages shape the way we think, or don't.
-- Erik Naggum, comp.lang.lisp
``Lisp has jokingly been called "the most intelligent way to misuse a
computer". I think that description is a great compliment because it
transmits the full flavor of liberation: it has assisted a number of our
most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts.''
-- "The Humble Programmer", E. Dijkstra, CACM, vol. 15, n. 10, 1972
You may find this conceptually simple, but real Lisps decided long ago
that the human language tendency to have verbs and nouns draw from the
same lexicon, but mean different things according to context actually
works tremendously well. Lisp was developed in the English language
community. Algol and several other languages that fight against this
tendency in human languages were developed in non-English communities.
If you do not like the ability to spell a verb and a noun the same way,
take it up with English or German, not with languages that evolved with
designers and users speaking the respective languages.
-- Erik Naggum
High on the list of things Lisp offers that most other languages botch is
the idea that (+ x 1) for any integer x should return a number bigger than
x in all cases. It seems like such a small point, but it's often quite
useful. -- Kent M. Pitman
> The continuing holier-than-thou attitude the average lisp programmer...
There are no average Lisp programmers. We are the Priesthood. Offerings
of incense or cash will do.
-- Kenny Tilton at c.l.l
Dalinian: Lisp. Java. Which one sounds sexier?
RevAaron: Definitely Lisp. Lisp conjures up images of hippy coders,
drugs, sex, and rock & roll. Late nights at Berkeley, coding in Lisp
fueled by LSD. Java evokes a vision of a stereotypical nerd, with no
life or social skills.
One of the major attractions that Common Lisp offer me personally is that
there is just so much in and around it that I would benefit from. I came to
the point of SGML expertise where (I thought) I would not be able to develop
any further, where there would be nothing more for me to learn, and I found
myself always helping people without the reward of learning anything new.
This exhausted me and contributed strongly to abandoning 6 years of
concentrated effort on something I have additionally come to think of as
fundamentally braindamaged. I decided to work in an area where the
probability of dealing with people who were smarter than me was nonzero and
the Lisp and Scheme worlds offer this in abundance. To work in areas where
the sum total of knowledge is acquirable in your youth may seem exciting to
the youth, but to realize that you have wasted your most absorbent days on
something that would bore you when you exhausted the supply of ideas is
nothing but painful to the old.
-- Erik Naggum
"Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material."
- Alan Kay
[Emacs] is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is
beautiful.
-- Neal Stephenson, _In the Beginning was the Command Line_
Just because we Lisp programmers are better than everyone else is no
excuse for us to be arrogant. -- Erann Gat
In Lisp, if you want to do aspect-oriented programming, you just do a
bunch of macros and you're there. In Java, you have to get Gregor
Kiczales to go out and start a new company, taking months and years
and try to get that to work. Lisp still has the advantage there, it's
just a question of people wanting that. -- Peter Norvig
"Conceptually FORTRAN remained on familiar grounds in the sense that its
p
Dyslexics have more fnu.
Dragonlance is one of the worst series of books written on earth. Gaaah! Yuck!
Think about it, this study assumes a tribe can't count because they don't have words for numbers.
Or perhaps the reason they don't have words for numbers because none of the tribe can count and therefore have no concept on which to construct a word. They can't count and neither could their parents or there parents' parents etc.
Nobody's perfect.
Nobody lives forever.
Nobody can be in two places at once.
Nobody can be in travel faster than the speed of light.
Nobody knows everything.
Nobody can fool all the people all the time.
Nobody is liked by everyone.
Nobody can have it all.
I want to be a nobody!
Doubleplusgood. How long before the republican party starts work on 'newspeak'? War is peace (Iraq), freedom is slavery (Patriot Act), ignorance is strength (George Bush)...
The Piraha tribe in the Amazon has only three words used in counting, that mean one, two, and many.
But those crazy Amazonian tribes have 15 words that mean "doing the nasty"! You know it's true. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
In reply...
Example #1: Further studies have shown that while they could tell the difference when first shown the colours, they had trouble remembering the difference if there had no unique word for it.
Example #2: point well taken.
For those (like me) who had never before heard of Gully Dwarves, here is an informative link that discusses their counting abilities.
Check out Chad's News
"Science Express" has its own paraphrasal of the paper at its website but you have to pay for the full text. There is also a link to "supporting online material" that includes a free document describing some of the methds and results.
Subject to the caveat that I did not fork over the $$$ for the full article, I'd say the conclusions appear unremarkable. Humans raised in cultures that lack counting can't count beyond 3, and also can't express the concept. I see no experiment that indicates causality between what I consider two aspects of the same phenomenon.
This means that they can't count up to 42. Obviously they must be descendants of the second spaceship.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
in Steven Pinker's "The Language Instinct". IIRC, it has been shown that human babies can be shown to recognise numbers (changes in numbers of objects, for example) courtesy of their rather low boredom threshold. An excellent read.
Even rabbits can count to four!!
-Markvs
46. The Hobo smiles, his eyes glaze over, and he burps. "Beware the man who has lived longer than the Wasteland."
But then, aren't we all. I just thought when I read your sentence that there was no better verification of the "News for Nerds" line. Well, no better except the number of people now destined to begin discussing Dragonlance in this thread.
my computer can only count to one, that never stopped it
Actually, your computer can only count to 1.
-- I could tell right away that she was impressed with my HUGE Slashdot Karma.
Is it just me or is this a long paper about something everyone already knew? George Orwell's book 1984 extensively covered an extremely plausible use of language control to shape what it is possible for an individual to think. Heck, entire U.S. industries are devoted to nothing more than massaging numbers to help people know what they should think (it's called statistics). Kerry leads Bush (in U.S. presidential elections) by 48% to 42%. Ralph Nader only has about 7%, so only idiots who want to throw away their vote will vote for him. 9 out of 10 dentists prefer Crest toothpaste. More than 85% of desktop computer run Microsoft Windows as their OS, so it must be better. It takes a true genius to suddenly discover (and write an impressive paper) that numbers may shape human thought!
I'll even go one step further than the startling theory of the original authors. Cultural needs shapes the evolution of language, and of thought. Amazon Indians who are in survival mode of hunt-and-gather do not need high mathematical skills. Seriously, what would they need a number greater than 2 for? Ook, how many days since we last ate?, It has been 3.7 days, mostly due to a 56% drop in acceptable game in the area. If we extrapolate from our current situation, in about another 1.5 days we will suffer a 80% decrease in operational efficiency due to insufficient food. I wish to propose that we may have hunted this area out and need to move to the next valley 8 miles over, where the game density is much higher. If they did need a number greater than 2, they would have invented it. People make fun of Eskimos and their many words for snow. Think of our society and how many words for computer we have, and the different connotations they have. Is it a Linux box, or a Windows box? A game machine, a home unit, a business computer, or a uber-133t-box? We have invented the words because there was a need. Words that aren't needed by a society disappear (when did you last hear someone say phithee, as in Phithee my good sir, may thou tellest me the road to Whenst?).
A much better paper covering language is here (A View of Man's Linguistic Development).
Hmmm... perhaps I should write a nice looking scholarly paper on this. Even better, I'll web-publish it and shock everyone with this new theory. Call the television networks!!
We never bothered to make the proper distinction between various 'Indians' simple because we didn't quite care, or we didn't care because we lacked the proper language ?
This stupid language, tricking us into exterminating entire populations !
In fact certain Inca tribes worshipped the zero, leading to the inevitable question, Is nothing sacred?
This is funny but...the Inca were a metropolitan culture, not a tribal society. They worshipped the Sun, though they did let the cities they conquered worship whatever gods they liked as long as they admitted those were minor gods. You also could not expect to get a good job in the bureaucracy unless you went to their administrative college in Cusco and accepted decimal arithmetic and learned to properly pray to the one and only god. This involved chanting from sunrise to sunset on the longest day of the year, and planning your cities with east to west streets and north to south avenues. Cusco is still centered around the old Inca buildings and the grid they established, and the Inca language Quechua is still spoken.
Oh, and the Inca didn't invent zero, they got it from the Maya who are amoung the three groups thought to have independently invented zero: the Babylonians, the Hindus, and the Maya. What's really interesting is that the Maya were also metropolitan but didn't have any technology to speak of. But while the Inca had technology from the city states the conquered, they were missing something the Maya had, a system of writing. The Inca had a numbers system, but their books were all pictorial, and sadly were all burned by the Christians. In Peru, I read about one native who was found hiding an Inca book a hundred years after the ban who had his scrotum slowly pulled off by a christian priest before being executed for the crime. The monk who got the book did write a somewhat detailed account of it before it was burned so we have at least some record.
This is a very old theory in Linguistics, commonly known as the Whorfian hypothesis (look for Sapir-Whorf). It predates 1950; it dates from the 1920s.
It has been discredited many times, as believable as it sounds. It is however a fascinating story; B.L. Whorf was an amateur linguist who was professionally a insurance claims inspector specialising in fire-related claims. He noticed that several fires where started when workers through cigarette butts into drums that in English we call "empty", even though they contained invisible and explosive fumes. Whorf realised that the workers knew this technically, but he wondered if being forced to think of the drums as "empty" changed their view of the drum. He did lots of research on languages of central america, and came up with interesting theories because many of these languages (eg Hopi) appear to have very different verb tenses; Whorf proposed that this gave their speakers almost-Einstein-like views of time and space.
A numbers of tests have been down over the years. Some languages have only a few words for color, for example. However, experiments show that this does not impair speakers of these languages from differentiating different shades of colors.
Why, languages, obviously!
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Actually, this raises an interesting point for communication in general. Research was done that found no way to mark dangerous materials as dangerous in a way that any culture discovering them could understand. Similarly, SETI has problems working out what signals to look for from aliens, since they have no idea how aliens might communicate, except to hope they do it like we would.
Even if these people cannot manage big numbers, I wonder if research into how they TRY to do it would have interesting implications for other research.
BLACKADDER: This is called adding. If I have two beans, and then I add two more, what do I have?
BALDRICK: Some beans.
BLACKADDER: Yes... and no. Let's try again, shall we? I have two beans, then I add two more beans. What does that make?
BALDRICK: A very small casserole.
BLACKADDER: Baldrick, the ape creatures of the Indus have mastered this. Now try again. One, two, three, four. So, how many are there?
BALDRICK: Three.
BLACKADDER: What?
BALDRICK: And that one.
BLACKADDER: Three... and that one. So, if I add that one to the three, what will I have?
BALDRICK: Oh! Some beans.
Interesting. My guess would be that as no requirement for being able to solve the problems posed by the testers had been pteviously experienced, the necessary neural pathways had not been formed. I don't see this as a limiting factor, but it is a different one. Do we get the tests in reverse? How do the "researchers" fare with tasks like living in the jungle for two days? A year? Would they eat the yellow snow?
I just have to ask... are they sure it's the lack of language that limits their counting, or is it the lack of couting that limits the language?
They can just be born "stupid" and not very good at counting... thus they formed their language to reflect that.
Is their language limiting their intelligence or could it just be that their intelligence is limiting their language?
Why is there no option to let all previous posts be modded funny :/
:)
Posted AC, guess why
If you want to know what's the biggest number you can conceive of, use flash cards with differenct numbers of dots. Flash them for a tenth of a second or so, quicker than you can count. See what's the highest number you can accurately identify. For most people, it's between 4 and 7 IIRC, which makes us no better than crows.
He says that this shows that, at least for numbers, language shapes and limits how people can think.
This is a chicken/egg thing. Aparently there are many words in the language of the Inuit that we would translate as snow. Maybe we don't care less about the different snow types than the Inuit do. So maybe the tribe simply doesn't (need to) care about exact figures greater than 3. Maybe they're less uptight than we are. Maybe.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
> BTW: I'm sure that somewhere in this discussion, someone is going to bring up the idea that the Inuit (Eskimos) have some huge number of words for snow. That claim almost always gets trotted out in this kind of context. This is a kind of academic urban legend that just won't die. The linguist Geoff Pullum thoroughly debunked this whole fable some time back, and traced the series of misunderstandings and exaggerations which had given rise to it. In fact, it appears that Inuktitut has just two words for snow.
Yeah, but I'll bet English has at least 25 words for {thing, thang, wang, yang, dong, prick, weeny, pecker, johnson,
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I don't agree that Whorf is "discredited ", but the post is thoroughly informative.
In the spanish language nouns are either feminine or masculine. Examples:
la flor = the flower : feminine
el carro = the car : masculine
Being spanish my primary language, I have always wondered if such language gender distinctions give us preconcieved notions of the roles that men or women must take in society.
Anyone care to enlighten me on this?
Cheers,
Adolfo
Is there a minimal set of characteristics that if a language has it no longer affects thought like this? Kinda like Turing completeness: if a language meets critera a,b, and c, it's functionally as "good" as any other language.
The Piraha tribe in the Amazon has only three words used in counting, that mean one, two, and many.
Geez, what a two-bit language.
"BTW: I'm sure that somewhere in this discussion, someone is going to bring up the idea that the Inuit (Eskimos) have some huge number of words for snow."
;-)
I was just about to
I live in Denmark alongside people from Greenland. I'm pretty sure there are a number of words in Greenlandish for snow, ice, water and their many possible combinations. I.e. a word for ice you can walk safely on and another for ice you'll fall right through.
Just the other day I watched a documentary on an African tribe. They had just one word describing "spring, rain, sprouting plants and wet soil". No more precision is needed in that place!
There you go. I have never heard of Geoff Pullum but I guess I could take a walk and ask the next Greenlander I meet!
How do you count to 7 in crow?
Keep in mind that counting theory is relatively new and the addition into language reflects that. Many languages did not count past three (instead of two). Three is generally understood to be about the average maximum number you can tell just by "looking" at it, without having to quietly count it (save your bragging if you think you can do 4 or 5)
There are examples of this in English, still. The words describing items #1, 2, and 3 are distinctly different than the rest: first, second, and third rather than just appending a "th" on the end of the number like fourth, fifth, etc. We still put commas after every 3 digits in numbers.
What's more interesting is how thought shapes language, not vice-versa, IMO
INTRODUCTION: COUNTING SHEEP.
Once upon a time there was a sheep farmer who had ten small barns, in each of which he kept five sheep. When asked how many sheep he had altogether, he replied "many", for people in those days counted on their fingers, and no one had ever thought of counting beyond ten.
Every morning he would drive his sheep over the hill and through the woods to their pasture, where they assembled in five fields, ten sheep to a field. The farmer, who was of a reflective bent, saw here a curious and beautiful law of nature: "Ten barns each with five sheep, and then five fields each with ten sheep!" Unfortunately this law did not always hold, and when the wolves howled on the hill at night, it failed quite often. The farmer had an explanation for this: "The howling of the wolves greatly upsets my sheep, and the laws of nature, like the laws of man, are often disobeyed when agitated spirits prevail".
The farmer realized that to make his law universal he would have to modify it thus: "When tranquillity reigns, ten of five turn into five of ten."
We today who know arithmetic would say that the farmer's law, though true enough in his particular situation, isn't a very good law by scientific standards. It needs to be "factored" into two laws, the first being the simple and very general law that xy = yx and the second a more complicated and specialized law having to do with sheep and wolves. The farmer was indeed aware that xy = yx, at least in the case of 5 and 10, but what he could not see is that the essential condition for xy to be yx has nothing to do with sheep or wolves or tranquillity but is simply that the total number of sheep remain constant. One reason he couldn't see this is that he lacked any conception of the total number of his sheep; that's because in those days there were no numbers beyond ten, just "many".
There are three morals to this tale. The first is that it's not enough just to ask whether a law is right or wrong - we should also ask whether it gets to the point. The second is more subtle: If the point escapes us, maybe it's because we lack the raw materials of thought needed to even conceive of it. The third is not subtle at all: learn to count!
We have learned to count beyond ten sheep and even beyond three dimensions, but we still are under a very stifling conceptual limitation in not being able to count beyond the two types of phenomena that we call classical and quantum. This paper will set these two among many more. It will do this by teaching us some new ways to count cases, such as how to keep counting when the count goes below zero! This will provide us with the raw materials for thought we need to clearly see some crucial points that quantum philosophy has so far missed, notably the significance, or rather the insignificance, of the wave function, and the essentially acausal nature of quantum processes.
Seastead this.
"The discussions that assume that language determines thought carry on only by a collective suspension of disbelief.
... A graduate student once argued with me using the following deliciously backwards logic: language must affect thought, because if it didn't, we would have no reason to fight sexist language (apparently, the fact that it is offensive is not reason enough)."
-- Steven Pinker, The Language Instinct, chapter 3, Mentalese, p. 46. Pages 46-57 are his repudiation of the "evidence" of this idea. Very compelling reading.
Yes.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, however, even though long proven wrong, has shaped the thinking of a whole generation of people, including those in the feminist movement, proposing "politically correct" words (female forms e.g.) hoping that they would induce a new thinking.
Language may be a result of knowledge and cultural concepts, thus reflect it. But it does not shape it, because - and that's known as de Saussure's work - the word is not equal to the concept. Whether you call something a small feline animal or a cat, it's still the same entity that you are thinking of. Whether you call someone a nigger, an african american, a 'brother', a black person -- the name does force us to change our thinking. (It may prompt us to think about misconceptions, of course!)
Steven Pinker's book "The Language Instinct" is a good read.
Haven't read Feigenson's original article. But it seems painfully obvious to me that given all the other linguistic evidence, the Brazilian tribe might simply have established a culture of arithmetics that doesn't allow you to count more than two things.
..for how could they know the distinction between the number one and the number two?
By deduction, they must have seen that a "one" that is not so "many" is "two", therefore have grasped basic algebra ( 1 < 2 < many).
They are good actors me thinks (or bad thinkers).
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
and why should it be impossible that they simply cannot count to (think / grasp the concept of) more than two, and that they _therefore_ lack the words for more than two ?
why should it be the other way around ?
i know this is probably politically incorrect, but i believe the point is valid.
(btw, i'm not registered here and i dont feel like doing so, thats why i post as an AC)
that if they counted as 0, 1, many, they would all become professional DBAs.
Language is a virus.
Try removing forms of "to be" from your speech and see how far you can go without saying "I am," "you are," and "they have." It is nearly impossible, and also very liberating. As you change your speech, you also change your perspective, because language has become our interface to the outside world. There has never been a stronger influence in defining how we percieve our world around us.
zosX
zosxavius photography
What episode is this from? I quickly went through a bunch of TNG episodes, but couldn't find this mentioned anywhere.
"This is totally insecure, but very convenient."
Does this mean I can steal a tribesman 4th daughter and he wouldn't notice?!!
Psychology is hard because the methodolgy of conducting experiments is rife with traps for the unwary (or what is the the same thing, for the ideologically driven).
Half of the problems come from poorly designed experiments, and the other half come from "knowing beforehand" what the results SHOULD be. See the history of intelligence testing. A very reasonable conclusion based on this history is that intelligence is the capacity to navigate & make use of one's cultural norms, practices, and knowlege. Note this is separate from the TRUTH, RATIONALITY, and COHERENCE of those norms, practices, and knowledge.
[Question, is it possible to measure that intelligence in the abstract without referencing specific the specific instances of that capacity? Is it possible to distill representative norms, practices, and knowledge that represents a baseline capacity of human beings to navigate their cultural norms, practices, and knowledge that is at the same time NOT a reflection of the cultural norms, practices, and knowledge that the the persons who are administering the test need to navigate their cultural norms, practices, and knowledge?
Anyone want to take bets that with a little practice the natives would be able to complete all of the tasks the experimenters set for the natives?
If one accepts the not unlikely possibility that the natives would with practice learn to accurately compare amounts larger than 3 or 4 objects reliably, the premise that language limits thinking falls flat. If anything, it would seem rather that language reflects thinking & that language reflects the demands and practices of environment and social life.
If the natives were unable to learn to reliably compare larger numbers of objects even with extensive practice, then a conclusion about linguistic determinism could be drawn that would have some persuasive power. Otherwise, one only sees the analytical and methodological naivete of the experimenters.
1GB, 2GB, many!
What has amazed me studying foreign languages is how the same thought is expressed a different way depending on the language. Given you and your native tongue, when you listen to the other language you can understand the intended message but you just would not have thought of expressing it that way.
Also, how a message is expressed also is influenced by that culture.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
We can build environement specific intelligence -- like chess programs. However, a chess program does not know to make an omelet.
HPC for Primates. Read Cluster Monkey
It is meaningful to say that our language informs our thoughts, because, in most cases it's the medium for our thoughts. Whenever someone says, "I understand it, I just can't articulate it," what they really mean is, "I don't understand it." Thought and language, for us, are inextricably linked.
The reverse, however, is also true, in that language evolved for us to be able to express and clarify our thoughts. This logically has to be the case.
This is one of those areas of study where a layman can have no idea of the absurd depth of literature available, or the sorts of ridiculous theories spawned, and yet still be able to say meaningful things because it's all pretty much been wanking. We know very well what the case is, but why?
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Some cases have been known of children raised with no language at all, often by animals. They have severe developmental delays.
"How many?", asked Bupu.
The gully dwarf in front of her trembled with fear,"One, and one, and one", he counted on his fingers and very soon used them all up.
"How many!", shrieked Bupu grabbing him by his torn and ragged lapels.
"Two. Not more than two," he quivered.
"You sure?" she glared at him authoritatively.
"Me sure. Not more than two," he pronounced with conviction very unusual in a gully dwarf.
"You go tell Big Highbulb. Me go with wizard," Bupu nearly threw her companion down the corridor as she hauled her bag towards Raistlin.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
So how do they keep track of their kids if they have more than three?
... the tribe invited the researchers for a dinner where the tribe has found the researchers to be unable to tell edible roots from extremely poisonable ones.
"Do you know how crankshaft works?"
"Yes."
"Then tell it."
Things are by no means as clear cut as you make them sound. For example, the study discussed in this article provides some support for the hypothesis.
It is well known that primitive people can't count. That is one of the prime things differenciating star gazing civilizations from others. I always doubt any numbers coming out of Africa. Whether the Hutus in Rwanda killed 50 people or 500,000 or 5 million, will forever be an open question.
Oh well, what the hell...
As someone who speaks this dastardly Slavic language (but loves it!), there is nothing like trying to remember to conjugate and decline according to number when you have the added complication of the dual. That's right. Slovene counts in ones, twos and manys. Yes, they can process numbers greater than 3, but when speaking or writing the language you can actually compress sentences conceptually by context of number (for lack of the linguistic term). For example. I can say, 'Vlak vozi v Ljubljano" meaning "One train goes to Ljubljana." No ordinal number needed (but there are no articles in Slovene so it means "the/a train"). But I can say "Vlake vozista na Bledu" which means "Two trains go to Bled." Further, I can say "Vlaki vozijo v Dunaj" which means "Trains (3 or more) go to Vienna." You would refine with an ordinal number the previous sentence, but everyone knows you don't mean that it is 2 trains but three or more, and in the second example it is exactly 2 trains that go to Lake Bled. Just a example of weird little things that pop up in moderately 'small' languages. Serbian has an odd counting system as well which suffers from the counting of objects different by kind (eggs for example). This is not unlike Japanese.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
>language shapes and limits how people can think
Wasn't that the whole point of IngSoc?
"Time is an abstract concept devised by carbon-based lifeforms to monitor their ongoing decay." - Thundercleese
yeah boyyyyyy, one more acorn and I'll be a "Manyionaire"
The Kanka-Bono tribe amazingly have no words for basic concepts like "wireless router," "dual opteron server blade," and "network print server." When our team of researchers presented them with these items, they merely tried using them to break open coconuts. The obvious conclusion is that, since their amazingly primitive language lacks the words for these items, their tiny non-Caucasian brains are simply unable to form distinctions among such obviously diffferent objects. Thus the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was vindicated. Then they ate our Dell service rep. And there was much rejoicing.
I am Sartre of the Borg. Existence is futile.
There was a study to determine if ravens can count and apparently ravens can count to seven. While ravens are watching, a single researcher walks in to a hut stocked with food. Then after a short while he walks out and leaves the door open. After the researcher had left then a raven would fly in get some food and fly out. The experiment would then be repeated with the addition of one person through each iteration. The first person in the team opens the door and walks in; then a short while later each person in the group walks in one by one with a short time gap in between entries. Then they walk out one by one with a similar gap in time. The ravens successfully waited for the last one to come out until the total reached seven. Any number of researchers beyond could walk in to the hut but when the seventh one walked out a raven would try to fly in to the hut only to turn around and fly out after encountering people inside. Then on each successive exit (after the seventh one) the raven would try to enter the hut.
To be fair, anyone with more than two nuts is a freak, regardless of how many they actually have.
They could count to five and with help from a friend, 25 i.e.,"hand of hands", after that it was "many, many".
**SPOILER**
Turns out they were space travlers, whose ship crashed and they degenerated into the wild state due to centuries of trying to survive.
The Complete Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper is still sold and has all three books in one.
Never trust a man wearing a coat and tie!
After all, the concept of one, two, many beers is a male thing. The women probably could tell the difference between a child with 10 fingers vs one with 9.
Here is a link to the full appendix about newspeak, often not present in various online versions of the book.
Please read that appendix; it will be one of the most important appendix you will ever read.
When you are sure of something, you probably are wrong (search for "Unskilled and Unaware of It").
They think trolls are stupid because they only count one, two, many, but the counting system is:
one, two, many, many-one, many-two, many-many, many-many-one, many-many-two, lots...
Language follows culture, not vica-versa. When electronic mail arrived, we didn't run around flumoxed because there was no word for it. We invented a word. For a while, people were pretty bad with email, even though there was a word for it, because it's a difficult thing to understand. Then, after a few years, everybody "got" it.
I assume this is the same thing. Nomadic tribes don't deal with a lot of things, because everything they have they have to carry. So there's no need to count above two. If suddenly you ask a guy to keep track of four things, he's gonna have trouble: not because he doesn't have a word for it, but because he's going to have difficulty differentiating between the four things. It's no different than if I moved from driving a car to driving a semi trailer with no training. I'd get some of it, but important, non-intuitive concepts would be lost on me, and I'd probably crash. It's not because I don't have a word for them.
This is like the Inuit people and their umpteen words for snow. We outsiders can recognize the different types of snow with only a little practice, but since we don't get snow 8 months of the year, there's no need for it. English speakers understand foreign concepts like "esprit d'escalier" (the french term for all the cool things you wish you would have said when you leave somebody's house) or "bokeh" (the japanese term for the photographic effect that occurs with large aperatures in which the foreground is in sharp focus and the background is out of focus and fuzzy, thus drawing the eye towards the focus), even if we don't know what to call them.
It's experience that drives language, not vica versa -- althought the part of the brain that employees language is also responsible for the most critical human activity: symbolic logic.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Ethnology is full of traveller's tales which usually boil down to three cases: a) The ethnologist is a white German lady filmmaker and the stud is dusting his dong because the batty crone pays him to, b) The ethnologist is Margaret Mead and the chief of the Gilhoulies is having her on, or c) The ethnologist has delusions of linguistic competence, and -- whilst demonstrating photography to the savages -- translates the perfectly sensible Papuan expression "Hey, that looks like my reflection in water! How you do dat, bub?" as "Funny fellow in water" -- thereby "demonstrating" that Papua New Guineans have no sense of self! Give me a break! I'll draw a major coda under the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis when I see this result vetted by independent grad students who can FIND the same tribe.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
My guess is they are Pokemon-like critters that run around only saying their name ("Guuuuuuleeee! Guuuuuuleee!"). But I'd like some clarification.
Thanks
Anonymous Kev
Proudly posting as AC since 1997
(Finally got a dang account in 2004)
No, I really do understand it. I just can't explain what it means. :)
In all seriousness, I would disagree in some cases (perhaps these are only exceptions...) where someone can conceive what is happening but either is not good enough at communicating, or is a horrid teacher, and so can not articulate.
I [think I] know this because I had a number of professors that suffered from this very affliction.
Linux: The world's best text-adventure game.
Actually, he's right. The Incas did invent the concept of zero, it's just that the idea didn't spread because their culture died out before it could make a contribution to ours.
I wrote a dippy paper about the history and importance of zero. You can read about it here.
Wikipedia credits Indian mathematecians for it. They called it Bindu.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero
Studies* in the eighties found that when tribes were regularly presented with tasks which required accurate use of larger integers than existed in the language, they invented them pretty quickly. So language is shaped by need - whodathunkit?!
J.
* No, I can't provide internet sources, but they're detailed in the bibliography of "The Blank Slate" if you really want to know about them.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
Wasn't Whorf the cunning linguist who first retranslated Shakespeare back into the original Klingon?
BTW: I'm sure that somewhere in this discussion, someone is going to bring up the idea that the Inuit (Eskimos) have some huge number of words for snow. That claim almost always gets trotted out in this kind of context. This is a kind of academic urban legend that just won't die. The linguist Geoff Pullum thoroughly debunked this whole fable some time back, and traced the series of misunderstandings and exaggerations which had given rise to it. In fact, it appears that Inuktitut has just two words for snow.
#define HUGENUMBER = 2
Problem solved, Inuit do have HUGENUMBER words for snow.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Huh... and I always heard that the reason it took so long for zero to be discovered was that they had to wait for a mathematician to get caught stealing twice. :-P
First, I am dubious as to the accuracy of the study involved. The article states that "The Pirahã also failed to remember whether a box they had been shown seconds ago had four or five fish drawn on the top." The article does not, however, state how long the box had been displayed, whether or not the Pirahã had been told that the fish were significant before the box was removed, and whether or not it had been properly conveyed to the Pirahã that different quantities of fish in numbers greater than three were significantly distinct.
.org domain, I will select Americans for my sample study. The Pirahã may then show an American a box containing a fish and ask what species it is. I personally know little about species distinction in fish, especially those in Brazil, and would fail to answer the question correctly. The point is that it has never been necessary for me to have this information to function in my society. Would it be academic of the Pirahã, then, to assume I was less intelligent for not being able to recognize an Epen Nomin?
/-xáagahá/. If I were to answer the correct species of fish and fail to use that suffix, would it be correct for them to assume I was not confident of my answer?
;)
To contrast, let us imagine that the Pirahã are conducting a similar study on a member of another culture. As this site is of the
Additionally, the Pirahã have a phrase in their language which indicates a degree of certainty, usually applied at the end of a sentence:
My point here should be fairly obvious. We cannot assume that we know the critical details of the study based upon a web article which, between two columns of advertisements, still only takes two pages (on my monitor, at least).
Second, and more breifly, the assumption that counting capacity defines intelligence is inherently flawed. The Pirahã have no need for counting; this is not to say they are not capable of it. Most Americans don't need to know what a coral snake looks like or that touching the little yellow-and-black frog is a bad thing. This doesn't mean they couldn't learn.
In summary, while the study definitely presents an interesting idea, one must evaluate it critically before accepting it as fact. Mistakes can be made.
That was a lot more than I meant to type. Thanks for the time.
...that ebonics is nothing but a disservice to the black community
They may have only had two words for snow... but those crazy Inuktituts probably didn't have ANY words for "cactus", now did they!
And thus we have proved that environment has an effect on language. Something not really related to this discussion... oh well.
Interactive Visual Medical Dictionary
Douglas Adams had this thought and reused city names for common concepts which don't have a name in the english language.
Check out http://folk.uio.no/alied/TMoL.html for more
If you think of what happens if you go outside the language barrier (by inventing new words). Society quickly thinks that you are mad.
;-)
I've always known I was ahead of everyone
Anyone who has trained a dog or raised a child knows how vital EARLY exposure to stimuli and early education is vital to the developement of the brain. If this tribe has no reason to use math or counting beyond 1,2,many obviously they are not teaching their kids to count beyond that either. When you teach kids numbers you aren't only teaching them to pronounce the words, you are teaching them to count. Someone who grows up without ever having this type of exposure to counting would obviously have a very hard time learning this as an adult.
People seem to be ignoring the implications of this for our own language - something Whorl was very concerned with. If our thought is limited by our language, the possible directions for hypotheses and discovery are also limited (I've heard theoretical physicists complain of this). Further, that thought tends to be over-determined by a judeo-christian metaphysic built heavily into the way this language describes the world. And every year, several languages go extinct - taking with them unique ways of knowing the world.
In a primitive society, im sure that things only come in amounts of one, two, or many. Think about it. And if they're not used to doing something, they can't do it. The two correlate, but the scientists have the causation backwards. Thy don't deal with other quantities, so that don't have words for them and they aren't really good at dealing with them since they don't.
Damn, that's confusing. Sorry.
I would think the people of the Piraha tribe would also be able to pass this test and score higher than the crows. They just can't large numbers to their long-term memory.
(sorry, I just watched momento)
Whorf? Is slashdot read in the Klingon Empire?
Some languages have only a few words for color, for example. However, experiments show that this does not impair speakers of these languages from differentiating different shades of colors.
Like the one men speak?
I read that and I was really surprised. I am a Polish speaker/reader and so is my wife. I left Poland at the age of four but my wife only did so four years ago. In fact to become competent in Polish I took two quarters of Polish at Uni. The other students were Russian/Slavic and linguistics concentrators. It was a very bizarre way of learning Polish I suppose, but before that I felt very inadequate about being illiterate and sounding like a four year old whenever I spoke Polish.
So what I know is that in Polish there are also two words for blue: niebieski and blekitni. (Okay so I had to strip-off the accents because slashcode did not like them.) They are light-blue and dark-blue respectively. (Really niebieski is related to the word for sky so you might think of this word as sky-blue, I do and that is what I meant earlier about learning Polish from a linguist probably was different from a native Polish speakers experience.)
Now you might think this is simple, well not really. Here is a translation of what happens in practice with some regularity. My wife says, "Bring me the blue one," where blue is the word for either light-blue or dark-blue depending on the color of the object. I oblige but then hear a response of, "No I said the blue one not the green one." Bizarre because notice I wrote blue and green. It is not like she said light-blue and I brought the dark-blue widget. Sometimes she claims I brought the purple thing instead. These exchanges are entirely in Polish because this what we speak predominantly at home.
Okay now I am not color-blind. For my work I need to pass a test every two years and in the report I always pass all of the tests, even those for which a certain percentage of people that are not typically considered color-blind would not pass. I can clearly distinguish between a wide spectrum of colors.
After a while of this my mother noticed it once so we did a little test with the family. My mother, father, uncle, aunt, and grandmother were all part of it. All of them had spent the majority of their lives in Poland and almost without fail they would agree with the colors that my wife gave to objects. Then we repeated the test with my brother and his girlfriend who except for a vacation had not spent any time in Poland. They agreed with me the majority of the time.
Now this test was not scientific in any way and it did involve alcohol because it happened during a family get-together, but I still think that native Polish speakers vs English speakers think of colors as different because of their languages. What I mean is that there are many shades of colors that are sort of between green and blue and others that are between green and purple and given a proper ambiguous color such as this Polish speakers will tend to identify it differently than English speakers.
So what I am trying to say after all of this is that the example of the Russian language having two words for blue is sort of a red herring. It is irrelevant to the real issues. In fact given two people that are not color blind, one a Russian and one an English speaker, they should not have any extra difficulty in being able to distinguish between color chips as being different or not. What I am saying is that they will think of the same color chip as a different color in their minds. Now this is subtle, and I tend to agree with the parent poster that it is a special case, but definitely an example of how language influences understanding and meaning. Here is a final true story to illustrate this idea.
My wife's favorite color is light-blue. Once I bought her a gift that was a light blue dress. When she got it she said that the dress was nice, but that, "Don't you know by now that I do not like the way I look in green?" Think about intend and effect in that example and you will see what I mean about language being important.
President Bush also has a very limited vocabulary. "Good", "evil," "black," "white," "good," "bad," "wrong," and "right." So give the guy a break. He simply doesn't have the mental tools to comprehend the complexities of many issues.
I suggest we pass a "No President Left Behind" act to help him around this problem. We can have him memorize flahscards with words and concepts like "grey," "neutrality," "compromise," "subtle," "multifaceted," and "uncertainty."
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
I think there is definitely some validity to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but it's more subtle than is characterized in this article and in previous posts. Here's an example:
As a native speaker of American English I perceive a distinction between a pidgeon and a dove. I have a word each, after all. I would eat a dove. I would not eat a pidgeon.
To the best of my knowledge, German makes no such distinction. There is one word for both: Taube*. The Germans that I have spoken to about this perceive pidgeons and doves as being the same bird. When I think about it, the two birds do seem rather similar, but prior to these discussions I saw no real similarity. That is significant. I am perfectly capable of seeing pidgeons and dove as distinct or the same. I don't think language binds your thinkingit merely influences it.
* I have heard someone call a dove a "Friedenstaube" or "peace pidgeon/dove," but that was under weird circumstances.
A publicly traded company exists solely to make profits for shareholders.
hmmm... the points you make are valid, but I'm not sure they pertain to this study.
The examples you used cite tangible objects that we are able to perceive with our senses, and thus use previous concepts we know to make sense out of them (bokeh is a "blurry" background and a "sharp" foreground image; two previous concepts we understand form a new concept).
But without those essential building blocks, symbolic logic could not exist. If you had no comprehension of the idea of addition, you could never add two arbitrary numbers; that is, you would count the two (or more) groups of whatever object was in front of you and come out with a sum, with no real understanding of why. One stone and one stone is two stones, but what is 1+1 ?
You may not have a [recognized language] word for it, but your brain must assign a variable to the idea which it can reference in a thought.
Slashdot: News for nerds. Stuff tha-- MICRO$OFT IS THE DEVIL!!1
Slashdot admins suffer from the same condition: This is why my Karma is listed as "Excellent" instead of being represented as a number.
The CompSci equivalent of the Hottentot and Piraha counting sistem is even weirder.
Nany (None) is not a number, like Zero, but an instantiation whereby a Class (an ObjectFactory) spits out an instance.
Any (one) is not a number, but an instance that encapsulate values, that can do things and can destroy itself.
Many (many) is one of several collection and relationship mechanisms. All you can fundanentally do with a collection is extract or identify a collected object. Connections, instances of Relationships, are existential and may also have values associated with them.
The Piraha have a handicap in that they have the concept of two and no concept of zero.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
OK. Comment on post #10021656
...several fires were started . . . ...when workers threw cigarette butts. . .
While you post is definitely informative, I apologize in advance for becoming a Grammar Nazi.
"He noticed that several fires where started when workers through cigarette butts into drums that in English we call "empty", even though they contained invisible and explosive fumes."
I apologize if you were typing fast, but I find it ironic that we are all talking about linguistics while using complete improper word choice. I'm sorry, it just bothers me.
Everyone (especially Mr. Richardson) may now begin flaming my grammar practices back to the stone age.
Maybe the reason the Germans have no separate word for pidgeons and doves is that they don't care which is which. In this case, social differences lead to language choice, not vica versa. I guarantee you German bird watchers know the difference.
In English, we only have one word for "duck," despite the fact that there are many kinds of ducks. They all have different sizes, temperments and flavors, but we call them all "duck." Which leads to some pretty depressed diners, who like one sort of duck meat and then come to find the duck served at a different restaurant has a different flavor. It's a minor inconvenience caused by the fact that language evolves, it's not planned. It is not an indicator of a widespread cultural ignorance of ducks.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
There is no difference here. Identifying and understanding a concept without a name is completely possible -- I understood the concept of prototyping well before I ever learned C++. And a name for a concept can exist without understanding what it is -- immenatization of the eschaton comes to mind. I still don't know what the fuck that is.
The brain does indeed need to assign symbols to process a concept, but it does not need to have a name for it! This is why sytagmology exists outside of linguistics -- there are ways to process information without words or discrete language.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
"BTW: I'm sure that somewhere in this discussion, someone is going to bring up the idea that the Inuit (Eskimos) have some huge number of words for snow."
How about the word horse? Regardless of size, color or sex a horse is a horse to me. A co-worker on the other hand would disagree strongly if I said that and I'd get a long lecture on stallions, mares, paints, gaits, breeding and a bunch of other nonsense.
How about the word video card? My father-in-law knows he has one and that's that. I'm sure most of us could wax ad infinitum about the many different ones, their advantages, their shortcomings and in what devices they can typically be found.
Living in North Dakota, I found that there are different states of snow and interestingly enough, we kids had different names for them that we invented. You don't use poof for forts and slusher sticks together nicely for snowballs.
We develop language and symbols for the things that matter to us.
May be they don't have words because they have fingers
If your claim is that language has no influence on the thought of its speakers, I disagree. I think the influence is subtle, but it's there. Language and culture have an influence on each other.
I'll bet you're right that Germans don't care which is which. The distinction is culturally unimportant. The culture influenced the language. However, since there is no distinction in the language spoken by the general non-bird-watching German public, they are less inclined to perceive a distinction than a speaker of a language that makes such a distinction. This is the influence of the language on the culture.
Do you not see this as being a two-way street? I imagine that influence of culture on language is greater than the other way around, but the influence is still there.
A publicly traded company exists solely to make profits for shareholders.
That's why I'm figuring, you know, maybe these Amazon fuckers are just bad at math. If you're that bad at math, so bad that using the fingers to count doesn't help, you really don't need words for complicated mathematical contstructs. Like, say an equivalent for the word "four."
yes, I'm KIDDING!
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
My god! Adam Duritz was right all along!
You must think in Russian.
You mean straight men.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe what your are thinking of as a pigeon is a species of dove; a Rock Dove" to be precise. Actually, I think the term pigeon and dove are interchangeable in reference to this family of birds. So, I suppose that the fact that Rock Doves are a species in the family of doves supports your position on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. A more precise re-wording of your feelings about consuming said birds thus might be, "I would not eat a filthy feral rock dove."
I believe that the limits of our language do limit our thought, and we are constantly trying to expand language to allow us to expand our consciousness. But there are other ways of knowing as well. For example, as a visual artist, I spend a lot of time attempting to discern subtleties in the way we actually see the world, and how we think visually. One of the most shocking things I came to understand while in art school was how our media shapes how we actually see the world around us; what we pay attention to, and what we ignore. This is why I feel the arts are so very important - we must continue to expand our vocabularies in order to expand our very consciousness; whether those vocabularies are language, the visual world, music, or math.
From "Introduction to General Linguistics," 1810:
"Every language sets certain limits to the spirit of those who speak it; it assumes a certain direction and, by so doing, excludes many others (VII, 621)."
While not articulated in the jargon of a psychologist, I'd say this qualifies as an earlier version of said theory.
expressed themselves via numbers. Their language was just numbers/formulas. Ok right now your probably saying to yourself that that tribe would be composed of math/physics/engineering majors. But think for a second of how their mind would operate if the only means of expression were maniupulating numbers. For example, to get a glass of water would be expressed as some formula. Love would be the inverse of hate. Being angry would be hate to an exponential power. I wonder what the expression for god would be if they had a religion? I wonder what sort of tools they would invent if their logic was totally expression based.. I think its an interseting idea to think over, maybe even a possible short story, but i suck at math and my language would be very basic. If you've read the book flatland, it would be something along those lines, but less geometry and more math based.
FYI, i dont post on slashdot because my IQ sets off the "not smart enuf" detectors. Shit, they're going off now.
These tribes typically have some individual(s) who have a more sophisticated counting system resembling binary or trinary. These few individuals are employed by chiefs to act as a sort of ceremonial accountant. However, it is true that the vast majority of people who speak these languages (that only have words for numbers upto 3) will have trouble with counting and arithmetic. And even if they know the binary/trinary counting system they might not want to bother with it, especially when talking to a non-native speaker.
Mathematics is not a crime.
To me the deterministic argument is like the nature vs. nurture argument: neither are an accurate way of framing the issue. Before the nature of language and thought can be explained we need a decent definition of both. A definition of language, tricky though it may be, is eaiser to define than thought. Does a definition of thought just include our inner monologue? Or should we expand it to include the things that we can see and hear entirely in our own heads? All these things are limited by the stimuli that inputs to the specific parts of coginition that deals with them. In the end thought is the process of creating a model of the objective world in our minds through the input from our senses. I think in the end we are faced with a tautology: The thought that requires language is linguistic thought, just as the kind of thought that requires us to picture things in our minds requires eyes. Noam Chomsky sees the role of language as a way to express thought. If we take this perspective then language can't limit what it evolved to express.
Does this sig remind you of Agatha Christie?
I'm sure you know what hunger (or love, etc.) feels like, but if you had to really explain it, could you?
Hunger is the signal expressed by the low-level survival centers of the brain when they detect that the body is running out of energy. This is distinct from appetite, a signal emitted after a meal has been fully digested.
I suppose it depends on whether a person thinks in words or whether they could use somthing else to model their thoughts. My mother can actually visualize things and hold the picture in her mind (Though it's not photographic). I tend to be more auditory and tend to hear things spoken back.
I suppose language is a means of modeling and thus compressing information for the purpose of memory.
I firmly believe that a person who has taken chemistry would be better at remembering the structure of a molecule because he has the words to describe it and thus encode it for memory.
The thing which differentiates humans from animals is that we're capable of recursion, and can use our knowledge of one-two-three-many and the one to one correspondence between added and subtracted numbers (9 minus three = 6) to effectivly model, calculate, and remember more complex situations.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
One Two Many is a concept very common in western culture, especially in areas around universities and colleges where many people regularly have 'one too many'
;)
In fact the people new to the concept lose higher brain functions after two and anything after amalgamates into many.
Sorry, I'll pack my bags and move along
Reminds me of the term "hrair" from Watership Down.
It's been suggested that both license plate numbers and telephone numbers have been limited in size due to typical Western European hrair limits (between two and three times that of the Piraha tribe on the average).
There's more about hrair limits on the Wikipedia.
Lucky you. The woman in the next cubicle over only knows that she has a video-card-thingy in the box under her desk that the computer plugs into. By 'computer', of course, she means monitor.
It would be really funny if it turned out that the researchers had miscounted during the experiments.
:-)
I once saw an elderly woman at a canoe rental place get into an argument about correct change with-- get this-- an International Mathematics Olympiad gold medalist *AND* a winner of the Putnam mathematics competition at the same time.
As it turned out, they were right. But it was ALMOST a really great story.
immenatization of the eschaton comes to mind. I still don't know what the fuck that is.
To make something "imminent" means to make it about to occur. The "eschaton" is the end of the world. Now you know.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
When electronic mail arrived, we didn't run around flumoxed because there was no word for it. We invented a word.
Which has always led me to wonder why the same hasn't happened for the name of this decade. We have the "eighties", the "nineties", etc. Why is there no name for the decade we live in?
That's why I'm figuring, you know, maybe these Amazon fuckers are just bad at math. If you're that bad at math, so bad that using the fingers to count doesn't help
Then you probably can't count past "one" click shopping. No wait, that's the USPTO being bad at math, not Amazon :-)
I refer to it as the "Aughts." Or, at least I have since Aught One.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Dyirbal (an Australian Aboriginal language) has four genders. Masculine, feminine, neuter, and edible non-flesh food.
Cherokee and Arabic has three numbers. Not like 1, 2, 3; but, singular, dual, and plural.
Chinese as a spoken language does not exist. Each "dialect" (not an entirely acurate word depending on its intention) is mutually uninteligible when spoken. Hence, may be considered seperate languages. The term dialect is applied to them because they share a common writing system. A Mandarin speaker will not understand a Cantonese speaker, but can read a message from the Cantonese speaker easily.
Thanks to the internet, we can now all die alone together! -SomeWoman
The Inuit DID NOT have many words for snow. This has been shown to be a myth. Sorry, no time to search for links, but it's true.
This interesting article makes me wonder: how does English (or any other major language) create limitations of our current abilities to think abstractly? How would the language have to be different to remove those limitations? For example, are there language differences that could give people a better ability to understand Quantum Mechanics or Ill-formed sociological problems like war, etc.
Few people know that ordinal numbers in English (first, second, third, etc.)actually have a French component. Old English ordinal numbers contained no word for "second." Logically, it should be "twoth" or something, but instead they just counted "first (or frist), other, third, fourth..."
It got to be such a problem, that in Middle English, they simply decided to use the French "seconde." Seconde comes from the Latin word "secundus" meaning "following" via Old French.
Perhaps this explains the deeply engrained disdain in English and American culture for "second place." We don't seem to ever acknowledge the fact that finishing second in anything can sometimes be quite an achievement. Sure, winning the Super Bowl is great, but somehow losing it seems to be regarded as worse than not getting there at all.
There have even been linguistic/sociological studies showing that concepts and expressed by words can live on, even after the words themselves have fallen into disuse or been replaced by words from other languages. Using a language without realizing the frame of reference it creates is something that most of us are guilty of at one time or another.
Both examples that assert the hypothesis that language define thoughts are from primitive hunter/gatherer societies.
These two societies are not agrarian or mercantile, and therefore have no need for trade, storage, accounting, ...etc.
Therefore, the need for numbers greater than two does not exist. One could argue that because there is no need, the concept of numbers did not arise.
Think about the concept and word "million". It only developed in pre-Renaissance Italy (AFAIK). Prior to that, cultures expressed it as "a thousand thousand". Only in the 20th century has the larger trillion, ...etc. developed.
As an aside, language do differ in many aspects.
Some languages are more precise than others in one area, while not being so precise in other areas. For example, whereas in English we have singular (e.g. site) and plural (sites), Arabic for example has singular, dual and plural. Also, there is a different dual and plural forms for masculine and feminine.
On the other hand, there is no concept of "he/she/it" in Arabic, everything is either masculine or feminine, even inanimate objects.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
Old Newfoundlander joke:
How does a newfie count fish?
One fish, two fish, another fish...
See this is supposed to indicate dumbness but obviously it's not true, the Newfie person is not dumb, just lacks education.
Learn multiple languages which are fairly different.
Then you get more familiar with the feeling of having a thought you cannot express in a language.
Which while frustrating sometimes (especially during exam in that language), can help get your brain used to not thinking just on the rails of your main language.
The trouble is when you have thoughts that all the languages you know are too imprecise to refer to it. Usually it means you can't recall the thought if you don't take the time to write a long paragraph trying to describe it (which sometimes dislodges the thought!). Most people's memory requires a well defined reference for recall. If you have no indexes/references for that sort of thought, it's hard to recall it.
It's like dreaming of a great piece of music. If you are not familiar enough with music, when you wake up you may not be able to recall much of it. Or as you wake up, you start losing it. Which is quite frustrating.
Sometimes you still can't get back the "inspired" moment despite all that writing down. So despite getting a decent fragment, you don't have the rest.
I can't help but be reminded of the gully dwarves from Dragonlance when reading this.
Never mind the dwarves; much better are the frogs in Pratchett's Bromeliad Trilogy (Truckers, Diggers and Wings). They're binary; they can only count up to one. So when one of the frogs comes out of its flower and sees all the other flowers, each with one frog, it counts them: One, plus... one, plus one, plus one, plus one, plus one, plus one... which adds up to... er... one.
Now, if only they managed to work together...
Why is this still at 0. /.ers are still mostly geeks, right?
Sure, without a numerical language you can remember things one at a time. You can't count, calculate, refer to or remember large numbers or finite quantities of things, though.
Here's my view; Language is used to
1. model situations and caluculate possible results
2. To remember things that happened
3. To compare memorized benchmarks (i.e. a job that pays $20,000/year is not very good, but a job that pays $60/hour is quite good)
You can remember that "one shade of lavender is lighter than the other"
but without some kind of descriptive language, you're relying on your pictoral memory to make the comparison. The problem is that without the right language, and especially without the right numerical system it's difficult to model, calculate or even remember large numbers of things except as individual visual events and one-to-one correspondences.
Think of your pictoral memory as a 'less compressed' version of your language memory.
When it comes to calculation and thinking, look at it this way. How do you do math?
You've memorized one-to-one correspondences between individual digits. 9-3=6 5+4=9 etc.
You have a system of rules which allow for encoding and calculation, and these rules are composed of one-to-one correspondences sometimes applied recursivly. Thus, our brain uses rules and one-to-one correspondences to calculate large numbers.
If you tried to learn to 'think' in base 6, you'd have to re-memorize your calculations. Then, once you had your calculated number in base 6 you'd have to change it back into base 10 since all your references are in base ten. In other words, you might know that your new job pays 600,000 per year in base 6, but you'd have to change that to base ten in order to see if it falls within a 'good' salary range.
This is all just my opinion, of course.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
I do not speak Slovene, but I do speak Slovak :-), which is also a Slavic language.
We have something similar - but the word forms are different for 1 item, 2-4 items, and 5 or more items. (But for some words it is the same as in English - different word for plural and singular.)
example:
jeden vlak (one train)
dva valky, tri vlaky, styri vlaky (2,3,4 trains)
pat vlakov, sest vlakov (5, 6 trains)
But you cannot just say the second form of plural (vlakov) without a numeral before it.
If ju want to say an indefinite number of trains, you just say "vlaky".
And look what impact that has had on people's personal lives.
8x is eighties
9x is nineties
0 is naught
so we live in the naughties.
When electronic mail arrived, we didn't run around flumoxed because there was no word for it.
;) So the current and permanent word is an analog of the English: the obvious "e-pos'to", an abbreviation of "elektronikan pos'ton".
I lived through an interesting development in the invention of a word for "email".
In 1991, I was a volunteer at the World Esperanto Association. The day-to-day office language is, of course, Esperanto. (Good thing, too: Its staff is from a half-dozen different countries, with four or five different native languages.)
I was an advocate for bringing the office online, putzing around on FIDOnet mail exchanges and contacting the Netherlands UNIX User's Group to see about getting a direct link.
The office's General Director was a bit old-fashioned. Learning of my off-hours email explorations, he said, "Why do we need that? We already have a Telex machine!" But he soon saw the utility of email when Esperantists from around the world started contacting by email through me, the result of another Esperantist's co-advocate's urging.
He proposed that the word for email be "tomo", in honor of my first name, and that the verb be "tomi". ("Sendu tiun tomon al mia frato, mi petas.") I was tickled.
But of course his influence was limited to the office, and not always every part of it.
Off-topic, but fun!
Tom Geller
I just came back from China. I speak very little Chinese. Expressing disapproval is a universal language that any human understands. Of course, the ability to barter, warn, threaten, and persuade require a little more communication to do properly. How would you behave if you couldn't communicate these things, short of showing anger or a willingness to fight?
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Bzzzt! Wrong. Thanks for playing the amateur linguist game.
An expert has posted previously we can understand an emotional concept but lack the words to express it. Anyone who speaks more than one language can come across phrases that have no real equivalent in their other language(s). In my case the Japanese emotional onomotopeia such as "doki doki" have no real English equivalent but can describe the feeling much better. The feeling in this case is what you would feel if somone removed a blindfold from your eyes and you found yourself standing at the edge of a 1500-foot cliff.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
You wrote:
A numbers of tests have been down over the years. Some languages have only a few words for color, for example. However, experiments show that this does not impair speakers of these languages from differentiating different shades of colors.
----
This is not quite true. What you want to say, I think, is that while speakers with few color words cannot differentiate different shades of colors, they can be taught to differentiate the various shades.
And the most common way of teaching them to do this is to teach them the words for these shades in a language that possesses a more adequate vocabulary. Historically, English as a language is notorious for this; it has simply absorbed the terms for concepts English speakers have found useful from whatever language they first appeared in.
Something similar can be shown with examples like the Inuit and their 40 words for our meager one "snow". If you are an English speaker, and you ski, then you too probably possess a somewhat specialized vocabulary which distinguishes between various types of snow. (also: Curlers "rate" ice by speed and hardness with a numerical system). And if you want to learn to differntiate the different types of snow or ice, you learn to ski or curl!
JHVH1
Database admins really only have 3 numbers to worry about too - 0, 1 and MANY.
...this is realistic exactly how?
Are you adequate?
Actually, your synopsis drastically oversimplifies and mis-states the current understanding in linguistics of color terms in relation to Whorf-Sapir. One of the leading linguists in color research is Paul Kay, and in 1999 he wrote this paper (PDF) synopsizing the state of research (he's a major participant in the debates, so salt as needed...). In it, he writes:
He then summarizes both the pro-Whorfian results and the anti-Whorfian results, ending the section on intra-language research with:The paper also summarizes inter-language color research, emphasizing Kay's work on physiologically-based universals.
Note that virtually everyone has abandoned the "strong" Whorfian hypothesis, that language tends to constrain thought. The "weak" hypothesis, that language can significantly influences thought, was still vigorously argued by the lingustic faculty when I was in college ('80s) and, from Kay's remarks in his paper, was still being argued into this century... WordIQ has a nice summary, which features this provocative quote about programming languages from Alan Perlis
Also, how do you articulate a feeling? I'm sure you know what hunger (or love, etc.) feels like, but if you had to really explain it, could you? Not bloody likely.
As I mentioned elsewhere, some languages have words that describe feelings in ways that are not possible in English. That English lacks this kind of vocabulary makes you unable to conceive of it.
Japanese onomatopoeia includes many words that describe feelings or states of the world. For your examples I offer "gura gura" and "hara hara" (also "doki doki"). A Japanese speaker hearing these words will have an inherant understanding of the feeling.
Even expressions for sounds are much richer in Japanese which is why you will find American Goodyear engineers using term like "gwooaarrrrrr" and "shhhiiiiii" to describe tire sounds during testing. They picked this up from their Japanese colleagues.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
1, 2, 3, 4, hrair.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
"sweetmeats"
I am fluent in German, Swiss-German, English, Dutch, Afrikaans and speak good French and I've lived in Germany, South Africa, Switzerland and Holland and I can utterly attest to the fact that a language affects your personality. I know that when I speak Swiss-German, I feel "less mentally supple", than when I speak German, for instance, and I remember having a number of conversations with Germans in Holland about how different one felt when speaking Dutch.
I read it back when I was in 6th grade. Loved it.
--- It's not my fault this post looks redundant. I just type too slow.
I don't feel this study addresses language at all; it only addresses technology. Sure, their language has no number bigger than two; but that just means they can't really *count* higher than two. If you'd gotten an adult english speaker to do the same tasks, but with numbers of objects that were too large to count in the given time, the results would probably be the same. I mean, if someone flashed you a box with 83 batteries in it, would you "remember" later, unless you counted them each time? Recognizing 10 objects is not like recognizing a flower, justice, or murder. It's based on a technology. Of course, though counting technology is based on number, there are more sophisticated ways of using it besides rote one-two-three counting. Since we're a numerate society, we train children to count and map sets to each other and all that fun stuff early on, and drill it into their heads. I remember when I was a kid doing these things, and learning to quickly recognize, say, five objects, by grouping them into 2 and 3 objects, and sort of "imprinting" what those look like in different configurations. I just "know" what five things look like now, the way a chess player "knows" what a winning configuration looks like, or the way a chef "knows" when a chicken is perfectly cooked. I was never trained to recognize 83 batteries, so I can't, any better than people whose lives have no use for counting technology when they see four or five batteries. Number words are just rosary beads, and people in numerate societies use them all the time. These tribesfolk simply don't, just like they don't write, program computers, drive cars, or bake souffles, but you could train them, even in their own language, using existing words for the numbers, and the difference would go away, I bet. Now *that* would be an experiment.
Hunger is a singal? I don't recall seeing it on the list of human neurotransmitters.
Neurotransmitters correspond more closely to a form of modulation (OSI 1) and hunger to what travels over a connection involving the feeding centers (higher in the neural protocol stack).
"As I mentioned elsewhere, some languages have words that describe feelings in ways that are not possible in English. That English lacks this kind of vocabulary makes you unable to conceive of it."
Excuse me, but I'll thank you not to tell me what I can and can't conceive of. Please don't place your limitations (or perceived limitations) on others when you don't have anything to back it up.
G
Pigeons and doves are not separate things -- they're the same. In English, we have both words since we get the first from French and the second from Dutch. In American English, at least, we tend to use dove for the smaller species such as the ringneck dove (Streptopelia roseogrisea) while we reserve the word pigeon for the larger ones like the Bandtail (Columba fasciata). Biologically, however, they are all in the same family.
loc. cit.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
I wonder how many problems in western culture come from the confusion of
- Good == effective vs.
- Good == moral
I think this is most evident in military campaigns, where it gets really confusing to say "we did a really good job bombing that city".one, two, many
The first thing I thought of was hex. Does anyone else remember what it was like learning other numbering systems? You know, binary (base 2), base 3 etc, to octal (base 8) and ultimately to hexadecimal (base 16).
If one of these researchers thinking in base 10 (decimal), talking to someone who thought in octal, would they be reporting "gee, these folks have no concept of the number 9." Duh! Their numbering system doesn't rely on that decimal concept. Just because you think something is important doesn't mean that others feel it important.
Even more down to home, do you buy six bananas, or a small bunch?
They say this is proof for language shaping thought, but couldn't it be just as well proof for thought shaping language?
If they don't have the need to perform tasks involving quantities more than two accurately, they would have never had the need to develop the necessary language to express quantities more than two accurately.
I just backed it up with the Japanese example.
If you were talking about a unilingual English speaker then you would be right, it would be "not bloody likely" for them to be able to accurately describe what the physiological and psychological feeling of fear or love is. Your original phrasing seemed to imply that was true for all languages.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
if they only have two values thay should make them 0 and 1 and someone should show them binary :-)
I know some guys who really know how to weld with ocy-acetelyne. I mean REALLY know. Their weldments make me drool.
But they can't tell me how to do it. They can tell me what I did wrong (You used to much heat there), but they can tell me what it is that lets them know that (You just learn it).
Language is how we convey and obtaing information and instructions. If Joe can't tell you how to weld or why a weldment is bad, does that mean that he doesn't really know how or understand the process (which it would seem like at first), or does it just mean that the bridge to convey his knowledge and understanding is broken?
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
By the way, Sparta has a society very much like that. It was truly alien.
Their special language was not quite as extreme as that of Babel-17 (good book, btw), but the sense of "self" that is so central to the dominant societies today ("west", islamic, Chinese and Indian) was at least suppressed and unacknowledged, and to a great extent really non-existent in Spartan society. The role of the individual was to further society. We have no modern parallel, not even the unrealized communist societies envisioned by Lenin or Mao.
It's funny to read people analogizing to Greek societies (in, say, the newspaper). You really have to study it for a surprising amount of time to understand how truly weird it was, even by (as much as we know them) the standards of its contemporaries. The persians or egyptians (as an alternative) were much easier to comprehend.
Diplomacy is the art of telling someone to go to hell so that they look forward to the trip
Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggy" while looking around for a rock
Any others? I'm sure there are more...
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
No.
Let's say you only know the standard "ROYGBV" color words. Someone presents you a pink, and you respond with "red". Someone Shows you three or four different shades of red, and you respond "They are red, but they are different reds..." and perhaps sort them on brightness or something.
The ability to differentiate color (provided you aren't colorblind) is physically inherent. The vocabulary of color was created to help express our perceptions. If you could precisely label the various shades of any colors from #000000 to #FFFFFF on the RGB scale, you could still differentiate shades on the CMYK scale even though you didn't have the precise "color words" to label them with.
As people grow and learn, they associate words and phrases with concepts that they experience, and as their experiences broaden and deepen they look for vocabulary to assist in communicating what they've learned with others.
Your example about skiing - learning to ski puts you in position to experience and appreciate the subtle differences between types of snow - learning the vocabulary along with the experience itself just helps you communicate the subtleties of the experience to others.
Ending ramble - I just get a bit concerned when people profess the belief that our understandings are limited by our language. It is QUITE the opposite - our language grows as our understanding expands.
-ZOD-
On the August 8, 2004 Daily Show, Stephen Colbert asked an Indian woman, "Gandhi or Sitting Bull?"
The woman replied, "Gandhi."
"Good. Because I already have a squaw."
That's a good example.
A question might be why do some languages develop these methods of describing states and feelings and others do not? English is actually a pretty limited language compared to some others.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Diplomacy means the art of nearly deceiving all your friends, but not quite deceiving all your enemies.
A real diplomat is one who can cut his neighbor's throat without having his neighbor notice it.
Insightful, Informative, Redundant.
Well, having just read the Cecil Adams treatise on the subject, I have to admit: we're both wrong.
The Inuit have many words for snow slash ice, but they're not really that different from our terms for different properties of snow ( drifting snow, packing snow, sleet, slush, etc ). The inuit language is polysynthetic, meaning you make up your own words from particles of meaning as you go along. Therefore, they have as many words for anything as they have time to speak them. Add the particle for snow to the particle for bureau, and voila! Snowbureau.
In many ways, this is not that different from English speaking idiots who think they can invent plurals however they like (statii, virii, emails, boxen and the like) or sound impressive by putting ir- onto the front of a word starting with r (irrespective, irregardless, irridiculous, etc).
Hey freaks: now you're ju
1. ???
2. ???
3. Profit!!!
The linguistic determination hypothesis is only trivially true. The problem is that researchers are rarely clear on what is exactly determined. Linguistic determination seems largely to be used to try to support the idea that we are born tabla rasa, an idea that is patently false. What is true is that we are all born with a rudimentary or naive mathematics...meaning that we comprehend the basic number system, and perform rudimentary addition and substraction intuitively. But there is a reason that we go to school to learn the multiplication table, division, decimals, calculus, etc. Learning augments the basic ability we are born with.
There are two versions of the linguistic determination hypothesis: the strong and the weak. The strong hypothesis supposes that language absolutely determines what we are capable of thinking, and that thus, individuals of different languages think fundamentally in different ways. This, I think, must be ultimately rejected. The weak hypothesis says simply that a language tends to direct our thought to certain things, but is not an a priori reason to think that someone is incapable of thinking such things. I would not expect even Galileo to have spoken intelligibly about quantum theory- but if he were to have had the chance to learn, he certainly could have.
Logic, macros, and more
While I don't speak French myself, I happen to know that to say "ninty" (90) they say something to the effect of "four twenties and ten"
I dunno, but that seems kinda.... weird... to me =P
Computer scientists have a similar problem: They can only count 0, 1, infinity.
Serious linguists find the question "are there more linguistic units that mean 'snow'" more useful and meaningful. However, this approach also has some difficulty because the boundary between things that are "snow" and thing that are not-"snow" is a somewhat soft one in language, e.g. is "sleet" a wet type of "snow" or not?
Despite these issues, people are still interested in "the answer" and experts commonly come up with counts of about 1 or 2 dozen, which is not particularly remarkable in comparison to english.Here's a brief article synopsizing all that a little more clearly.
Even consciousness http://www.julianjaynes.org/bicameralmind.php
I walked into this really cool bar with some friends and one of them said "Ah...gezellig!" and it just fit. IANAL(inguist) but it seems to me having a word for an idea like that gives one a better understanding of it. Not that an American wouldn't appreciate the same space as much, but I think there's a subtle difference in understanding something (and perhaps appreciating it) when you can say "gezellig" rather than stumbling for words that talk around the idea.
Anyone know of a resource for words that have no English equivalent? It's be interesting to see what we're missing out on.
accorting to this story http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews /TPStory/LAC/20040820/NUMBERS20/TPScience/in the Globe-Telegraph, the Piraha does not even distinguish between one, two, and many. Rather there is a word which conveys "oneishness" and another that conveys "twoishness". If the word for "oneishness" is applied to fish, out of context, it is impossible to tell if this means a single fish, two fish, a few fish, or a small fish.
The piraha also do not have words for colors. It is a language which eschews all abstraction. Very weird.
Edsger Dijkstra already knew this.
That's why C, BASIC and other less than expressive languages should be outlawed!
I completely forgot about the lemon/lime confusion. The same thing happened between my wife and I as well. There is possibly a very straightforward explanation to this though completely not related to color perception. I too thought was just an inaccurate teacher but your having the same experience made me wonder.
We now live in the United States but my wife was taught English as a foreign language in Poland and the English that she was taught was British English. Once in a grocery store she called the larger yellow citrus fruits limes and I told her that they were in fact lemons. She looked at the sign that said lemons and protested remembering being taught that these were limes. When we got home she pulled-out her English textbooks and in fact it described the lime as yellow. I thought this was a mistake just like you but now I think that this is just one of those chips/french fries, tyre/tire, bonnet/hood sorts of differences between British English and USA English.
Maybe a Brit could set this straight?
Interesting point about the difficulty in remembering "six" without the word for it.
I would add that it is not clear whether or not the psycologist ever indicated to the tribesmen if he considered the answers they gave correct. If I were from the tribe and I conceived of "six" as "many," it would affect how I responded to a group of six items placed in front of me. I might respond to the pile of six items with seven items, not because I could not distinguish between six and seven, but because I am responding to a pile of "many" with another pile of "many." It does not *matter* to me whether there are six or seven items in the pile, both piles contain "many." I would never even know the pyscologist considered my answer wrong.
Now, if the tribesmen were carefully adding or removing one item at a time to their pile while checking back towards the psycologists pile, but still placed the wrong number of items in their pile, I would give the results of this study much more credence. As is, I don't know either way, as I couldn't find the report's fulltext online.
-Sparks
This reminds me of some lingustic confusion I have had with a friend of mine who was raised in Brazil...
Apparently, in Brazil, the little green ones are called "limon" and the fat yellow ones are "lima".
He's been living in the US for over 10 years now, and he still mixes them up from time to time...
Knowledge != Intelligence
You wrote:
The ability to differentiate color (provided you aren't colorblind) is physically inherent. The vocabulary of color was created to help express our perceptions. If you could precisely label the various shades of any colors from #000000 to #FFFFFF on the RGB scale, you could still differentiate shades on the CMYK scale even though you didn't have the precise "color words" to label them with.
----
This misses the point. If you've learned to label as per the RGB scale, you've already learned the color words. That is what the color scale provides! So learning the scale is learning more words is learning to discriminate more precisely!
Would you argue that someone who is familiar with the scale would not (all else being equal) be able to discriminate shades where the untrained eye did not?
JHVH1
You didn't provide any evidence, you simply pronounced your opinion. Don't just assume that things you believe are logical are therefore true. How do you know what I comprehend about my own feelings, and how does it have anything to do with people who speak Japanese? If you're going to call something "evidence," it had better be clearly indisputible or found in a scientific journal.
G
This "bokeh" concept you described - in English it's known as the depth-of-field effect. Not as succinct as the Japanese, but it's directly interchangable.
Dogs cannot speak a human language so do they not understand math? If I throw a ball near a dog it will/can run twards it can catch it. Does this not show a fundamental understanding of math? To run to a ball and catch it you have to understand concepts of atleast equality, rate change and unknowns, ie. change your position based on where you predict the ball will land.
While the study is useful and interesting, the conclusion doesn't follow.
We simply don't know if they have a limited ability to count because they have no distinct words for numbers greater than two, or if they have no distinct words for more than two because they can't count higher.
The latter case (due to the issue not coming up for them in daily life) is at least as likely.
I would need to review the actual data, but since the summary indicates they did OK with 3 and 4 objects, it suggests that their ability to count exceeds their ability to express numbers in language. That would support the latter conclusion as well.
When they spot a morsal of food on the ground, they will swoop down and do the eqivalent of yelling "Danger!" so the other birds that are racing toward it will hesitate or veer off.
Or so I've heard-- any ornithologists here?
"they are unable to accurately perform tasks involving quantities as few as four or five"
Neither can my co-workers.
Columbians have far more words for "snow" than the Inuktitut.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
No, the two are a bit different. Bokeh refers to the LOOK of the depth of field effect, not its existance. For example, take the same picture at the same focal length and with the same aperature setting for two separate lenses and you get two different looks to the out-of-focus background.
Good bokeh turns sharp background contrast into soft, slowly sloping gradiants (like the airbrush in Photoshop) that highlight the foreground subject. Bad bokeh turns sharp background contrast into a series of pointed halos around the object that distract from the foreground subject. The ideal for many photographers is bokeh that looks like a pointellist painting does up close, though everybody has a different preference (here's my favorite bokeh and a miserably failed attempt).
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Are you reading what I write?
:-)
I didn't say you can't comprehend your feelings, I was addressing your contention that a person cannot verbally describe their feelings. I only state (quite truly, not my opinion, check other postings by those more qualified than I) that there exist vocabularies in other languages that can describe what English can't.
This whole thread is about language and the limitations it places on what can or cannot be comprehended. As has been pointed out, people can still comprehend things without having the words to describe them. Your initial point was that someone couldn't describe feelings such as love. I submit that it is possible if the vocabulary and cultural understanding exist. I can describe and point to lists of the Japanese "feeling words" I use as an example but can you comprehend how hearing one of these feeling words can affect someone. It took me years of living in Japan to get the real sense of the power of these words. (and how they make for great jokes)
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Say a letter of the alphabet for each X. For the example given:
A B C D E F.
Now just remember that it ended on F. Now repeat the alphabet, writing an X for each letter, until you get to the letter F.
You could do the same thing with a song or a speech instead of the alphabet if words repeating didn't confuse you. It is sort of like imaginary fingers you can count on.
This study does not prove that limited numbers in language cause limited numerical thinking. The result would be the same if the cause/effect relationship was the other way around. If a people have limited ability to think numerically, then they are going to develop a language that is similarly limited. Or, there could be a third unspecified cause that both of these things are the effect of.
Basically a correlation does give strong indications there is probably a cause/effect relation occuring (if it's a statistically signifigant correlation), but it says absolutely nothing about what direction that relationship goes. Any one of three possiblities exist:
1 - X causes Y
2 - Y causes X
3 - X and Y are both being caused by Z, so when Z occurs, X and Y both occur together.
If I didn't realize that, then I might end up believing absurd things like owning a shiny car causes someone to be rich, or that being skinny causes people to excercise.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
How do we know that Piraha people even understood what was required of them?
When people are asked to imitate, they tend to focus only on the important parts. For instance, if I wave, and ask a person to imitate me, they'll probably focus on my waving, and ignore my saccadic eye movements. One could then conclude that lack of short word for "saccadic eye movement" causes people to not see it.
The only way to reliably make sure they understand the task is to evaluate their performance on a validation set. IE one would give several examples of researcher tapping N times (>2), and assistant repeating N times. After the subject could successfully imitate the assistant on those examples, he should get previously unheard number of taps, and be asked to imitate it.
Yaroslav
Artificial Intelligence in Python: yaroslav.hopto.org/pubwiki/index.php/ai-python
Although in the last year it's been shown that most men are unable to distinguish certain color variations from one another, while most women have no problem in doing so (primarily shades of red and pink).
This has nothing to do with language but with the fact that a man's biological ability to distinguish subtle shades of certain colors from one another is more rudimentary than a woman's. It's possible that the supposed linguistic limitations in discerning color are not, in fact, linguistic in nature, but based on elementary biological differences.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
"While Piraha adults had difficulty learning larger numbers, Piraha children did not."
Which tends to point to the fact that language is not the limiting barrier here.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
sir, i like the spirit of your post.
in more direct terms, i would say that performing these experiments without the appropriate controls means these experiments are almost completely worthless. there are several confounding factors. rather than speculating wildly, perhaps we can address these confounding factors directly by other experiments.
for example, perhaps all hunter-gatherer tribes really have no need to distinguish between 4 or 5 object piles, and as a result, any human raised in the hunter-gatherer environment ends up being unable to perceive this subtlety whether or not their language has words for 3 - infinity.
we could look at other hunter-gather tribes and do the same experiment on them.
or, better yet, since we want to investigate the piraha directly, we can take a piraha and raise him in a hunter-gatherer environment, but teach him english from the outset so he has words for 3 - infinity. and then experiment on him again.
or perhaps, a worse experiment is to take a piraha and raise him in a western society, but restrict him to learning piraha language. if the sapir-whorf hypothesis is correct, then this man, despite having the right environment, would perform worse than a non-piraha speaking person.
or, we could take a piraha, raise him in the hunter-gatherer society, but force him to speak english. and then check to see if he performs better or worse than other piraha.
what i'm trying to say is that there are so many confounding cultural factors that when we remove them all, we may get a much weaker and less affirmative effect than the one seen in the original experiment. your post captures the heart of this objections - since clearly they kanka-bono hunter-gatherer tribe wouldn't have things like wireless routers, opteron blades, print queues and bluetooth mice.
I think this has already been explored in STNG, language often needs a cultural basis for two entities to communicate
I also can't recall the actual study but there are peoples living in deep jungles that have no words for direction other than that of self reference.
There is no east west north south but only from me and towards me, above me and below me.
The tribe's sense of distance in the deep forests was incredibly honed as it's easy to get lost.
Language is used as a memory mechanism. I think to myself in my native language (English) all the time - it assists in cognition and memory. If I were to show you 10 objects, but you did not know the word "ten", how would you know exactly how many objects there were unless you had a photographic memory? In essense, thinking "ten" to yourself would be a mnemonic.
-R
For sex we have masturbation for one, orgy for many and nothing for two!
Irconceivable!!
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
I'm a decent Planet of the Apes series fan, so I have to tell you that you are incorrect. Caesar was the son of Cornelius and Zira, who were speaking apes from the future who came back in time. Caesar was raised by Ricardo Montalban, who substituted an ordinary chimpanzee for him when he was a baby and the government killed off Cornelius and Zira for fear that they would take over the world.
Anyway, Caesar had the power to speak since he was from the future. The first word he taught to the ordinary apes in Earth present (or near future) was "No", however.
My other first post is car post.
"I understand it, I just can't articulate it,"
"Words Fail Me..." is an old and well understood phenomonia. That's how "being left speachless" became "an old saw."
It is easier to see this failing as classically applied to moments of great emotion. That does not, however, deminish the reality in less emotional contexts.
Often this "failure of words" comes when a pair of people lack what I would call a "bridge vocabulary". That is, when two parties lack the necessary spesific and technical lexicon to get the idea from one to the other of the participants.
Even in the presence of the bridge words, the speaker has to be able to plot the path of his speach before he begins. As the uncertianty of the speaker for the audience and the lexicon rises, the difficulty of formulating an aproach will increase as well. So talking obscura to strangers from different disciplines becomes axiomatically high.
All that being said, it is often true that this same assertion is being used to hide a fundimental failure to understand. People are like that and we have all seen it happen. So it has to be taken on a case by case basis. The probability that someone is glossing over their ignorance is inversely proportional to subtlty of the field.
So if an accountant says this of an accounting practice you are probably dealing with a failure of understanding. If an artist, or a high-energy physicist etc, says this of an esoteric technique it is probably a genuine failure of communications.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
First, linguistic researchers routinely control for color-blindness on the scale of perception being tested.
Second, the results of the gender study you mention are concerned with small perceived differences while the linguistic studies are concerned with much grosser differences, for example with languages that have only one word for the color range yellow-green-blue-violet.
I know it may seem strange to many of you, but quite a few languages don't have seperate words for all of the "elemental" colors: black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, grey, orange and pink. No one thinks that speakers of languages with one word for "yellow-to-violet" can't perceive the difference between green and yellow, it's just that they see that range as one basic color (that sometimes looks a little different) in the same way that those of us familiar with the clothing shades "forrest green" and "kelly green" can see them as different shades of one color "green".
I think this can apply to computer languages as well. I find myself thinking in C sometimes.
;-)
Some abstract ideas are easier for me to visualize now that I know several programming languages.
For instance, I knew how to plug in numbers into functions in my Algebra II class better than anybody there, only because I could visualize it's recursiveness.
-Xeon
Real programmers can write assembly code in any language. -- Larry Wall
I wonder what corporate speak has done to us then?!
Visit my serial fiction site at www.cornerscribe.com
That is to say, that because the tribespeople have no need to count higher, it would not make sense for the laguage to have words for larger, specific numbers. Similarly, the brains of the tribespeople have little or no experience with counting such specific numbers, and thus they have a hard time doing it. This is a result of the incredible plasticity of the brain: if you don't do something for a very long time, the neuron connections involved in doing that thing often die; of course, if you never do something at all or have even seen it done before, the neuron connections will likely not even be formed!
So in short, I think that the language is not the cause of the limitation in counting abitily. Instead, both the language and the limitation are a result of a common cause, that being that the tribespeople have no need of the numbers.
-Jacius
The title story from Heinlein's anthology. A truly great science fiction story that forever changed how I thought about language, and which is very applicable to TFA. I suggest you read it immediately if you haven't done so already.
WWJD? JWRTFA!
"This is like the Inuit people and their umpteen words for snow. We outsiders can recognize the different types of snow with only a little practice, but since we don't get snow 8 months of the year,"
yeah this is bullshit...the huge number of words for snow that the intuit ppl have is complete bs they have about twelve...and by the way english has many words for snow...snow, powder, sleet, hail, ice storm, slush, flurry, blizzard, dusting, hardpack.
stendec@gmail.com
Three is the highest number most people can "count" instantly when the objects are in a random pattern. This is easy, and fun, to test at home. When you "count" higher groupings quickly you are either seeing known patterns (eg dots on a die), or quickly re-grouping as you stated.
Anarchists never rule
This article which is on the web takes a leaf out of the sapir whorf hypothesis which has strong and weak forms
... we had a course on language and discussed a lot about the success rates in this and the working memory or numerosity in monkeys (they do experiments on numbers in monkeys at MIT and in tuebingen) surprisingly they have the same curves ... does it mean that there is a connection .. this is plausible but too much of an extrapolation ... this doesnt mean they are less cognitive or something like that
:-)
the central idea is that language shapes the way we think or in more specific ways it says language affects the way we percieve the world..
This is a nice study which is quite informative but not the last word on the whorfian hypothesis
other papers are by roeshc, davidoff and others in 1999 and other years... if anybody is interested I can provide the conclusions from those papers tooo
my words on the issue like another writer before me... look at all the evidence and decide for yourself
You're arguing both sides here - I have no idea how to respond to you.
"That English lacks this kind of vocabulary makes you unable to conceive of it."
"people can still comprehend things without having the words to describe them"
Both of those quotes are yours. Please find a mirror to talk to.
"Your initial point was that someone couldn't describe feelings such as love."
No, that's missing it completely. Someone said that people can't comprehend that which they have no words to describe, and I used feelings as an example of something that people can understand despite a lack of proper vocabulary. I think you need to read more parent posts.
G
The idea that your language determines the way you see the world (the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) has been around for many decades
It would be intresting to know what others think on related stories - the effect of culture on the way one thinks.
"Article 1 - Culture and cognition"
and another such article (intially from NY Times)
"Article 2 - How Culture Molds Habits of Thought"
?Read this news article which shows another study that found the opposite out.
- think.html
http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/07.22/21
Indeed so.
I've been fascinated by this concept for years! Is there a name for this or psychological literature on the subject? I think I can recognize up to five, but I may be deceiving myself. I definitely can't recognize six though. What an interesting concept.
I have tested this myself using pennies (have someone throw down a random number of pennies then give you a brief glance at them), and almost always instantly know groups up to five, but with six or more I have to count a memory image.
The republican party has been employing this theory for a couple of years now.
The idea is Rush and friends start using words that liberals use to argue for liberal policy. They change the meaning of the words, or the context to turn them around, thus making the liberal argument less convincing. It works quite well.
See here for a more in-depth discussion
Unfortunately, its encouraging for gruops that think they can change a negitive image by changing their name to something more appealing.
Doh! Just when you thought humans were intelegent..
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act" - George Orwell
Since she made a point that lower animals such as crows have the same problem in her "Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology."
That's how you fool crows - you send five people into a hunting blind, then have four of them leave. The crow sentry thinks they've all gone, calls in the flock, and they get shot.
Now we find sections of the human race aren't any better at it than birds.
OTOH, presumably these people could be trained to understand the concept of large numbers. Presumably they have the conceptual processing ability in the brain to do so, whereas birds (presumably) don't.
However, it raises issues over just how do you deal with people who are simply incapable of understanding certain - even what everyone else considers "basic" - concepts.
How about the reverse situation? If someone can understand a concept that most other humans can't understand, does that make that someone something other than human?
Does not understanding large numbers make you "subhuman?" Does understanding concepts few others understand make you "superhuman?"
At what point on the Bell Curve do you become something "else?" A moron? A genius? A Transhuman? A "primate?"
Are any of those terms precise enough to even be relevant, in the absence of precise brain function analysis on an individual basis?
Interesting questions.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I read a sci-fi story a few years ago that touched on this. I swear it was one of the Rama books, but can't remember for sure. An alien commented that humans can only instantly recognize between 5 and 7 objects, while they could recognize up to a dozen or two, and a third alien race couldn't reocgnize anything below 47 (or something) but could instantly count any other number. Sort of like the opposite of the OP: They have words for 47 and up, but anything lower than that is simply 'few'.
I read a classic example of this in Ishi in Two Worlds, which is a biography of the last Yahi Indian. When this guy first emerged from the wild in 1911, he gave investigators the usual "one, two, many" brushoff. But later, when Ishi was working as a janitor/informant at a museum in San Francisco, they discovered that he had no trouble counting the money he was paid -- in his native language! The difference was that Ishi cared about his money, but not about abstract linguistics.
This reminds me of a psych seminar I attended earlier this year, which I think also concerned the Piraha tribe. The working hypothesis, if I recall correctly, is that there are actually two different systems of innate counting. The first system is discrete/digital, but can only count up to very small numbers. The second system is fuzzier/analogue, but can distinguish between bigger numbers like 200 and 300, controlling for potential confounding factors by doing things like varying the size of objects. Neither of these systems are by themselves able to distinguish between numbers like 8 and 9, which is generally not too harmful in the context of evolution.
The idea is that language (or perhaps modification of brain structures related to language) is needed to tie these two systems together. You and I learned these sorts of mechanisms growing up, but members of the Piraha tribe didn't.
Twelve is close enough to umpteen as makes no odds.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
> For instance, when you are surrounded by people with whom you have no
> fluent language in common, you soon get into the habit
Good point.
For a while, my housemates included a girl freshly arrived from China (with mediocre English) and another native English speaker. We found that we quickly adopted a particular way of speaking when including her in the conversation - much more direct and concrete - and that spread to the way we would think about things.
When she was not part of the conversation, our speaking styles were quite different - much more fluid and abstract play with the language, much more jesting and verbal ripostes, and a distinctly different tone to the conversations.
One language, two different (albeit similar) personas.
Based on Google Images from only .uk sites, it seems like lemon/lime in the UK is the same as lemon/lime in the US. See, for example: http://www.artificialplants.co.uk/limes.htm
As you know, human languages are infinitely expressive, which is why the Whorfian hypothesis is wrong. Programming languages are not; they impose real constraints. Visual Basic makes it really hard to see the programming problem space as hashes and regular expressions, and there is little VB programmers can do about that. For a Perl coder, these tools are so integrated that sometimes every nut is cracked with Perl sledgehammers. But a human from any place on earth who sees a solar eclipse for the first time will be able to talk about it the next day. So I don't see any point in the comparison.
It's not clear to me that this proves anything. I think it depends a lot on what exactly the people in the experiement were asked to do. For example, if they were asked to match the number of things the experimenter put out, they did this successfully. They were shown many sticks (or whatever), and they did indeed put out many sticks. The attempt to approximately match may have been because of another characteristic than quantity, e.g. length. "I see a bunch of sticks, spaced about this much apart, and the group of them is about this long. I'll do the same." As far as the subjects were concerned, they may have done exactly what they were supposed to.
> In a book "The Illusion of Technique", an anecdote is told about some
> Headhunters in a Polynesian island during WWII. GIs would give them one pack
> of cigarettes for each Japanese head they brought in.
Whereas today, North American headhunters would get about 3 months worth of salary for each head, which tells you that while the techniques have changed, they still have trouble counting past 3.
I read that article earlier. The real problem isn't that these people do not have the proper language to understand mathematics, but rather these people have never been taught the concepts or abstraction of basic mathematics. You can teach a completely deaf person mathematics, as long as they understand the concepts. Mathematics is the language of the universe and it is not directly tied to any verbal language whatsoever. Mathematics at its core is not a matter of numbers and words, but abstractions and concepts. It is amazing how "researchers" get studies like this published sometimes.
This is also reminds me of a story just a couple weeks ago that some "researchers" tried to prove that the successfulness of human relationships is dependent on a person name. Specifically where the vowels were placed in the person's name (and some other crap). Talk about horribly correlated data and bad conclusions.
Soft science. *rolls eyes*
I have seen this in English somewhere in (I think) "Church and State" from the Cerebus comic where Cerebus is trying to write a letter to his love, Jaka, and can't say what he wants to. Every other frame you see "Rip Rip" and "Tear Tear" written in wavy lines eminating from the hunched form of Cerebus as he decides each letter is not good enough. Although this uses the verb to represent the sound it makes, you can often see people exclaim in IRC channels on freenode "w00t!" which, if you attempt to say it, is a bit like the Gerry Springer audience trademark exclamation - it indicates the feeling you get when you are very pleased with some good news.
Acutally the Inuit language is synthetic, so rather than putting adjectives near nouns to express the adjective-noun relationship, they attach them to the actual word.
Thus, Inuit in fact has an infinite number of words for snow, as they do also for skyscraper.
It's just the way the language works.
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
Zeig Heil Der Grammar Nazi! Zeig Heil!
And mod the stupid grandparent down... wait. Better yet, burn him on a stake for spreading a dangerous meme.
Yeah, but those two tests are stupid. Of course people are going to perceive the same color (unless they are colorblind) or remember that the fox jumped over the dog. Where one would expect it to have an effect is on higher cognitive reasoning, abstract modes though.
Perhaps the internet is proof of that. People wish to express complex thoughts, but don't have the words and end up with: Y0U FUCKING MER0N!1! !
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
graduate student once argued with me using the following deliciously backwards logic: language must affect thought, because if it didn't, we would have no reason to fight sexist language (apparently, the fact that it is offensive is not reason enough)
What an idiot - he is to stupid to know that "offensive" is not an objective state? SOME people find it offensive, others do not. What is the difference?
That's what he should look into.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
It's usually the same species. There exists white specimens of the regular rock dove (the ones we have in cities and know as pigeon). Fascinating species really. The natural tameness that probably makes them an easy target in the forest also makes them very well adapted to life alongside humans. I wonder if this isn't related to the fact that doves have been domesticated for thousands of years.
You often see rock doves with a couple of white feathers, or even a single white dove in the flock. Now there are many species of dove, and I can't say for sure if those are identical to the ones that magicians use (which are extremely tame), but if they are, it would explain the adaption of rock doves - they would get just enough tameness genes from the occasional stray white dove to survive in the city.
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Another linguist that was working with Gordon, and has lived with the Piraha people for 20 years has posted this short reply to the LinguistList. Following the link, you can find a link to his paper which is pending peer review.
"Gordon's conclusion in Science is that Piraha offers support for the
Whorf hypothesis. While I believe that this is plausible, my own view
is that the lack of counting must be seen in the larger cultural
context and that when thus viewed in conjunction with the lack of
color words, the lack of embedding, the simplest kinship system ever
documented, and various other characteristics, a different,
non-Whorfian picture emerges. The basic conclusion I reach is that
culture constrains grammar in ways many of us have not previously
imagined. I take this to be an argument against, for example,
Universal Grammar, at least the more widely-accepted versions of it."
http://jones.ling.indiana.edu/~prrodrig
"Those who can do..."
Put identity in the browser.