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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.
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.
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.
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. . . 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!
Please no more replies I just can't keep track of them all.
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
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.
In fact certain Inca tribes worshipped the zero, leading to the inevitable question, Is nothing sacred?
> Or the trolls in Terry Pratchett's Discworld books
Finally, a
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
But theyre pretty good at fooling earnest anthropologists who only want confirmation of their pet theories ...
"in American English, you have only one word for Indians" Well, I keep on trying to use the word Injun to describe Native Americans, but everyone always gets mad at me. Something about politcial correctness or insensitivity or something.
>> If we counted in base 100 would women finally remember their own mobile phone numbers?
;)
Just because the ones they give you dont work, doesn't mean they can't remember them...
In an unrelated story, american people (who only have one word to represent the concept of Indians and Native Americans) where presented people from India and Native Americans. As language shapes the mind, American people were unsurprisingly unable to make any difference.
They only thought the Hottentot were saying the word many. It was actually a word later translated to mean "Why is this white idiot asking all these questions?"
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.
congress should outlaw testing on crows. If a few of them get ahold of cell phones for instance, it's difficult to say just what kind of trouble we'd be in for...
nope, it's easy...with crows, it'd be murder!
Of course it gets complicated when mounting multiple partitions, and don't talk about swap drives as this can cause volumes to not want to mount anymore.
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I've heard this before... In the bar!
I start out intending to drink one beer,
Then I think that two beers can't be bad...
But somehow I end up having had many beers!
Free as in Freedom: free as in free beer does not sound bad either!
Great to be here and away from the oppressive Bush
regime that threatens world peace espoused by
good Germans and
(*notices Americans in the room*)
[English]
and of course I'm just kidding -- 4 more years!
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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.
Personally, I think maybe congress should outlaw testing on crows. If a few of them get ahold of cell phones for instance, it's difficult to say just what kind of trouble we'd be in for...
We'd soon see posts in slashdot about welcoming our new crow overlords?
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...
Ah, don't worry too much about the crows, man. They're all busy accompanying the souls of the avenging dead.
That's a big job for a medium sized carrion bird. I'll bet crows are pretty pissed at how easy ravens got off, lousy curved beak bastards.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
I can just visualize it. Everyone is gone from the set, but they've left the prop weapons and blank ammunition unlocked. The bird flutters down, packs some extra powder in it, packs some more cotton wadding it it. Flutters over to the director's script, crosses out "20 ft away" and scribbles above it "5 ft away from firing gun". Smirks to himself, flies off.
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.
"Dude."
Exactly. This is why people have trouble in accurately defining very explicit but esoteric words, such as "irony".
No comment.
In my experience, "dude" is definitely male. I've never heard someone refer to a chick as a "dude."
Oh, right, sorry I didn't mean to offend by use of the word "chick." I mean to say, "broad" or "dame."
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Aww Belgium, Did you have to remind me? Now I'm going to have to read the books again. :-)
Never give any object more potential energy than you want it to have.
Some people claim that western cultures took the zero from India, but I say that we took nothing from them.
Of course not! They still have their zero, we merely copied it. Unfortunately, the Indian Gov't has filed an IP case with the world court...
Irconceivable!!
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