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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?
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
Please no more replies I just can't keep track of them all.
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
1. Locate sub-average intelligent slashdot poster
2. Leave aformentioned slashdot poster in amazonian jungle with same level of technology as amazonian tribe s/he ridiculed.
3. Wait for slashdot poster to die in hostile environment which ridiculed tribe thrives in
4. Collect his/her life insurance
5. Profit!!
"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.
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.
You know what they say, "In the land of the only-to-2-counting, the 3-counter is king."
668.5
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!
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
I would have thought it was more along the lines of
"In the land of the only-to-2-counting, the 3-counter is burnt at the stake for being a witch."
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.