Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

One, Two, Many - Language Shapes Thought

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the all-natural-language-processing dept.

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.

10 of 919 comments (clear)

  1. Does this mean anything? by tod_miller · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
  2. Too Many replies by prgammans · · Score: 5, Funny

    Please no more replies I just can't keep track of them all.

  3. Obligatory discworld reference by Zarhan · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  4. Re:Inca's and Zero by Polaris · · Score: 5, Funny

    In fact certain Inca tribes worshipped the zero, leading to the inevitable question, Is nothing sacred?

  5. Re: Troll by Black+Parrot · · Score: 5, Funny


    > Or the trolls in Terry Pratchett's Discworld books

    Finally, a /. story where trolls are on-topic! [Head explodes]

    --
    Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
  6. Re:INDIA (was Re:Inca's and Zero) by anpe · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  7. Re:Could it be? by janbjurstrom · · Score: 5, Funny

    You know what they say, "In the land of the only-to-2-counting, the 3-counter is king."

    --
    668.5
  8. Re:Where have I heard this before? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!

  9. Re:MOD PARENT UP by gowen · · Score: 5, Funny
    I don't agree that Whorf is "discredited "
    He lost all credibility for me when he turned up in Deep Space Nine.
    --
    Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
  10. Re:Could it be? by batemanm · · Score: 5, Funny
    You know what they say, "In the land of the only-to-2-counting, the 3-counter is king."

    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."