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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.
"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 ]
Trolls are usually thought to be so stupid they can count only up to 4. [...]
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.
- Men at Arms
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.
They weren't tested for mathematical skills, they
were tested for practical skills involving
quantities of items or events larger than 3.
sigs are hazardous to your health
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.
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.
For those (like me) who had never before heard of Gully Dwarves, here is an informative link that discusses their counting abilities.
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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.
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. One enterprising local broad in 12 heads, and the American counted off 12 packs of cigs. The guy looked confused. So finally they put each pack of cigs next to each head and the headhunter was satisfied. So, he could make pairing associations.
>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.
I'm sorry but that statement is misleading. The 0 is generally accepted to have been invented in the Dravido-Indic cultures, what is currently Southern India. See following URL: Google Cache of Invention of 0 This was then spread through the Persian/Arab (Islamic) scientists and eventually to Europe.