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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.
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 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
That's your two year old-- who has already been immersed in your language, with those concepts, for two years.
My 11 month old can understand a lot of words and commands, though she doesn't speak yet.
I have a two and a half year old who can tell you what she wants, and can understand nearly anything you might tell her. She can even express some abstract ideas "That's amazing", "This is fun".
It seems to me as a layman, that the only thoughts that occur naturally to children are "Feed me" and "make me comfortable again" (change diaper, make me warm, stop the thing that's hurting me). Everything else seems to be environmentally induced (most of the play I see in the 2.5 year old is mimicry of adult actions).
But evenso, I find it hard to grasp the concept of a language that goes to anything less than five-- because that's how many fingers you have and it seems to me that someone would want to count them sometime.
Also, personally, if I see a group of things, and it is five or less, I just know how many it is-- I don't have to consciously count them. Six though, I have to count. I do that by making two groups of three, so it's nearly instantaneous, but it is definitely not just "known".
On the other hand-- you only have two hands, so you'll rarely if ever manipulate more than two things at a time, so maybe that's it-- one, two, too many to do things with right now.
But for people who gather fruit and nuts... it seems like it would be a survival necessity to be able to tell the differnce between 4 cashews (I'm going to need to eat more) and 400 (I'm going to be so full).
And I think they can tell the difference. It seems, based on the article, that they just approximate volume. Because there is no need to tell the difference between 350 cashews and 400-- both of them will give a few people a snack. Similarly, who cares whether you have five avacodoes or six? That's a lot of avacadoes to eat.
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.