Slashdot Mirror
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.
Maybe their brains are not capable of numbers greater that 2. Therefore their language reflects that limitation...
President Bush also has a very limited vocabulary. "Good", "evil," "black," "white," "good," "bad," "wrong," and "right." So give the guy a break. He simply doesn't have the mental tools to comprehend the complexities of many issues.
I suggest we pass a "No President Left Behind" act to help him around this problem. We can have him memorize flahscards with words and concepts like "grey," "neutrality," "compromise," "subtle," "multifaceted," and "uncertainty."
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
I'm pretty sure most people don't know what hunger is. If they did, then there wouldn't be so many obese people. Anyways, you've got a stupid example. People generally don't understand their bodies or feelings in words. This is the reason why so many westerners mistreat their bodies. English has it's goal of disecting and classifying the whole world, giving a name to everything out THERE. Unfortunately they have never seemed to turn 'science' inwards. However, once we develop a word for a concept, or something that we feel inside, the word is never 100% exact. After that word is developed we gravitate more and more to that particular meaning even if it isn't exact. Often times, people have so little information about their body that they make serious mistakes. Take a look at the smoker. Smoking has absolutely nothing positive going for it, and yet millions of people are addicts. You can't even get animals to self administer nicotine, you have to force them until they're addicted. So here's what happens. A person smokes a cigarette, then they go into withdrawal. How is that withdrawal perceived? Generally, people assign it one of the very few words we have to describe internal states, stressed, anxious, tense. Person smokes another cigarette and all of a sudden their 'anxiety/stress/tenseness' goes away. What happens when people quit smoking? Then they interpret their 'stomach feelings' in a different way. Hmm, it's coming from my stomach i must be hungry, lets go eat. The signals are very similar, which is why people can confuse hunger/nicotine withdrawal/anxiety/stress/tenseness depending on which words they have learned to assign to them. You want some to stop over eating, smoking, drinking, being lazy? All you have to do is help them understand their bodies and develop a language around that. Yoga is excellent for that.
If you can't understand something enough to put it into words, you don't understand it well enough. Everybody that is at the top of their field can explain what they're doing and/or thinking. You might not be able to understand what they're saying, but they know (and can say) exactly what they're doing at any given time.
That includes artists, btw.
If you can't articulate, you're just not good enough. Try harder.