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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 ]
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?
Beings aspergers AND pulling chicks... I enjoy the challenge!
"One. Two. Many. Lots."
Of course as soon as I saw the title all I could think about was Detritus the Troll.
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
So, let me get this straight. These people have no concept of numbers, and upon testing them for mathematical skills, you found them lacking?
Why does that not surprise me.
It's not so much that language shapes thought, it's entirely the other way around. If you and your tribe have never discovered mathematics, it's only natural that you have no words to express them. These people are making it sound like if we recite a list of number names we will become genius mathematicians.
. . . after all, all they have is CAR and CDR.
1. Locate sub-average intelligent tribes in the deepest jungles
2. Learn their language
3. Propose and conduct some humiliating "research" that even a monkey could succesfully complete
Many. ??
Many. ??
Many. Profit!
The Incas (I believe) were the first people to come up with the concept of Zero. Before that, (and during that time) nobody else could understand no objects. They were the first ones to come up with the word, but that was due to being the only ones who understood it. Intersting question now that I think of it is do these tribes understand zero?
There are 0 spoons
Please no more replies I just can't keep track of them all.
We need to teach more women the french phrase "Menage A Trois" early on in life.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
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.
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.
Obviously, this should be self-evident. Sadly, it seems this is not the case.
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 in this case has certainly limited their ability to express concepts. Their brains, however, will still recognize the existence of four or five things. Unfortunatly the limitations on their language will keep them from expressing verbally that knowledge. It could even bar their comprehensive abilities.
the byproduct of years of oppression by the white man
> Or the trolls in Terry Pratchett's Discworld books
Finally, a
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
But theyre pretty good at fooling earnest anthropologists who only want confirmation of their pet theories ...
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.
I have seen same problem in (US) English also when words do not represent what exactly supposed to be.
With us or with them; there is no neutral ground.
Credible threat; How credible (little, none highly)?
Imminent danger; Like Hurricane Charly or collision of earth and moon
Coalition of willing; How willing or paid
...
I'm surprised nobody's made the "reduced language = reduced ability to form mental concepts" link with Orwell's '1984'. This seems like some strong evidence that it might actually work.
=Smidge=
So in essense this seem to support the Sappir-Worph hypothesis (http://venus.va.com.au/suggestion/sapir.html) that the language strongly affect our ability to think.
This makes one wonder if a another language would give us the ability to better reason about other things. Would we be smarter if we had a better language in which to think?
There is an artifical language called lojban (http://www.lojban.org/) based on predicate logic but which is meant to be used as other "real" languages (compare with eg. esperanto, interlingua and swahili). The question is, would native speakers of lojban be better a rational thought? As far as I know there are no native speakers of lojban but what would happend if I raised my (hypothethical) children to speak if from birth?
Mathias
Many fluently multilingual people will tell you that they are a slightly different person when they speak a different language.
I'm fluent in English and Japanese, and I can attest to this. In fact, there have been occasions when I was out of touch from Japanese speakers for a long time, and I began to miss my "Japanese self" because it hadn't had a chance to surface for so long.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
In this 1949 book, the "Newspeak" language is designed exactly for that purpose. For example, they don't have a word "bad" - only "not good" (which is supposed to be the opposite of bad, but isn't).
They use language control for thought control.
If this tribe calculated 0, 1, 2, many, many 1, many 2 or something like it there would be no trouble. Just confusing for base 10 users.
But it seems this tribe doesn't have/need the concept of higher numbers.
What I would like to know if they understand the concept of zero. 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. If this tribe wich can only count to 2 understands 0 then it would make an intresting find.
They may not have a need to count higher numbers but me thinks it is very important to know the difference between 1 fish and 0 fish.
What may also be intresting is that if you need language to count and animals can count does that mean that all animals that can count have a language. And not just a language of "food" "danger" "sex" but a language with "1" "2" "3" etc?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I've heard stories of tribes in Australia having the same "problem".
They couldn't count above 3, but if they had 200 sheep they could instantly tell if one was missing.
Maybe they know exactly how many sheep they have, but no way to verbalize it. Simply because they have no need to.
But later in the same article we find this: "There are not really occasions in their daily lives where the Pirahã need to count,"
This statement is in direct opposition to the stated theory. In this quote, the scientist is saying that the causitive arrow points the other direction. They don't have much need to count -> their language doesn't contain those words.
To my mind, their failures on the tests are more parsimoniously explained by their simply not having had much practice with a technique (counting) they don't use much and their language merely reflects this.
This is not surprising; several studies on language have had similar findings. For example, a article I read last month in an issue of Discover ties the level of technological advancement with an increasing need to define more colors.
For example, in 1st world countries, the basic ROYGBIV colors are defined as well as variations within (Gee, honey, magenta or fuschia curtains? Chartreuse or pea soup, even!). In one South American tribe, there are only two words, those essentially describing "hot" and "cold" colors.
What I find most intriguing is whether or not it is the language that limits the culture, or the culture that limits the language. After all, as a culture, civilization grows and comes into contact with others, it is only reasonable that some things are assumed by each. Language is always one of the first aspects of a culture to change.
I'm not a psychologist, but to me there's nothing earth-shattering here. There are other instances of people who have words for a wide variety of shades of green (that normal Americans can't differentiate) but who use the same word for the colors we call orange and red.
But, even knowing that, is anything so dramatic going on? "Western" people with the proper training and experience could tell the difference at a glance between a screen full of C programming and a screen full of FORTRAN. My grandmother would struggle with that task. It would just all look like gibberish to her. Likewise, someone experienced in wine tasting can describe in detail the differences between two wines most of the rest us couldn't even tell apart.
A lot of what's necessary (or at least very helpful) in learning about programming or wines is the specialized language. When I'm told that the difference between two wines is that one is "fruitier" than the other, I've got something to look for. The nebulous and complex experience of tasting wine is brought into my understanding a little because I can now use a word to identify a part of what I'm sensing.
My point is, the idea that language affects how we think and what we perceive is not really all that novel.
Seems like no-one takes the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis serious these days, but I always thought it makes sense.
Why? It seems to me that all manner of spontaneous word creation (and outright theft from other languages) is hobbled if it were true. I mean, if thoughts of 0 or 3+ things were important to these people, they would have that thought long before they came up with a clean word to express it. As another poster joked, a computer isn't hobbled by only having 0 and 1 at its disposal. I think it is more correct to say that these people are not Turing-complete (for whatever reason) rather than blaming the language.
>> If we counted in base 100 would women finally remember their own mobile phone numbers?
;)
Just because the ones they give you dont work, doesn't mean they can't remember them...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
One of my favourite examples, as a Norwegian stranded in the UK, a country where people simply does not get the concept of candy with ammonium chloride, is how to talk about it.
In the UK, the word "candy" has mostly gone out of use, and usually refers to brown sugar or alt least "old fashioned" sweets based on brown sugar. Instead you'd refer to the different types of confectionary directly, with most of the sugar based confectionary grouped under "sweets".
Now, ammonium chloride based candy is most definitively not sweets. Though it is always fun to trick Brits into chewing Turkish Pepper or some other Scandinavian ammoium chloride based candy... :)
The word "confectionary" similarly doesn't really cut it - it's recognised as a grouping, and if you asked people if thy wanted any confectionary they'd wonder what kind you were talking about.
Scandinavian languages on the other hands have words for this, since it's an integral part of our culture. In Norwegian you'd talk about "godt" or "smaagodt", referring to small sweets, bits of licorice, small chocolate pieces or candy full of ammonium chloride, as well as assorted sour stuff.
But what would a usable equivalent be in the UK? I usually end up resorting to candy, but Brits then tend to assume that since I'm foreign I'm probably resorting to US English, and talking about sweets...
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.
Samuel Delaney's classic SF book "Babel-17" explored how language shapes behavior. A clandenstine group who wanted assassins who wouldn't question what they were doing created an artificial language and raised children in it. The language had no word for "I" or "no". It was all commands, such as "You will do this." They had no way of saying "No, I won't.", because the concept didn't exist in the language. I recently re-read it after many years and it's still an incredible read.
Common Lisp people seem to behave in a way that is akin to the Borg:
they study the various new things that people do with interest and then
find that it was eminently doable in Common Lisp all along and that they
can use these new techniques if they think they need them.
-- Erik Nagggum
languages shape the way we think, or don't.
-- Erik Naggum, comp.lang.lisp
``Lisp has jokingly been called "the most intelligent way to misuse a
computer". I think that description is a great compliment because it
transmits the full flavor of liberation: it has assisted a number of our
most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts.''
-- "The Humble Programmer", E. Dijkstra, CACM, vol. 15, n. 10, 1972
You may find this conceptually simple, but real Lisps decided long ago
that the human language tendency to have verbs and nouns draw from the
same lexicon, but mean different things according to context actually
works tremendously well. Lisp was developed in the English language
community. Algol and several other languages that fight against this
tendency in human languages were developed in non-English communities.
If you do not like the ability to spell a verb and a noun the same way,
take it up with English or German, not with languages that evolved with
designers and users speaking the respective languages.
-- Erik Naggum
High on the list of things Lisp offers that most other languages botch is
the idea that (+ x 1) for any integer x should return a number bigger than
x in all cases. It seems like such a small point, but it's often quite
useful. -- Kent M. Pitman
> The continuing holier-than-thou attitude the average lisp programmer...
There are no average Lisp programmers. We are the Priesthood. Offerings
of incense or cash will do.
-- Kenny Tilton at c.l.l
Dalinian: Lisp. Java. Which one sounds sexier?
RevAaron: Definitely Lisp. Lisp conjures up images of hippy coders,
drugs, sex, and rock & roll. Late nights at Berkeley, coding in Lisp
fueled by LSD. Java evokes a vision of a stereotypical nerd, with no
life or social skills.
One of the major attractions that Common Lisp offer me personally is that
there is just so much in and around it that I would benefit from. I came to
the point of SGML expertise where (I thought) I would not be able to develop
any further, where there would be nothing more for me to learn, and I found
myself always helping people without the reward of learning anything new.
This exhausted me and contributed strongly to abandoning 6 years of
concentrated effort on something I have additionally come to think of as
fundamentally braindamaged. I decided to work in an area where the
probability of dealing with people who were smarter than me was nonzero and
the Lisp and Scheme worlds offer this in abundance. To work in areas where
the sum total of knowledge is acquirable in your youth may seem exciting to
the youth, but to realize that you have wasted your most absorbent days on
something that would bore you when you exhausted the supply of ideas is
nothing but painful to the old.
-- Erik Naggum
"Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material."
- Alan Kay
[Emacs] is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is
beautiful.
-- Neal Stephenson, _In the Beginning was the Command Line_
Just because we Lisp programmers are better than everyone else is no
excuse for us to be arrogant. -- Erann Gat
In Lisp, if you want to do aspect-oriented programming, you just do a
bunch of macros and you're there. In Java, you have to get Gregor
Kiczales to go out and start a new company, taking months and years
and try to get that to work. Lisp still has the advantage there, it's
just a question of people wanting that. -- Peter Norvig
"Conceptually FORTRAN remained on familiar grounds in the sense that its
p
Dyslexics have more fnu.
For those (like me) who had never before heard of Gully Dwarves, here is an informative link that discusses their counting abilities.
Check out Chad's News
"Science Express" has its own paraphrasal of the paper at its website but you have to pay for the full text. There is also a link to "supporting online material" that includes a free document describing some of the methds and results.
Subject to the caveat that I did not fork over the $$$ for the full article, I'd say the conclusions appear unremarkable. Humans raised in cultures that lack counting can't count beyond 3, and also can't express the concept. I see no experiment that indicates causality between what I consider two aspects of the same phenomenon.
Is it just me or is this a long paper about something everyone already knew? George Orwell's book 1984 extensively covered an extremely plausible use of language control to shape what it is possible for an individual to think. Heck, entire U.S. industries are devoted to nothing more than massaging numbers to help people know what they should think (it's called statistics). Kerry leads Bush (in U.S. presidential elections) by 48% to 42%. Ralph Nader only has about 7%, so only idiots who want to throw away their vote will vote for him. 9 out of 10 dentists prefer Crest toothpaste. More than 85% of desktop computer run Microsoft Windows as their OS, so it must be better. It takes a true genius to suddenly discover (and write an impressive paper) that numbers may shape human thought!
I'll even go one step further than the startling theory of the original authors. Cultural needs shapes the evolution of language, and of thought. Amazon Indians who are in survival mode of hunt-and-gather do not need high mathematical skills. Seriously, what would they need a number greater than 2 for? Ook, how many days since we last ate?, It has been 3.7 days, mostly due to a 56% drop in acceptable game in the area. If we extrapolate from our current situation, in about another 1.5 days we will suffer a 80% decrease in operational efficiency due to insufficient food. I wish to propose that we may have hunted this area out and need to move to the next valley 8 miles over, where the game density is much higher. If they did need a number greater than 2, they would have invented it. People make fun of Eskimos and their many words for snow. Think of our society and how many words for computer we have, and the different connotations they have. Is it a Linux box, or a Windows box? A game machine, a home unit, a business computer, or a uber-133t-box? We have invented the words because there was a need. Words that aren't needed by a society disappear (when did you last hear someone say phithee, as in Phithee my good sir, may thou tellest me the road to Whenst?).
A much better paper covering language is here (A View of Man's Linguistic Development).
Hmmm... perhaps I should write a nice looking scholarly paper on this. Even better, I'll web-publish it and shock everyone with this new theory. Call the television networks!!
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.
BLACKADDER: This is called adding. If I have two beans, and then I add two more, what do I have?
BALDRICK: Some beans.
BLACKADDER: Yes... and no. Let's try again, shall we? I have two beans, then I add two more beans. What does that make?
BALDRICK: A very small casserole.
BLACKADDER: Baldrick, the ape creatures of the Indus have mastered this. Now try again. One, two, three, four. So, how many are there?
BALDRICK: Three.
BLACKADDER: What?
BALDRICK: And that one.
BLACKADDER: Three... and that one. So, if I add that one to the three, what will I have?
BALDRICK: Oh! Some beans.
If you want to know what's the biggest number you can conceive of, use flash cards with differenct numbers of dots. Flash them for a tenth of a second or so, quicker than you can count. See what's the highest number you can accurately identify. For most people, it's between 4 and 7 IIRC, which makes us no better than crows.
Of course it gets complicated when mounting multiple partitions, and don't talk about swap drives as this can cause volumes to not want to mount anymore.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
Yes.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, however, even though long proven wrong, has shaped the thinking of a whole generation of people, including those in the feminist movement, proposing "politically correct" words (female forms e.g.) hoping that they would induce a new thinking.
Language may be a result of knowledge and cultural concepts, thus reflect it. But it does not shape it, because - and that's known as de Saussure's work - the word is not equal to the concept. Whether you call something a small feline animal or a cat, it's still the same entity that you are thinking of. Whether you call someone a nigger, an african american, a 'brother', a black person -- the name does force us to change our thinking. (It may prompt us to think about misconceptions, of course!)
Steven Pinker's book "The Language Instinct" is a good read.
Haven't read Feigenson's original article. But it seems painfully obvious to me that given all the other linguistic evidence, the Brazilian tribe might simply have established a culture of arithmetics that doesn't allow you to count more than two things.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
... the tribe invited the researchers for a dinner where the tribe has found the researchers to be unable to tell edible roots from extremely poisonable ones.
The "strong" form of Sapir-Whorf, that the form of language directly impacts what kinds of thought are possible, is not taken too seriously anymore. But there are weaker forms of the hypothesis, that there is an infulence, that still seem reasonable given the evidence so far. Much like how a different programming language lends itself to different sorts of programming constructs.
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.
They think trolls are stupid because they only count one, two, many, but the counting system is:
one, two, many, many-one, many-two, many-many, many-many-one, many-many-two, lots...
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
Ethnology is full of traveller's tales which usually boil down to three cases: a) The ethnologist is a white German lady filmmaker and the stud is dusting his dong because the batty crone pays him to, b) The ethnologist is Margaret Mead and the chief of the Gilhoulies is having her on, or c) The ethnologist has delusions of linguistic competence, and -- whilst demonstrating photography to the savages -- translates the perfectly sensible Papuan expression "Hey, that looks like my reflection in water! How you do dat, bub?" as "Funny fellow in water" -- thereby "demonstrating" that Papua New Guineans have no sense of self! Give me a break! I'll draw a major coda under the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis when I see this result vetted by independent grad students who can FIND the same tribe.
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
No, I really do understand it. I just can't explain what it means. :)
In all seriousness, I would disagree in some cases (perhaps these are only exceptions...) where someone can conceive what is happening but either is not good enough at communicating, or is a horrid teacher, and so can not articulate.
I [think I] know this because I had a number of professors that suffered from this very affliction.
Linux: The world's best text-adventure game.
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.
Douglas Adams had this thought and reused city names for common concepts which don't have a name in the english language.
Check out http://folk.uio.no/alied/TMoL.html for more
In a primitive society, im sure that things only come in amounts of one, two, or many. Think about it. And if they're not used to doing something, they can't do it. The two correlate, but the scientists have the causation backwards. Thy don't deal with other quantities, so that don't have words for them and they aren't really good at dealing with them since they don't.
Damn, that's confusing. Sorry.
I read that and I was really surprised. I am a Polish speaker/reader and so is my wife. I left Poland at the age of four but my wife only did so four years ago. In fact to become competent in Polish I took two quarters of Polish at Uni. The other students were Russian/Slavic and linguistics concentrators. It was a very bizarre way of learning Polish I suppose, but before that I felt very inadequate about being illiterate and sounding like a four year old whenever I spoke Polish.
So what I know is that in Polish there are also two words for blue: niebieski and blekitni. (Okay so I had to strip-off the accents because slashcode did not like them.) They are light-blue and dark-blue respectively. (Really niebieski is related to the word for sky so you might think of this word as sky-blue, I do and that is what I meant earlier about learning Polish from a linguist probably was different from a native Polish speakers experience.)
Now you might think this is simple, well not really. Here is a translation of what happens in practice with some regularity. My wife says, "Bring me the blue one," where blue is the word for either light-blue or dark-blue depending on the color of the object. I oblige but then hear a response of, "No I said the blue one not the green one." Bizarre because notice I wrote blue and green. It is not like she said light-blue and I brought the dark-blue widget. Sometimes she claims I brought the purple thing instead. These exchanges are entirely in Polish because this what we speak predominantly at home.
Okay now I am not color-blind. For my work I need to pass a test every two years and in the report I always pass all of the tests, even those for which a certain percentage of people that are not typically considered color-blind would not pass. I can clearly distinguish between a wide spectrum of colors.
After a while of this my mother noticed it once so we did a little test with the family. My mother, father, uncle, aunt, and grandmother were all part of it. All of them had spent the majority of their lives in Poland and almost without fail they would agree with the colors that my wife gave to objects. Then we repeated the test with my brother and his girlfriend who except for a vacation had not spent any time in Poland. They agreed with me the majority of the time.
Now this test was not scientific in any way and it did involve alcohol because it happened during a family get-together, but I still think that native Polish speakers vs English speakers think of colors as different because of their languages. What I mean is that there are many shades of colors that are sort of between green and blue and others that are between green and purple and given a proper ambiguous color such as this Polish speakers will tend to identify it differently than English speakers.
So what I am trying to say after all of this is that the example of the Russian language having two words for blue is sort of a red herring. It is irrelevant to the real issues. In fact given two people that are not color blind, one a Russian and one an English speaker, they should not have any extra difficulty in being able to distinguish between color chips as being different or not. What I am saying is that they will think of the same color chip as a different color in their minds. Now this is subtle, and I tend to agree with the parent poster that it is a special case, but definitely an example of how language influences understanding and meaning. Here is a final true story to illustrate this idea.
My wife's favorite color is light-blue. Once I bought her a gift that was a light blue dress. When she got it she said that the dress was nice, but that, "Don't you know by now that I do not like the way I look in green?" Think about intend and effect in that example and you will see what I mean about language being important.
I think there is definitely some validity to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but it's more subtle than is characterized in this article and in previous posts. Here's an example:
As a native speaker of American English I perceive a distinction between a pidgeon and a dove. I have a word each, after all. I would eat a dove. I would not eat a pidgeon.
To the best of my knowledge, German makes no such distinction. There is one word for both: Taube*. The Germans that I have spoken to about this perceive pidgeons and doves as being the same bird. When I think about it, the two birds do seem rather similar, but prior to these discussions I saw no real similarity. That is significant. I am perfectly capable of seeing pidgeons and dove as distinct or the same. I don't think language binds your thinkingit merely influences it.
* I have heard someone call a dove a "Friedenstaube" or "peace pidgeon/dove," but that was under weird circumstances.
A publicly traded company exists solely to make profits for shareholders.
Whenever someone says, "I understand it, I just can't articulate it," what they really mean is, "I don't understand it."
:) What happens when your right brain comprehends something but is unable to properly communicate the idea to the language center in your left brain? (Very few people have language centers in their right brain.)
What a load of crap.
What happens is you have an understanding of something that you are unable to put into words.
"This is one of those areas of study where a layman can have no idea of the absurd depth of literature available, or the sorts of ridiculous theories spawned, and yet still be able to say meaningful things because it's all pretty much been wanking."
Sorry, but that's just not the case. This happens to be my field - language is far more complicated than you might imagine. Linguistics, psycholinguistics, and visual cognition are not trivial just because you don't understand them on a serious level.
G
Maybe the reason the Germans have no separate word for pidgeons and doves is that they don't care which is which. In this case, social differences lead to language choice, not vica versa. I guarantee you German bird watchers know the difference.
In English, we only have one word for "duck," despite the fact that there are many kinds of ducks. They all have different sizes, temperments and flavors, but we call them all "duck." Which leads to some pretty depressed diners, who like one sort of duck meat and then come to find the duck served at a different restaurant has a different flavor. It's a minor inconvenience caused by the fact that language evolves, it's not planned. It is not an indicator of a widespread cultural ignorance of ducks.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Whenever someone says, "I understand it, I just can't articulate it," what they really mean is, "I don't understand it."
My life changed when my fifth grade teacher said the same words to me ~mmm mmm~ years ago. I immediately understood the basic truth of that statement and have never wavered in my belief of it.
More directly topical, I have studied three non-western languages (heavily influenced by Sanskrit, Bali, and/or Chinese) and find the mindsets of native speakers to be so shaped by their language that I have to immerse myself in the culture to understand anything more than the simplest conversations. American culture and non-western ones find little common ground unless the latter have been influenced by foreign media.
Put identity in the browser.
If your claim is that language has no influence on the thought of its speakers, I disagree. I think the influence is subtle, but it's there. Language and culture have an influence on each other.
I'll bet you're right that Germans don't care which is which. The distinction is culturally unimportant. The culture influenced the language. However, since there is no distinction in the language spoken by the general non-bird-watching German public, they are less inclined to perceive a distinction than a speaker of a language that makes such a distinction. This is the influence of the language on the culture.
Do you not see this as being a two-way street? I imagine that influence of culture on language is greater than the other way around, but the influence is still there.
A publicly traded company exists solely to make profits for shareholders.
That's why I'm figuring, you know, maybe these Amazon fuckers are just bad at math. If you're that bad at math, so bad that using the fingers to count doesn't help, you really don't need words for complicated mathematical contstructs. Like, say an equivalent for the word "four."
yes, I'm KIDDING!
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
My god! Adam Duritz was right all along!
You must think in Russian.
You mean straight men.
Exactly. This is why people have trouble in accurately defining very explicit but esoteric words, such as "irony".
No comment.
Dyirbal (an Australian Aboriginal language) has four genders. Masculine, feminine, neuter, and edible non-flesh food.
Cherokee and Arabic has three numbers. Not like 1, 2, 3; but, singular, dual, and plural.
Chinese as a spoken language does not exist. Each "dialect" (not an entirely acurate word depending on its intention) is mutually uninteligible when spoken. Hence, may be considered seperate languages. The term dialect is applied to them because they share a common writing system. A Mandarin speaker will not understand a Cantonese speaker, but can read a message from the Cantonese speaker easily.
Thanks to the internet, we can now all die alone together! -SomeWoman
Amen.
As a behavioral scientist (read: psychology), I have to absolutely disagree that "it's all pretty much been wanking". What a sorry attitude.
I do agree that many lay persons are capable of contributing meaningful insight to some of these problems, but in my own area of specialty, I encounter a lot of situations where people really have no clue what I am talking about, but think that they do. (FWIW, I am a grad student doing my thesis on Hedonic Prediction (in particular), and Motivation/Judgment-Decision Making in particular: I find that it takes at least 15 minutes to explain what these are really about to most people, and why they are related to industrial psychology).
As far as linguistics are concerned, having lived in a foreign country and REALLY learned the language, I know that language is a very deep area of research.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
Bzzzt! Wrong. Thanks for playing the amateur linguist game.
An expert has posted previously we can understand an emotional concept but lack the words to express it. Anyone who speaks more than one language can come across phrases that have no real equivalent in their other language(s). In my case the Japanese emotional onomotopeia such as "doki doki" have no real English equivalent but can describe the feeling much better. The feeling in this case is what you would feel if somone removed a blindfold from your eyes and you found yourself standing at the edge of a 1500-foot cliff.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Also, how do you articulate a feeling? I'm sure you know what hunger (or love, etc.) feels like, but if you had to really explain it, could you? Not bloody likely.
As I mentioned elsewhere, some languages have words that describe feelings in ways that are not possible in English. That English lacks this kind of vocabulary makes you unable to conceive of it.
Japanese onomatopoeia includes many words that describe feelings or states of the world. For your examples I offer "gura gura" and "hara hara" (also "doki doki"). A Japanese speaker hearing these words will have an inherant understanding of the feeling.
Even expressions for sounds are much richer in Japanese which is why you will find American Goodyear engineers using term like "gwooaarrrrrr" and "shhhiiiiii" to describe tire sounds during testing. They picked this up from their Japanese colleagues.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
1, 2, 3, 4, hrair.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
I am fluent in German, Swiss-German, English, Dutch, Afrikaans and speak good French and I've lived in Germany, South Africa, Switzerland and Holland and I can utterly attest to the fact that a language affects your personality. I know that when I speak Swiss-German, I feel "less mentally supple", than when I speak German, for instance, and I remember having a number of conversations with Germans in Holland about how different one felt when speaking Dutch.
Whenever someone says, "I understand it, I just can't articulate it," what they really mean is, "I don't understand it."
Not necessarily. I often find myself saying something like that when I mean "I have up a name for a concept that will explain that, but it's a word that I (or a small group) just made up, so I'd first have to go through a long explanation before you'd understand."
This isn't at all odd for software geeks. Every time you type a variable declaration, you are in fact making up a private name for a concept, and that name is only defined in the context where you declared it. Sometimes you may use variable names that are words in English or some other spoken language, but I think most programmers understand that such usage is really very rough, and to understand the code, you have to understand each name's meaning within that code.
On a more general level, there's a widespread observation that one of the most important part of any scientific field is developing the field's terminology. Many histories of science have illustrated this with one or more historical examples where a field went through a list of closely-related terms before finally settling on what seems to be the right one.
One of the ongoing battles with terminology is the need for biological education to instill in students the idea that "function" is a well-defined technical term, but "purpose" is not. The basic debate between these somewhat similar terms happened mostly in the 1800's, of course, but the general public (and the media) still uses these terms interchangeably. To someone who uses "purpose" in biological discussions, you could reasonably tell them that you can't articulate something, because they don't understand the terminology well enough to understand what you'd say. They'd get annoyed with you, of course, but you'd be right.
In general, to "articulate" anything, i.e., to communicate it to a listener, it's necessary that both parties not only use the same words, but have the same understanding of the words' meanings. If this has been shown to be not true, then you could very well be unable to articulate something (in terms that your listeners would understand).
In the case of software, we have a deeper problem: Even if your code is clear, it's often very difficult for a reader to dig out the meanings of all those names you've used. All too often, a name's meaning can only be learned by thoroughly studying the entire body of code, until you understand all the names and how they relate to each other. Since programmers rarely document the meanings of all their code's names, we often end up with "write-only" code whose meaning is understood (if at all) only by the original programmer.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
I know some guys who really know how to weld with ocy-acetelyne. I mean REALLY know. Their weldments make me drool.
But they can't tell me how to do it. They can tell me what I did wrong (You used to much heat there), but they can tell me what it is that lets them know that (You just learn it).
Language is how we convey and obtaing information and instructions. If Joe can't tell you how to weld or why a weldment is bad, does that mean that he doesn't really know how or understand the process (which it would seem like at first), or does it just mean that the bridge to convey his knowledge and understanding is broken?
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
It is meaningful to say that our language informs our thoughts, because, in most cases it's the medium for our thoughts.
Actually it's been pretty well debunked that language is the medium for our thoughts. Most of the current theories are similar to Fodor's concept of a "mentalese" or Vygotsky's non-linguistic agglutinate forms.
You are, however, correct in saying that language informs our thoughts with "informs" being the key word. There appears to be a strong connection between language and perception. While we may not think in language we appear to see in language. Language seems to teach our perception what is and is not important to take note of, our minds then process that data. This means that our minds should be able to still conceive certain concepts, but the data may not be obvious to the majority of the public and they certainly would have a difficult time articulating that information.
Penguin Trivia #46: Animals who are not penguins can only wish they were. -- Chicago Reader 10/15/82
Well, having just read the Cecil Adams treatise on the subject, I have to admit: we're both wrong.
The Inuit have many words for snow slash ice, but they're not really that different from our terms for different properties of snow ( drifting snow, packing snow, sleet, slush, etc ). The inuit language is polysynthetic, meaning you make up your own words from particles of meaning as you go along. Therefore, they have as many words for anything as they have time to speak them. Add the particle for snow to the particle for bureau, and voila! Snowbureau.
In many ways, this is not that different from English speaking idiots who think they can invent plurals however they like (statii, virii, emails, boxen and the like) or sound impressive by putting ir- onto the front of a word starting with r (irrespective, irregardless, irridiculous, etc).
Hey freaks: now you're ju
I immediately understood the basic truth of that statement and have never wavered in my belief of it.
A crock of shit if I've ever heard one. There are times when I can't define a word explicitly (old age, you know) yet I know exactly what it means. At that point I have to go to a dictionary to refresh my failing memory in order to explain what the word means to others.
And there are words in other languages which have no direct translation into English. I can talk around the meaning all day to you, but I can never properly define the word to you; either you'll 'get it' someday, or you won't. Whether or not you do 'get it' has no bearing on whether or not *I* do, regardless of my lack of ability to translate it properly.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
How do we know that Piraha people even understood what was required of them?
When people are asked to imitate, they tend to focus only on the important parts. For instance, if I wave, and ask a person to imitate me, they'll probably focus on my waving, and ignore my saccadic eye movements. One could then conclude that lack of short word for "saccadic eye movement" causes people to not see it.
The only way to reliably make sure they understand the task is to evaluate their performance on a validation set. IE one would give several examples of researcher tapping N times (>2), and assistant repeating N times. After the subject could successfully imitate the assistant on those examples, he should get previously unheard number of taps, and be asked to imitate it.
Yaroslav
Artificial Intelligence in Python: yaroslav.hopto.org/pubwiki/index.php/ai-python
Irconceivable!!
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Three is the highest number most people can "count" instantly when the objects are in a random pattern. This is easy, and fun, to test at home. When you "count" higher groupings quickly you are either seeing known patterns (eg dots on a die), or quickly re-grouping as you stated.
Anarchists never rule