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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.
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
Please no more replies I just can't keep track of them all.
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.
In fact certain Inca tribes worshipped the zero, leading to the inevitable question, Is nothing sacred?
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
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
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.
Well yes, but if you read the article, it's not claiming to be a new theory, simply *proof* of an existing theory. From the article:
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.
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.
Which makes them smarter than Hottentot tribesmen....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Evidence against the Sappir-Worph hypothesis includes studies showing that people with color words for only dark colors and light colors couldn't reliably distinguish between dark red and dark blue. However, they could be *taught* the difference, and new color words, with no great difficulty, and could easily distinguish colors with those new words, showing that Sappir-Worph describes how language limits thought only circumstantially, not fundamentally. In other words, growing up with a lack of words for something doesn't mean one can't learn those words, concepts, and thoughts later on, so Sappir-Worph doesn't identify something fundamental about language use, only the rather obvious obvious conclusion that you can't put into words what you don't know the words for.
That's the problem with this psychologist's study--it doesn't say whether or not they learned larger numbers and applied them effectively.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
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.
You know what they say, "In the land of the only-to-2-counting, the 3-counter is king."
668.5
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.
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
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.
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!
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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."
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
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.