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Amazonian Tribe Has No Word To Express Numbers
In 2004 we discussed the Piraha, a tribe in the Amazon, when a study appeared characterizing their language as a "one, two, many" language. Now reader mu22le informs us of a new study of the Piraha pointing to the possibility that they use no number words at all. Instead they seem to use the word formerly thought to mean "two" to represent a quantity of 5 or 6, and the "one" word for anything from 1 to 4. The language has about 300 native speakers. "The study... offers evidence that number words are a concept invented by human cultures as they are needed, and not an inherent part of language, Gibson said."
Has no word to express.. uhhmm... forgot what it's called now.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
How do they say: First Post! ??
Guess I can't say... first....
Sig Registration Form 34c_766(a) submitted to Ministry of Signature Management. Approval pending.
??? Have no words for numbers
???
???
??? Profit!
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
Shouldn't it be "a large number, but not five or six" speakers?
Boy, oh boy... l33t is gonna take on a whole new meaning!
Crackin' Wise - Blogging about whatever we want
Seems that what they're calling "Numbers" are the same as our quantity descriptors. Small number, medium number, and large number. Seems reasonable, I'm no anthropologist, but I think that numbers really start when you have a lot of trade going on, when you have to KNOW that 5 ears of corn is worth 1 basket of peas.
society's that use currency/money, rather than hunter/gatherers...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
This indicates that "these aren't counting numbers at all," said Gibson. "They're signifying relative quantities."
--
Relative quantities to what? Sounds to me like it's counting, just that they don't have much need for it and only use very basic pointers. I guess when theres only 300 of you, counting isn't your main problem.
Though we can whatever we like about them, guessing they don't read Slashdot.
then there's also no way to collect taxes. I should move...
MP3 Search Engine
They've got a long way to go until they figure out the meaning of life then...
When numbers play no role because what you need is either abundant or nonexistant, i.e. "there" or "not there", you have no need to invent a word for it. What matters is whether there is enough or not enough. And appearantly the "a little" "a little more" "much more" separation works sufficiently.
The best example is the omnipresent claim that Inuit have dozens of words for snow. Or Ferengi having a few for rain, but none for "crunchy". What matters is the context you're living in. I dare say that the need for numbers stems either from the needs of trade, administration or simply the urge to show off. And even for that, the basic system of "one, few, many" works out quite ok until the system and your "tribe" reaches a certain size.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Bush has been speaking Piraha all this time?
Shameless political joke of the day.
Not having words to represent numbers is a long way from having no concept of numeracy. Can you quickly estimate how much or how many of something you require over a period of time without doing the math? Even animals seem to have this ability.
How do they express IP addresses?
How do they indicate successful termination of their C programs?
No wonder they are living in the jungle.
So, I grew up on a Bushveld Farm in Africa.
And, as one does on farms in the raw, one must maintain a system of control... over baboons.
Experience taught the farmers how to deal with baboons, as a necessity towards having a harvest- baboons are quite destructive you see.
The first method is by catching one using the 'pumpkin' trick. Quite easy:
Tie down a pumkin, make a hole in it just big enough for a baboon hand to slip in and wait.
The baboon will come along and stick his hand into the pumpkin, grab a handful and then try to remove his hand... but as an empty hand can go in, the clenched fist cannot get out... baboon does not want to let go... and is therefore stuck. Then you paint the fellow white, and let it go. The returning baboon will scare the living daylights out of his tribe and they will disappear for a while.
The other method... well... shoot a couple and the farm will be avoided for a LONG time.
It is not as easy as one would think to hunt baboons, firstly, as they have very effective watch..err.. watchmen (Bobejaan-brandwag) who will sound the alarm as soon as they spot people with guns. The trick is as follows (works for Maize fields):
If one man walks into the field, and hides, the baboons stay away.
If two goes in, and one comes out, they stay away.
If three goes in and two comes out... they stay away...
But if four goes in and three comes out... they seem to think that many went in and many left... all right to plunder. (ok, know it should be 'feed', but we live in a relative universe!)
We used to tease and say "1-2-many" is how baboons count. So, imagine my puzzlement when I saw that there are... well... humans living by a similar system!
Here we are wielding the Power of the Universe (maths) as if it is nothing... and others are still learning how to count!
Probably our ability and need to express numbers came from... capitalism :-)
Dammit... finding 'good' in capitalism is painful! :-(
Completely clashes with my view utopian socialism
It is a general property of people that the most objects they can generally count in a single glance is around 5. The most things a typical person can easily remember in the short term is seven.
Maybe the "one" word means "I can easily commit the scene to memory at a glance", meaning that the scene has a few easily remembered objects in it.
The "two" word might mean "yes I can remember that scene, but I have to concentrate to do it". Typically that would mean the scene has 5-6 items.
The "many" word might mean "no I cannot easily remember the number and arrangement of objects in that scene"
In other words the word used depends on the mental effort required.
The previous study had the same basic flaw: they asked the Piraha to count objects that they never normally had to deal with (it was batteries, I think).
What westerners often forget is that many cultures have different numbering systems for different types of things.
If they asked instead, "how many children do you have", or "how many people are there in that hut", they would most likely discover (shock! horror!) that the Piraha count people exactly as you or I. (If we know the individuals we can count up to 10 or so, if we don't, we count up to five or six, then switch to "many").
These experiments look designed to prove something bogus, namely that counting is not an innate skill.
My blog
i wonder if they have a word for firewater
few, some or many?
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
Should be "one, two, many"
KDawson, you got a link to your own website wrong, on your own website. You n00b.
I heard they have discovered that some ancient tribes in the world are still using imperial measurement. Hard to believe!
"The study... offers evidence that number words are a concept invented by human cultures as they are needed, and not an inherent part of language, Gibson said."
How long has it been since fast food restaurants have had real cash registers?
Yes, and the Hopi have no words for "time".
I'm just saying that startling claims like this have been made before. According to TFA, counting is "not useful in their culture"? How is that even possible?
Never approach a vast undertaking with a half-vast plan.
A side note: Sanskrit has singular, dual and plural forms of words. A lot of i18n infrastructure could get broken if this language got back to life all of a sudden.
Example: boy, (two boys), (more than two boys) === baalakah(1), baalakau(2), baalakaah(2+)
This Slashdot ignored non ascii when I previewed this, so added the google search results for the devanagari characters used to compose these three words instead.
I'm guessing the need arose as a shorthand to talk about two's - eg two people, two oxen working in the form, two feet, two hands and so on.
Anyone know of any other language tha has dual forms of words?
Can't see Hindi?
Don't need to count beyond 4 or 5? Clearly they're Zune owners.
I suggest they name everything beyond four 'hrare'
Always worked for us in the warren....
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
...if they would just learn English and be done with it!
I guess if you asked the men how many wives they had they would say "too many" no matter how many they had.
I'm gonna have one girlfriend there.
Full Tilt
My "#1" hat that I got just so everybody would know that I am number one would not mean anything there! That is sad for them.
Instead they seem to use the word formerly thought to mean "two" to represent a quantity of 5 or 6, and the "one" word for anything from 1 to 4.
Bartenders and police officers in the US dealing with drunks are very familiar with this method of counting.
Revised headline:
Hrair natives from Amazon don't know how to count.
Anyone want to try and estimate the error on that?
Lots!
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
Or we could do some research.
Lovell's The Growth of Basic Mathematical and Scientific Concepts in Children posits that number started off as many/few, then a one-one correspondence (e.g. one flint per man) with the corresponding concepts of relation, then tallying (fingers, notches - consider the pre-6500BC bone dug up at Ishango, fingers), then abstract number.
Menninger talks of the lack of need to count beyond a certain number in certain cultures - we may have "one", "two" and "many". Hell, even English has the irregular "eleven" and twelve" having roots in "one left" and "two left", suggesting that the base 10 system was the result of running out after 10 and having to start over when base 12 became fashionable (time, etc).
There have been some good posts so far mentioning that we're probably taking the wrong approach to testing. Don't throw unidentifiables at them and expect them to give an exact count - give them familiar objects, e.g. five cows here and four cows there, let them compare etc.
If they asked instead, "how many children do you have", or "how many people are there in that hut", they would most likely
"None of your god-damn business, you pesky anthropologist ... now get your ass out of my rain forest!"
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
It will be read as eL-Tee? Sounds vaguely Spanish.
But what about 5318008?
You mean to say they have lived all these year and still don't know to joy of 5318008?
Good god...
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Gully Dwarves? "How many are there?" "Two, no more than two!"
... conclusion for one reason only because the word a (in the english language), such as "a house", points out the fact that language and numbers intersect. That is, language and numbers derive themselves from the same fundamental source, that is our ability to draw distinctions. Even if they use one word to refer a few objects (1 to 4) and another one to refer to more then that, this still shows that they have the ability to know more then, less then (bigger vs smaller), and that is intimately tied to geometry and hence numbers, I see numeracy is a organic/fractal outgrowth of our ability to draw distinctions (this from that), othewise we could not function as a species.
Reminds me of the story of the ants in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age : "'There's only zero of you,' said the Queen of the Ants (to the King of the Shrews). In ant arithmetic, there are only two numbers: Zero, which means anything less than a million, and Some."
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
Which means that somewhere between 3 and 14,756,222 people speak it.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
As an (undergraduate) trained anthropologist, I am always skeptical of announcements like this. The locals may have skewed Margret Mead's research for her book Coming of Age in Samoa (a very well respected and renowned anthropologist):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_of_Age_in_Samoa
Additionally, we also have the Eskimo/words for snowflake issue:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow
The truth is that accurately studying other cultures is difficult. I have not read the original journal article, but I would take this with a grain of salt.
(in Piraha)
Their cars gets forty rods to the hogshead and that's the way they like it!
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
If true and you set aside the ability to count objects and extrapolate into other areas numbers are useful how do they give directions for instance? Go some paces east then more paces north and so on and you end up where? Then follow those directions backwards and you won't arrive at your starting point.
Do they have a concept of time? It seems you need numbers for that. I'm more sunrises older than my one son who is some sunrises older than my other son. I guess it's possible time is irrelevant to them but seems to me without numbers it's hard to do just about anything.
They have null words for numbers?
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Next time my boss asks how long it'll take my to complete a job I'll tell him some time. Then when he asks how much longer I need to finish the project I'll tell him more time. Makes things much simpler than making up numbers like I usually do anyway.
:).
My above scenario sounds like something out of Dilbert though
Quote from the story: "They could learn, but it's not useful in their culture, so they've never picked it up."
The English language has no word for some Amazon insects. English speakers could learn, but it's not useful in their cultures.
Two tests: Give the Amazon natives sufficient food and water and safety from other people, and see how long they can comfortably survive in lands where English is spoken.
Then give native English speakers sufficient food and water and safety from other people, and see how long they can comfortably survive in the Amazon region.
That makes golf pretty interesting... I don't know what club to use on a "many" yard par "one". Maybe a "5 or 6" iron?
I also find it interesting that Romans had no expression for the number zero.
I wonder how the Piraha say "I was told there would be no math"?
Seeing as the researchers arn't that sure about it, maybe they want to learn the language fluently before they go off publishing papers about it.
The insight that word categories are not intrinsic to language is something I'd put in the "well, duh!" category. Discrimination and labelling are not the same thing, even if they are bidirectionally related. Consider how babies can learn any language and discriminate the sounds (phonemes) in them, but once you've settled on a language (or few) you all but lose the ability to discriminate among the sound categories your language doesn't use - they get binned to useful categories.
It may be (notwithstanding the need for a less speculative understanding of the language!) that these laid back chappies really have no words in their language for number concepts more accurate than "a few" or "whatever, dude", but I'm sure they are able to discriminate between the categories one, two, three, etc, up to some small number - a capability which does appear to be innate - and I'll even bet they have some way to express it also, if only in some laborious forms such as "one pig, and another pig, and another pig". It's probably no coincidence that there are only a handful of native speakers left though, since a language like this isn't going to be very useful ("how many enemy did you see heading our way?" "a few" (reality: 300)).
I'd hate to be the one in charge when they go on a field trip.
Wow, now I know where the guy I used to code with came from. He had problems with numbers too.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
There are MANY lights!
She: It's true Red Bird that I am your only woman?
He: Sure darling, I have always told you that I only have one woman.
Not to worry. I bet they can still model ER diagrams. They seem to have the one-to-many relationship down.
So, being single, married, and a polygamist is all the same?
Aghar?
No, not the city in Afghanistan, but the slow-witted, loveable creatures in the Dragonlance series of books, described here.
This was my 1st thought, anyway, and I was pleased to see that someone beat me to it!
If you're trying to show that Amazonians aren't inferior to us, I agree. If you're trying to show that they're superior, I disagree.
Each of us knows what we need to know. Getting "food and water and safety" is the primary task of every individual in a society like that, and you betcha they know a lot about it. We live in a very very specialized society, where a person can spend his whole career getting letters and numbers to appear on a screen correctly and never know where his food comes from.
Trying to get a programmer to live as an Amazonian is more hazardous than trying to get an Amazonian to live as a programmer, precisely because most of the Amazonian's "job" is "try to stay alive." And it is very hard - I'm sure their life expectancies are shorter than ours. If syntax errors made computers explode into shrapnel, it would be more even.
"The study... offers evidence that number words are a concept invented by human cultures as they are needed, and not an inherent part of language, Gibson said."
As a mathematician, may I say... "duh".
If you look in our own culture at the evolution of our number system, and the sequential invention of counting numbers > integers > rational numbers > real numbers > complex numbers > etc., it follows the exact same progression.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Was about to post along the same lines...thought to search for it first. Immediately what I thought of when I read the description.
Hold it right there, cowboy. This is a perfectly legitimate study, and not the first one either (although the first one on numbers in Piraha). I know Ted Gibson and I can assure you he's a respectable scientist. Do you really think the reviewers of the article (it has been published in a very decent journal, actually) would not have caught an obvious fraud?
This. Is. Piraha!
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
Wow. Any more trolly and we'd need a "Threshold: -Many!"
I use "a few" and "many" more often than I use a specific number like 4 or 7 - don't you ?
Consider living in a place where the things that you trade are not valued by the unit (beer from the shelf versus nuts from a tree), it makes much more sense to just refer to a "a few" of these or "many" of those instead of taking the mental challenge of counting exactly how many you need each and every time...
This is not at all surprising.
There are all kinds of groups in the West that have no words for things. Like one subculture has no words to express the concept of the temperature of the planet being static, decreasing or even fluctuating randomly. They simply cannot give voice to those concepts. Some anthropologists think this is why they are always saying it is warming, regardless of what the temperatures are actually doing. It is not that they think it is warming in the same way that we would if we said it, its just that they are trying to make conversation about the planet, and this is all that comes out.
This missing vocabulary thing is much more common than people usually realize. Apparently something similar has happened at a lot of financial institutions in the US. They had until recently no concept of down. They always said they were taking the elevator up. When prices fell out of bed, they said they had risen. The thing that really got them was when defaults started to rise. Then they needed words to say they had in fact, well, what had they really done? We knew they could not have risen, so there must have been something else that they could have done. What could that have been?
I hear they are all frantically looking up in thesauruses and dictionaries now, trying to find out how to describe the baffling phenomena they see around them. Must be tough.
..."The language has about 300 native speakers"? rj
As the Nurk Monster would say,
"It's only 0, 1, or many."
Damnit, now I have the image of a white-painted baboon trying vainly to pull its hand out of a pumpkin stuck in my head. This will surface in my memory at random intervals over the next week, causing me to giggle at unfortunate moments.
Damn you! And damn Ren and Stimpy too, I'm sure they've had a hand in this as well.
"Count em yourself whitey"
"Is this guy taking the piss?"
"Next time you clowns turn up, I'm painting myself red and throwing my spear at you, dickhead"
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
...when the 1 is Yo Momma!
"Words cannot express how many times..."
That this theory of necessity before development in words for numbers is true!
Why just the other day, it was a Tuesday (I don't know if you knew that), oh it was also 1940, a good friend of mine looked inside an empty box. He said, "I need a word to quantify how many atoms are floating around in that box." I wondered why. I also asked him how the hell he could calculate how many atoms were in the box, after all it was 1940. He said, "I don't know but it's a necessity that I quantify it and therefor I shall develop a number that represents all these atoms. I shall call it, a googolplex."
And, so ends the tale of how you thought the number disproving the theory turns out to have had a purpose once- and never again.
You wouldn't want to buy them, But you almost certainly can.
Lots of rape, slavery, abuse, etc... Not something we should be joking about.
Ahhh, so the sytem used by the US electronic voting machines finally comes to light.
America, Home of the Brave.
Perhaps they're just big Terry Pratchett fans?
Lord Blackadder, a favorite in the court of Queen Elizabeth I, teaches the foul-smelling peasant Baldrick mathematics:
The lesson
Transcript:
Blackadder: Right, Baldrick, let's try again, shall we? This is called adding. If I have two beans, and then I add two more beans, 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.
Blackadder: Yes. To you Baldrick, the Renaissance was just something that happened to other people wasn't it?
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
I find this rather intriguing. I'm a professional translator, bilingual (Japanese, English), and very interested in the language/culture combination in general, but not necessarily educated in these areas.
First of all, I find it very hard to believe that they don't have numbers. I do believe, however, that they may not use numbers as frequently as most other languages do.
For example, in the English language there are items that can be counted, and items that must be measured. You can count the number of bricks, but you can't count a number of water. Water is measured, not counted. Then there are the odd ones like rice, which technically you can count, but no one does, and as a result it is another item that is measured. (Either in weight or volume.)
Japanese people have a terrible time figuring this out, and when teaching English, the general rule is "use 'a' for items that can be counted, but not with items that can't be counted. For example, I can have 'a' brick, but I can't have 'a' water." But then the rice thing throws them all off again.
The reason is that in the Japanese language, there is no numerical indicator when describing an object of ownership. You can have water, and you can have brick. Or should I say you can have a brick, and you can have a water. As you can see, these items can't be directly translated, but require a cultural and experience based reference. (FYI, this is why mechanical translation is so difficult, if not entirely impossible.)
So what about this tribe? Chances are they do have numeric words, they can count, and they can even do basic arithmetic. But they don't count things on a daily basis. Much like rice is not counted, they probably either have "lots of rice" or "just a little rice". Maybe "enough rice for your family" or "enough rice for the tribe". Neither of these use numeric references, but are well distinguishable. If there's no point in counting an item, chances are, it won't be counted.
All in all, I suspect it is a highly cultural consequence backed by ages of experience in that certain life style and surrounding. But I don't doubt that they can count, and have a word for numbers. It may not be decimal (although that's unlikely, due to the reason humans are well versed in the decimal system), and it may not apply to the same words we use, but I'm sure it is understood and exists.
If I were in charge of an expedition there, I would start to target things that are of a daily importance to these people. For example, if they have a certain method of building huts (most tribes do), asking the requirements for beams may be a hint. I would find it hard to believe that they would say "a bunch" or "a few" for things like that. For a given size structure, they would probably say "8 beams" or whatever is required. However, they may have a specific word for this already, which DESCRIBES exactly 8 beams. Going at it this way, however, eventually I'm sure the numeric lingo will be found.
As a side note, the Inuit have multiple words for snow. Heavy snow, light snow, wet snow, melting snow, slightly icy snow, very dry snow, and so on. Yet the English language has only a single word to describe "snow", and the rest are descriptors of the form of snow. I would suspect that this would be the case with these tribes as well, and why we find it so "weird" that they don't count things.
...because nothing is sacred.
Actually, I'm not so sure about that. Why currency?
1. Point in case: Ancient Egypt. I'm pretty sure that they had numbers and even maths, _long_ before they used currency.
It's a funny thing. We're so caught up in our own obsession with money, that we assume that it must have always been the alpha and the omega, or at least a major economic breakthrough. Well, Egypt used barter internally until the conquering Romans forced them to use coins, and nevertheless they were for a long while the most powerful economy.
Oh, they learned about coins earlier from the Greeks and Phoenicians, and even started minting their own gold into coins for external trade. But even that was long after they had numbers. But internally they still used barter and didn't seem worse off for it.
Thinking about it in modern terms, it must have fulfilled the same role as inflation nowadays. If your grain is your currency, you can't hoard it for generation, because it decays. The Pharaoh's granaries functioned as a sort of bank: they'd keep it for you, but you earned a -10% (yes, _minus_ ten percent) "interest" per year. Building your own granaries did somewhat better, but not by awfully much. So there was a very good reason to spend or invest that "money" instead. And unsurprisingly their economy included extensive trading and extensive crafts.
Or as another example, I don't remember coins being mentioned in Hamurabi's code of laws (from a bit over 4 millenia ago), but they already had numbers all right.
2. I'd argue that, actually, you start needing numbers much earlier anyway, when you switch to agriculture or animal husbandry.
For a shepherd there's a very good reason to know if you have 20 sheep (or goats, or whatever) or 21.
For an agricultor, you have to count days. Or the high priests count it for you, same deal. Think, for example, cultivating in the Nile's valley. It will take you X days to harvest all those crops. If you start later than X days before the next flood, then some of your crop will be lost. You also need to be able to reserve Y buckets/barrels/sacks/whatever of grain for sowing the next crop, or you will starve next year. I'd say there's a damn good reason to be able to count those.
And in either case if you counted the days wrong until the next crop, or the next sheep are born, you might get to starve.
It's events that happen long before you even need currency.
3. Even if you managed to avoid #2 somehow, numbers soon get you anyway: Any kind of more complex state than a 300 people tribe, starts needing numbers just to exist at all.
E.g., you have to raise an army. How many soldiers do you have? How much food do you need to take with you on a campaign? How many ships do you need to carry them? How many weapons do you need to build for them? How many smiths do you need for that?
Let's say you even don't use a professional standing army like post-marian Rome or Egypt, but go with citizen-soldiers like early Rome or Greece. Well, those guys need to get back to their farm when time comes to sow or reap. It doesn't matter what kind of food source you have. Even hunter-gatherers need to spend X days a year hunting and gathering. They need to be there when the good berries are ripe, or when the great Perfectly Normal Beast migration comes by. So you're back to counting days anyway, or you can't have any kind of warfare.
E.g., so you conquered the next city and installed your own nomarch/satrap/governor, loyal to you. How much tribute does it send you? How do you know how many more days you need to wait for it?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
So it's basically like our words for "a couple" (1-4) and "a few" (5-6), but slightly more defined. (Ours are extremely subjective to the speaker and the interpreter.) Learning language concepts like this is very fascinating, for example, the Thai language (as far as I know, any way) doesn't have seperate words for eating and drinking... rather, they use the same word "gin" (guh-in) for both actions... so it's similar to our word "to consume."
Well, two anyway.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
this might explain Amazon.com 's pricing structure!
(Score:Many, Cover yourself up!)
Instead they seem to use the word formerly thought to mean "two" to represent a quantity of 5 or 6, and the "one" word for anything from 1 to 4.
Revealed at last - the common ancestry of all roadies and sound engineers...
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
So, wouldn't that mean they have the equivalent of the words 'few' and 'several?'
4 I have several.
Item(s):
An Illustrated History of Anthropology
Price (dollars):
Many
Proof positive that women suck at math.
(Yes, I'm kidding)
Other research suggests that the Piraha use a relative estimation system. Two options are few/many and more/less than I expected. The current belief in the literature is that more/less is the most accurate. I was fortunate enough to hear Prof. Gibson talk at Swarthmore College several months ago, and he seemed unsure of exactly how the Piraha use number. He was, however, quite sure that the convention (that they don't have any concept of number) was incorrect.
Amazons
I guess they had heard the lies about what was 9 inches so many times, they just gave up on numbers.
Have gnu, will travel.
Well, how about "two" as in "the whole f-ing tribe, all 300 of them"?
Small tribal communities have a lot more rigid expectations of what your duties are to the rest of the community, and your very life may depend on fulfilling those to the letter. Even if the tribe doesn't actually do an execution, simply being cast out in the jungle would spell death for any tribesman who's no longer liked by the tribe. But there are also documented cases where then the shaman would do the special voodoo, e.g., poison your food or put some bamboo needles in it or whatever, to get rid of you in a speedier way.
And to get an idea of what kind of obedience can be expected in such a tribal society, or what absurdities may be expected, at least one tribe had a proof of having become a man that involved wearing a glove made of live wasps for 10 minutes. And ones where even a single sting spells excruciating pain. The result of that trial would leave the boy (because the age of manhood is very low there by our standards) with a numb arm and shaking uncontrollably for days. Ok, now think doing that 20 times, on different days. You know, to prove that you really are a man.
And your life would depend on not failing it.
Are you thinking of the box of pain and the Gom Jabbar too, yet? Because that's essentially what they asked of every single boy in the tribe.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Ungabunga: "They are lost and we need to find them!"
Chief Jongajonga: "How many people?!?"
Ungabunga: "Only one"
Chief Jongajonga: "WTF"
Architectural Renderings
You don't, but the Piraha do.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
I think there are at least two major ways of disagreeing with this statement. One, from an evolutionary/materialist point of view, some people argue that morality IS a survival mechanism. They would say that humans survive well because we take care of one another.
From a philosophical/spiritual point of view, I would note that "humanity" can be used as a synonym for "compassion," precisely because we feel it to be an essential human trait. Few things are as moving as accounts of people's kindness in the face of death. I would not like to subscribe to a worldview that reduced such unselfishness to illogical inefficiency.
Part one of this book discusses how, when, and why numbers were introduced into western culture languages.
http://books.google.com/books?id=w38hHMsq_i8C&dq=holding+on+to+reality&pg=PP1&ots=ggT4dlVmSW&sig=LX3nDPvl_d-Boeb48Jy8tRrD_tQ&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result#PPA25,M1
Thanks for the correction. It's been some years since I had an interest in anthropology, and, well, my memory isn't what it used to be. And never was ;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
... especially regarding sales figures for the Kindle.
Now if we only could find a language with no swear words.
This article has been circled in the net for weeks. And my first thought was that: WTF. Actually, if you do an experiment where you put two group of objects on the table: group one with one object, and group two with two objects. And ask a person in the tribe to differentiate, I'm pretty sure they will say objects in group two are more than in group one. That is the fundamental of numerology. Each number actually is just a distinct symbol, as long as the subject can compare two objects more than one object and less than three objects, and so on... we can confirm that they have a capability of counting things.
Since language shapes thought, perhaps there's an evolutionary advantage here: e.g., not knowing how many wives one has. :)
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
It's not so much that they have a "1,2,many" counting system as that they have NO ABSTRACT concepts in their language. If someone in the tribe currently living hasn't seen it, then it doesn't exist. They have no history!
Sosetta
As an (undergraduate) trained social scientist, I need to assure you that Margaret Mead was (and still is, mostly) a respected member of her field, also.
The parent of this tread was absolutely correct, studying a different culture is hard. At my school, there's about 160 upperclassmen in the major at any one time (PSU doesn't really count you in a major until your 3rd year), and probably about 6 of them including I are male.
If the girls go up to the projects right by campus and tutor kids and try to run programs (and in the process, study it and take notes, because you're gonna be writing 20 pages on it soon enough), the kids go HAYWIRE. Screaming, fighting, not doing a thing, yadda yadda.
If just about any one of us guys go in there, they all sit down, shut the hell up and listen to the girls, so all I gotta do is sit up by the chalkboard the whole time I'm there and act like a guard dog.
Turns out, it's transitional government-owned housing. These kids don't have a male influence (or, if they do, they're probably sobriety challenged), and the female head of household is working too much to watch the kids. As soon as one walks in the door and tells the boys to behave, they do (and the girls can pay attention because the boys have stopped using their heads to play wallball).
There's other examples that work too, some of the women in the major are parents and older - they simply command a different presence. Because of this, when the all-female groups that don't have some help from "mom" go do the project, they see a totally different view of the same group of children and write papers that aren't alike at all.
People are like big electrons, if you if you look at them too hard, you don't know where they're going. In medical trials, they have to double blind them, because just the fact that the tech knows who's getting what drug can have an effect on the coutcome.
The study has some truly odd features. When they started with one object and added one at a time, the Piraha act the way 1-2-many tribes act. They said "one" when there was just one object, "two" when there was two, and either "two" or "many" for more than two. That's because when there's three objects on the table, there's also two objects on the table. It's when they started with ten objects and took one at a time away that things got strange, with the "one" word being given for 1, 2, or 3 objects. The thing is, the article gives no explanation for this difference, and pulls the conclusion that they have no number words out of thin air. They had only four subjects, by the way. Go read the study for yourself!
Or so they tell us . . .
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
One, two - pickle my shoe
three, four - open the door
five, six - sandlewood sticks
seven, eight - running late
nine, ten - chicken in the Den
"The study... offers evidence that number words are a concept invented by human cultures as they are needed, and not an inherent part of language, Gibson said."
Jeez... *language as such* is invented by cultures as needed rather than being an inherent part of anything. Of course this whole thing is quite fascinating, but who in their right mind would believe that there's some sort of natural law that says that any language used by humans MUST include numbers, period?
The boy chimp is posing as an artist to get the girl chimp to take her kit off.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The bungholio tribe of lake titicaca uses the following numbers to count to ten :
one
two
three
four
five
six
six
six
seven
eight
Two. Not more than two.
Oh, and I'm a member of that tribe!
Two tests: Give the Amazon natives sufficient food and water and safety from other people, and see how long they can comfortably survive in lands where English is spoken.
Then give native English speakers sufficient food and water and safety from other people, and see how long they can comfortably survive in the Amazon region.
What would that prove? I can't even figure out what you were going for there...
There is no culture that would not benefit from having words for numbers. That doesn't at all mean that they were necessary. Of course they have eyes and understand the concept of values and quantities, but for whatever reason, they never felt it necessary to attach specific forms to them.
However, in the case of edible bugs (is that what you meant?), the problem isn't that we don't have words for them; it's that we don't have concepts for them. We have the concepts for bugs and for edible bugs (concepts we got from other cultures--ours has never really been big into eating bugs), but expecting us to have concepts for specific species of insects is just silly.
The key difference between these two things, however, is that we lack the specific concepts for species of bugs because we have never encountered them. Once we do, affixing a form (i.e. a name) is trivial. In the case of the Piraha, they are surrounded by things that could be represented by a numeric system, but have been delinquent (yes, delinquent) in recognizing them and affixing forms to them. I tried to think of an analogy for this... But there just isn't any. It is unfathomable.
I think that was you were going for was a kind of "multiple intelligences" thing. Like somehow not having a name for a certain bug is no different from lacking the words to express values in a higher resolution than 3-4 integers, and values over SIX. It is not.
To go back to your (or maybe "my," if I misunderstood) bug analogy, perhaps if they could express quantities over 6, they wouldn't have to know which bugs they can eat. --Because they'd have massive fields of grain and support a population of hundreds of millions, instead of just hundreds.
Looking at their living conditions, and their numbers, tells you all you really need to know about whether having a language without a numbers system is a good idea or not.
But please do not misinterpret. I am not saying "Rah Rah the Anglo culture is supreme!" because Anglos were not much better than these folks when the Romans found them. "We," too, had to be taught advanced technological concepts like having a proper working writing system, etc. And then came the Arabs with their improved number system, with the major technological breakthrough of the concept of 0 as a number, allowing negatives (I have to add this, though--they got it from the Indians, along with most of what they are given credit for in Europe--they were just like the Romans, gobbling up cultures and assimilating and spreading their ideas and technology--where the Romans had Greece, the Arabs had India).
The point of the story is that what we have here is a pointless, dead-end culture, and there is no reason for it to survive. The people will learn numbers and a billion other concepts we in the culturally interconnected have come to take for granted, and their ridiculous, backward culture will disappear by choice. They might know a few handy bug tricks that might turn into proper medicines--all cultures have things to offer to the rest of the world--but that's probably it.
At the heart of Western imperial guilt is an arrogance--an arrogance that we are the dominant and most developed culture and therefore must be benevolent and tolerant and held to some sort of higher standard that we, in our benevolence, have crafted. We are not that great. We learned everything we know from those who conquered us. And if we hadn't been conquered, we'd be rooting around in shit and living in huts in the rain and
We might be like the Piraha about infinite quantities, instead of finite quantities.
There are lots of different names for infinite quantities out there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleph_number
but most people is not aware of them.
Complex numbers too seem unnatural to most of us, but their construction is quite similar to integer numbers construction or even rational numbers construction.
It turns out that numbers' essence isn't so predictable after all.
The parent commenter should get some sort of prize. His comment indicates that if there are enough people someone will know the answer.
Or Yahoo, who paid Terry Semel $528 million dollars for working 6 years, then fired him because he didn't know anything about technology, and other reasons.
Yes, people at Yahoo can count, but that doesn't necessarily mean they are smarter, in my opinion.
Or U.S. taxpayers who have paid to kill between 650,000 to 1 million Iraqis, more than Iraqis than Saddam Hussein killed, with almost no protest. Who is counting? Apparently not U.S. taxpayers, although it is generally understood that they know how to count.
If knowledge of numbers doesn't make a person smart, does not knowing numbers make a person dumb?
There is a serious need to question what is intelligent and what is educated.
for 300 native languagers left of a language, there is bound to be lack of dynamics. the fact that the word "one" is at the lower end of counting is in fact some form of inherent language. Incest took care of the rest. I wonder who the god of "one" is. Oh no. pun for smart people frowns for others.
Once I've achieved independent wealth I'm going to go on a "safari" and wipe those abominations off the face of the earth.
99, 100! :D
I'm not sure how true this is, but ...
I was told that when the English first arrived and colonised Australia, they came to the conclusion that Aboriginal people could not count above 2. When asked to count objects, they seemed to say something that was translated as "one, two, many ...".
When a proper anthropological study was made of this matter in the 1950s or 1960s, it was eventually realised they use trinary math. Think binary for computers + 1 more. The sequence of counting is therefore "1, 2, 10, 11, 12, 100, 101, 102, 110, 111, 112, 120 ... etc" the word translated as "many" expressed "that's a group and start again" as we do with 10, then count on into the "teens" ... eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen ...
By the time anyone has understood Aboriginal culture and society, most of the original stuff has disappeared, sadly.
Don't blame me, it's usually 2 in the morning when I post
I couldn't help but to remember the Gully Dwarves from Dragonlance. They had only 2 numbers; one and two.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
I guess one gets run over by a car in less then a week the other get's bitten by a poisones animal in less then a week.
Martin
Maybe it was just me, but growing up I always understood "a couple" and "a few" to mean the same thing. A fuzzily defined quantity, more than 1, but less than "a lot".
Then I moved and met people who understand "a couple" to mean exactly two, always.
I'm still adjusting in my head.
How is this news? The Guinness Book of Records has had this listed for bloody decades, also indicating that the tribe have a word for "they are alike."
My web domain.
"Wow, you get a verbal pasting and now you're stalking me. What a loser!"
No, I was giving you a chance to follow up on your internet threat.
YOU threatened me over the internet and are now trying to portray ME as the loser for allowing YOU the opportunity to actually DO what you threatened?
I guess that same kind of retarded thinking got you believing you actually had the intelligence to "verbal*(ly) paste" anyone.
As I recall, you were wrong, got proven so, and resorted to THREATENING ME OVER THE INTERNET at which point, you ran away and hid like the pathetic, cowardly piece of trash you are.
Keep in mind, douche, NOTHING I do will make me more pathetic than that. Well I guess I could threaten YOU over the internet, but I'm not useless pile of shit, so I'll let you corner that market.
You lose, again. Nothing will ever change on that front.
SMALLINT, INT(11), BIGINT
Who needs "numbers" when you have 1 and 0, or something and nothing. As any geek knows that's all you need to be able to count, or rule the world. ;-)
What did you think your silly little threat would scare me off?
I imagine you hoped it did so your pathetic behavior wouldn't continue to be discussed.
YOU threatened ME over the internet, loser. Now you're so rattled, incoherent, and incapable of replying intelligently that the best you have is "Oh, you're still here?"
What happened to the hard man who threatens other people over the internet? Well tough guy?
And you should look into some reading comprehension classes moron, the last reply you made didn't have anything to do with my post, it was just another pathetic attempt to draw attention away from your sad little internet threat.
So yes loser, I'm still here. Unlike you, an internet threat doesn't make me shake in my boots (like you've already admitted doing, like the bitch you are).
There I was thinking you'd never achieve anything - and you went and found the shift key.
Still here, waiting for you to do something about it.
Post your address here and I'll see if I can make time for you next time I'm passing by Idiotville or Fuckwitsburg.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
"Still here, waiting for you to do something about it."
I'm sorry, I forgot you're an imbecile. Were the "I'm right here waiting for YOU to follow up and actually DO what you said you would in your sad little threat" posts too subtle, or are you just really fucking dumb?
"Post your address here and I'll see if I can make time for you next time I'm passing by Idiotville or Fuckwitsburg."
I don't live with your parents, that's you, so you wouldn't see me in either of those places.
Why don't YOU post YOUR address, since you're the bitch who made the threat in the first place?
It's really funny that your such a loser that you A) threaten people over the internet, then, when they call you on your sad little punk-ass move, you B) pretend they're stalking you and whine like my little sister about it, and then, when you realize that is as sad and stupid as threatening people over the internet, you C) Lie and tell ME I haven't done anything to follow up on YOUR threat, even though anyone can check the posting history and see you're full of shit, and that I've been telling YOU I'm quite ready for YOU to actually do something about your silly little threat.
You're still pathetic, no matter what kind of stupid tactic you use.
YOU thretened ME over the internet, and despite the fact that I've made myself avialable to you to arrange for you to have an opportunity to actually DO what your cowardly ass threatened, you've done nothing but whine, cry, try to change the subject, and hide like the twat you are.
You're a bitch, and nothing you say, no lame ass insult, no attempt to pretend I haven't been INSISTING you follow up on your lame ass threat will change that.