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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."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit_language#Words_for_snow
As I recall (I was at a talk by one of the principal investigators), the flaws were not so obvious as to use batteries. I think they might have even asked them to count their own family members. If anything it was probably not what was counted but the task of counting which might have been both unfamiliar and potentially culturally sensitive.
But there are other interesting things (claimed) about their language besides a lack of numbers that makes it less surprising that this might also be the case. There was very little recursive structure in the syntax, for instance.
That was one of the most interesting posts I've read in a while. Thank you!
FOXTROT UNIFORM CHARLIE KILO
Which is, in fact, the origin of the word (though obviously it was coined from Latin roots). Look up "Defenestration of Prague".
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?
Check out Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I think you've paraphrased his ideas.
I'm not a nerd. Nerds are smart.
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.
You vastly underestimate the "study." There is a researcher named Daniel Everett who has been studying the Piraha for years. He is fluent in their language and has written about them for a long time. This is not the result of a single "experiment," but merely a peek into what researchers have been studying for over 20 years.
Esoteric reference.