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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]
??? Have no words for numbers
???
???
??? Profit!
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Shouldn't it be "a large number, but not five or six" speakers?
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...
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Hold on cowboy! It has been many seconds since you last posted, please wait another many seconds before you can post again.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
then there's also no way to collect taxes. I should move...
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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.
How do they express IP addresses?
How do they indicate successful termination of their C programs?
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
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!
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?
Too many?
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
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.
Anyone want to try and estimate the error on that?
Lots!
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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!
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)
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.
The latin language does have a word "nulla" for zero/nothing was used in numeric context.
I think you mean that the roman numeral system doesn't use a zero digit, but this wasn't becuase they had no concept of zero, it was because their numeric system didn't need it. Zero's are only needed in a system such as our where digit value is context specific (i.e. the "1" in "100" means something different than the "1" in "10") - the roman numeric system doesn't work this way.
So, being single, married, and a polygamist is all the same?
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
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
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.
The parent commenter should get some sort of prize. His comment indicates that if there are enough people someone will know the answer.