Science
Related: About this forumWhat Happens When a Language Has No Numbers?
By Mike Vuolo
The Pirahã are an indigenous people, numbering around 700, living along the banks of the Maici River in the jungle of northwest Brazil. Their language, also called Pirahã, is so unusual in so many ways that it was profiled in 2007 in a 12,000-word piece in the New Yorker by John Colapinto, who wrote:
Unrelated to any other extant tongue, and based on just eight consonants and three vowels, Pirahã has one of the simplest sound systems known. Yet it possesses such a complex array of tones, stresses, and syllable lengths that its speakers can dispense with their vowels and consonants altogether and sing, hum, or whistle conversations.
Among Pirahã's many peculiarities is an almost complete lack of numeracy, an extremely rare linguistic trait of which there are only a few documented cases. The language contains no words at all for discrete numbers and only three that approximate some notion of quantityhói, a "small size or amount," hoí, a "somewhat larger size or amount," and baágiso, which can mean either to "cause to come together" or "a bunch."
With no way to express exact integers, the obvious question is: How do the Pirahã count? More pragmatically, how do they ask for two of something instead of just one? The answeraccording to some of the more recent research on anumeracy, published by anthropological linguist Caleb Everett in the journal Cognitive Sciencesuggests, almost inconceivably, that they don't.
more
http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2013/10/16/piraha_cognitive_anumeracy_in_a_language_without_numbers.html
FiveGoodMen
(20,018 posts)I guess someone else must have counted them!
Xipe Totec
(43,890 posts)Zero, one, and many.
Or none, unique, and ordinary.
Everything else is a distinction without a difference.
DetlefK
(16,423 posts)It makes a difference how "many" meals your group gets: starvation, cannibalism or survival.
Xipe Totec
(43,890 posts)Who would have thought it, but the Pirahã are as mathematically advanced as our computer scientists.
http://ericlippert.com/2013/09/19/math-from-scratch-part-two/
DetlefK
(16,423 posts)If you add "small amount" and "medium amount", how much do you get?
"Medium amount" or "big amount"? Or something inbetween?
If you add "big amount" and "big amount", how much do you get?
"big amount" or something beyond that?
You can't base your argument on some cool-sounding, context-free quote from an anonymous source.
Xipe Totec
(43,890 posts)If this is how you interact in general, I have no interest in further contact with you.
Bye.
DetlefK
(16,423 posts)Seriously, do you have any other argument than "some people say so"?
Sorry, if I came across as rude, but I absolutely can't stand it when people get all pseudo-scientific and new-age. I don't mind questions, but if you claim something, be prepaired to prove it.
Knowledge is more than repeating a sound-byte.
Insight is more than repeating a sound-byte.
Marrah_G
(28,581 posts)~facepalm~
DetlefK
(16,423 posts)In my defense:
1. There are some woo-guys around here on DU.
2. Typing without thinking is a sin we all have committed, including me.
Marrah_G
(28,581 posts)I think the humor just went way over his head.
Xipe Totec
(43,890 posts)illyricus
(1 post)- Binary systems predating Leibniz also existed in the ancient world. The aforementioned I Ching that inspired Leibniz dates from the 9th century BC in China.[5] The binary system of the I Ching, a text for divination, is based on the duality of yin and yang.[6] Leibniz interpreted the hexagrams as evidence of binary calculus.[3] The text contains a set of eight trigrams (Bagua) and a set of 64 hexagrams ("sixty-four" gua), analogous to the three-bit and six-bit binary numerals, were in use at least as early as the Zhou Dynasty of ancient China. The Bushmen of Africa communicated using drums with binary tones which enabled them to encode messages.[6] The Indian scholar Pingala (around 5th2nd centuries BC) developed a binary system for describing prosody.[7][8] He used binary numbers in the form of short and long syllables (the latter equal in length to two short syllables), making it similar to Morse code.[9][10] Pingala's Hindu classic titled Chandaḥśāstra (8.23) describes the formation of a matrix in order to give a unique value to each meter. An example of such a matrix is as follows (note that these binary representations are "backwards" compared to modern, Western positional notation):[11][12]
0 0 0 0 numerical value 1101 0 0 0 numerical value 2100 1 0 0 numerical value 3101 1 0 0 numerical value 410
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_number
gopiscrap
(23,765 posts)Xipe Totec
(43,890 posts)Thank you!
And welcome to DU!
pscot
(21,024 posts)NoOneMan
(4,795 posts)And on a scale of hói to hoí, just how inferior is English in their eyes?
PSPS
(13,614 posts)A Reporter at Large
The Interpreter
Has a remote Amazonian tribe upended our understanding of language?
by John Colapinto April 16, 2007
Dan Everett believes that Pirahã undermines Noam Chomskys idea of a universal grammar. Photograph by Martin Schoeller.
One morning last July, in the rain forest of northwestern Brazil, Dan Everett, an American linguistics professor, and I stepped from the pontoon of a Cessna floatplane onto the beach bordering the Maici River, a narrow, sharply meandering tributary of the Amazon. On the bank above us were some thirty peopleshort, dark-skinned men, women, and childrensome clutching bows and arrows, others with infants on their hips. The people, members of a hunter-gatherer tribe called the Pirahã, responded to the sight of Everetta solidly built man of fifty-five with a red beard and the booming voice of a former evangelical ministerwith a greeting that sounded like a profusion of exotic songbirds, a melodic chattering scarcely discernible, to the uninitiated, as human speech. Unrelated to any other extant tongue, and based on just eight consonants and three vowels, Pirahã has one of the simplest sound systems known. Yet it possesses such a complex array of tones, stresses, and syllable lengths that its speakers can dispense with their vowels and consonants altogether and sing, hum, or whistle conversations. It is a language so confounding to non-natives that until Everett and his wife, Keren, arrived among the Pirahã, as Christian missionaries, in the nineteen-seventies, no outsider had succeeded in mastering it. Everett eventually abandoned Christianity, but he and Keren have spent the past thirty years, on and off, living with the tribe, and in that time they have learned Pirahã as no other Westerners have.
The rest: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/04/16/070416fa_fact_colapinto
hunter
(38,326 posts)Language isn't a tool we use, it actually directs our thoughts and behaviors.
Too me one of the more disturbing aspects of this is the way we our culture thinks about money. Once we accept the "reality" of money we are easily manipulated by those who manage money's "creation."
A culture that has no counting words is going to be resistant to the parasitism of the world money culture. The parasitism of this culture is going to be more obvious to them.
The world money culture has become the dominant culture because it has the organizational ability to kill off those who are not susceptible to this kind of parasitism.
n2doc
(47,953 posts)Silent3
(15,265 posts)...but the only "value" I find here is that this lack of numbers is a fascinating phenomena, and perhaps an opportunity to learn more about language and human psychology.
Beyond that, however, I find the Pirahã's situation kind of sad. I see these people as having fallen into a linguistic, developmental, and cultural trap that cuts them off from a huge, important area of human thought. I'm certainly not denying that these people can find happiness without numbers and math, but so much of the world at large is lost to them without numbers. It's hard to imagine that there's much of any special compensatory insight they gain in exchange for this loss.