What happens when a language has no numbers? | Hacker News Reader

What happens when a language has no numbers?

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56 pointslisper53 comments

Anyone interested in the Pirahã should read 'Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle' by Daniel Everett ( http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Sleep-There-Are-Snakes/dp/0307386... )

There's quite a bit about the language, but the backstory of Daniel going over as a missionary and losing his faith (and family) while trying to convert a happy people in no need of religion is stunning.

Everett gave a very interesting talk [1] to the Long Now org a few years ago in which he describes some of his experiences working with the Pirahã. Video is available at [2].

[1] http://longnow.org/seminars/02009/mar/20/endangered-language...

[2] http://fora.tv/2009/03/20/Daniel_Everett_Endangered_Language...

trivia: there are some languages out there which don't have different concepts for PIROS and VÖRÖS, and just bunch them together under a single color ("red" in english).

Red is a broad group of colours. There are plenty of more specific names for types of red, like scarlet or ruby, does that qualify?

but when you ask a non-specialist[1] "what color is this", pointing to a scarlet object, they'll say "red". They will also take longer to tell the difference between turquoise and blue than between proper green and blue, where (I think it was) Thai-speakers wouldn't[2] (who have a primary-colour word for turquoise).

[1] specialist = (color-theorist, decorator)

[2] http://www.pnas.org/content/104/19/7780.full actually, this article seems to talk about Russian, I'm getting the Thai thing from a discussion I remember (a video by the authors at the Long Now foundation[3].)

[3] http://longnow.org/seminars/02010/oct/26/how-language-shapes...

And for the nerd comparisons: http://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/

most popular colour names from guys:

    Penis
    Gay
    WTF
    Dunno
    Baige

I feel quite embarrassed for my gender at moments like this.

EDIT: I didn't realise that Randall actually typed "I weep for my gender." a few lines lower down...

I've seen somewhere a test for how many color words are there in the language - only color-words which do not correspond to a specific material or plant which color is emulated are accepted. So “red” or “blue” is fine, as is “piros” or “vörös” - but “sky blue” (color of sky), “ruby” (color of the gemstone) or “scarlet” (color of the Scarlet cloth) are not.

So orange wouldn't be counted as a colour in English? I'm not sure what value there is in measuring the amount of colour names in a language based purely on their etymology.

Orange wouldn't. By this logic, many oddities in color naming can be abstracted over languages, see for example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms:_Their_Univer...

Interesting. Does this hold true for every single language?

As a correction to my sibling comment, orange _is_ counted as a color in English. The most widely-cited list of colors in English, as seen on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_... for example is that English has eleven basic colors: white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, and gray. That page also provides criteria for being considered a basic color term.

"the Scarlet cloth", what's that?

It may have referred to something specific once, but now it's just a colour.

There are many examples of things that are just a part of speech now. e.g. when was the last time you had the opportunity to actually "put the cart before the horse" or "strike while the iron is hot".

in english/italian etc.. I can say that magenta and scarlet are both kinds of red, but there is nothing above the hungarian voros & piros, you can only say they are both colors.

Yeah, it's called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

I believe that Russian has something similar to Piros/Voros with shades of blue.

The "blue" and "indigo" in "Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain" are just two shades of blue in Russian, more like "light blue" (голубой) and "dark blue" (синий).

Not only Russians. I believe it's the other way around - in English you have the same name "blue" for two colors that exist in quite few languages.

синий: http://yandex.ua/yandsearch?text=%D1%81%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0...

голубой: http://yandex.ua/yandsearch?text=%D0%B3%D0%BE%D0%BB%D1%83%D0...

It was a bit of mind-blowing to learn that English world for #0000ff is "blue" and then suddenly "The sky is blue" (what?! no it isn't #0000ff)

The same thing goes for redheads - what? but this is not red!

Yes, the book described in this Wikipedia article

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms:_Their_Unive...

(which I read years ago) makes a case for a language-universal gradation of color terms in the spectrum of visible light, with some languages having few of the terms, and some languages having more, and some languages having quite a few. (In the languages I know best, English has more color terms than Chinese, but Russian has more than English.)

I am surprised that no one has mentioned the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis[0]. It's incredible, the effect that language can have on the mind. Given that they can communicate in whistles and hums, I'd also be interested in a study about their music as well.

[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

Everett argues in the other direction. He believes that the unusual aspects of their language stem from their unusual culture.

Why would a culture that has no trade need numbers? Approximate buckets are good enough for the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

After all, it were Sumerian traders and bureaucrats who gave us both figures -and- numbers -and- a way to write them down.

"How many children/pigs/dogs are in the house? Did we forget any?"

Yeah, or alternatively how many wolves are approaching? It seems like it would be advantageous to be able to communicate whether 5 or 50.

Three.

You must be referring to the legendary 3 Wolf T-Shirt available on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Original-Three-Wolf-Adult-T-Shirt/dp...

Just get the T-Shirt and read the reviews - famously funny.

There aren't any wolves in the Amazon rainforest - not enough bins for them to go through, apparently.

What would you do differently if it was 5 or 8 wolves? Having concepts like "a few" and "a lot" seems to be enough for this case.

Decide whether to send one or two of your group of 8 hunters after each of the wolves?

Fuzzy buckets are wonderful for exactly this kind of case. If you're alone, it doesn't matter whether there are 5 or 50 wolves - you're fucked anyway.

On the other hand, if you're a scout for an armed band of hunters, 5 are no longer “a lot”, it is “some” - and 50 is a lot.

That seems to be where the distinction between hói and hoí would come in.

Did we forget any to our way to the mall maybe? Animals seem to be able to handle their young ones without counting them too.

I really don't know whether to believe this article. The whole setup sounds a little too ... perfect.

We have:

* a language where "speakers can dispense with their vowels and consonants altogether and sing, hum, or whistle conversations"

* a language that "contains no words at all for discrete numbers"

* a tribe too arrogant to learn any other language

There are stranger things in the world, but I'd take a long, hard look at the guy reporting these facts before I took them at face value

Here's an interview with a Pirahã speaker:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHv3-U9VPAs

I don't see any (English) subtitles, do you?

Oh Gawd...

Read: http://web.mit.edu/linguistics/people/faculty/pesetsky/Nevin...

Edit: and sure this is the Chomskians debunking the "upstart" Danial Everett but this is thorough, clear and convincing in contrast to the haphazard novelty that most Piraha discussion involves. A language with future? How...? Well, actually the answer would be just no, that's not how it works. And sure, this headline says "number" but all the discussions are interlinked.

I don't now. I read it. It seems that given that most of the documentation of the language was done by Everett, the Chomskians have some difficulty getting around some points.

I found the discussions of anumeracy in that PDF quite problematic because they basically argued we don't know enough about the language to say one way or another. Some of the difficulties, particularly adding vs removing spoons posed significant interpretation problems for me. Of course if I was differentiate between a few spoons and a bunch of spoons, the lines would be different if adding spoons vs subtracting them. This is because the relative frame of reference is different.

It seems to me that the problem is fraught with insurmountable epistemological problems which can't be solved and therefore people get to make best guesses. In general though I would trust the one who speaks the language more fluently than the one who doesn't. This isn't to address novelty claims. Bahasa Indonesia, for example, mostly lacks relative tenses as well, and Proto-Indo-European probably did as well.

It's clear that Everett has a lot more work to do before any of his claims will stand up to scrutiny.

Like I said earlier, it all sounds a little too perfect. Unpolluted by outside contact (because they refuse to learn a language that can't be whistled), the Piraha have no need for past, future, creation myths, kinship systems beyond the first degree, numbers, and so on. It's a dream of what we might be like if we were freed of our corrupt culture.

Is Everett an heir to Margaret Meade?

I use a language has no numbers every day (Bash).

    for x in {0..3}; do echo $x; done

Can't help but to think abotu lambda calculus encoded numbers.

Nothing to do with the Piraha, I fear. Get some sleep.

In science approximation is so common there's a required notation for experimental measurement for it. Perhaps they're just accept that sooner than us.

It's not much different than most people rarely using Greek characters as formulas or constants.

Pretty different, actually -- the point is that they (supposedly) have no counting system at all. They lack the concept of numbers, not just the words.

...they spark up conversation with the neighbouring tribe that has no concept of time!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13452711

...and then it all falls to pieces because they have no concept of god!

More to the point, what is the big deal with counting if there is no concept of private property?

Well, you know, science and computers and medicine and all that stuff.

I left the house with a somewhat largish amount of children. I've still got a somewhat largish amount of children, so I can't have left any of them behind.

I left the house with David, Susan, Steve, Kate, Alice, and George. I still have David, Susan, Steve, Kate, Alice, and George, so I can't have left any behind.

I've got issues with a lot of (Dan) Everett's work, but you don't need counting to handle that scenario.

You've now got to remember all of the kids' individual names (and hope that you haven't got a somewhat largish amount of John Smiths in your group), rather than remembering "I had 6. I've still got 6".

It's also even more of a challenge when the things you've got to remember aren't easily individually identified - a flock of sheep or apples or whatever.

It's not that hard to remember individuals' names, when there aren't all that many of them in your society to begin with, and you've known them all your life.

After all, you remember your parents' names, and your grandparents' names, and probably your uncle and aunts' names.

If you went on vacation with them, would you count your family members at the start and end of the plane ride, or would you just look around, and think, "Marina, Richard, Victor and Mila, Irina and Alex - okay, everyone's here!"

Actually I struggle pretty badly with names - I have honestly forgotten my wife's name in the past - so I'd probably still go for counting people even if they were in my own family. But I get your point.

What it doesn't address though, is my second point - things that don't have unique names. Remembering how many sheep you took out to the field, how many bowls you tooks with you to eat, how many pieces of wood you need to cut in order to fix up your wall etc.

Clearly they have managed to find a way to cope without needing these numbers, but I'm not sure that I buy the idea that they wouldn't regularly come across situations where having numbers would have made their lives simpler.

That's a good point. I haven't read the original profile in a long time, so I don't remember - do they actually have any farming, animals, etc? If they don't raise animals, then counting them doesn't matter quite so much.

You may be "thinking backwards". If their language doesn't have this feature, or their society these concepts...it's because they don't really run into these situations to the point that it becomes detrimental.

I don't know much about primitive tribes in the amazon, but I don't imagine that their traditional lifestyle involves very large flocks of sheep.

My family bred dogs growing up so we always had a good number (~10) running around. When I let them out and in, I don't recall ever counting but rather ticking off names. Even then I don't think it was generally a conscious listing, but rather a scanning and the ability to "feel" that someone was missing.

For a very long time (well into adulthood) I had no concept of the proper order of the months. I could recognize month names, and with great difficulty name them all...but not their proper order. I had missed that section in school and it never really came up. When it did it really blew peoples minds for some reason. Eventually, I did come across it enough that I learned it.

I know nothing of the tribe in question but I don't think it's that much of a stretch that if they have things like a communal attitude towards property, few pieces of property they consider valuable, small flocks of livestock, etc... the issue may simply never come up.

> their language doesn't have this feature, or their society these concepts...it's because they don't really run into these situations to the point that it becomes detrimental.

Not necessarily. Just because something is detrimental, it doesn't mean that a society will automatically come up with a solution for it. It took people in the west millenia to come up with (or more accurately to be introduced to) zero - and the entire arabic numeral way of counting. That's not because it wouldn't have been useful before. It's simply that no one had figured out that this is a better way to count than their existing representations.

>I don't know much about primitive tribes in the amazon, but I don't imagine that their traditional lifestyle involves very large flocks of sheep.

You may well be right - I'm no expert in Amazonian culture, so I don't whether they have flocks/herds/whatever of any particular animal. But that's just one possible example. I struggle to believe that they've not got some situations in their lives where numbers would be an advantage. Like I mentioned - it could be counting animals, counting the number of bits of rotten wood that might need to be replaced in their house, dividing a crop of fruits equally between the tribe, or something entirely different. But the lack of numbers in the language is no proof that there was no call for them.

But you're living with a group of people to whom you're likely either related directly or have known your whole life (or their whole life, in the case of kids).

You're applying your numerate bias here. I have no idea if that's how the Pirāha handle the situation, but it's certainly plausible. Perhaps their memory for this kind of thing is better than yours because they've relied on it for cases where you'd just keep track of a number.

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