One, Two, Many - Language Shapes Thought

Chuck1318 writes "The Piraha tribe in the Amazon has only three words used in counting, that mean one, two, and many. A psychologist testing them has found that they are unable to accurately perform tasks involving quantities as few as four or five. He says that this shows that, at least for numbers, language shapes and limits how people can think." I can't help but be reminded of the gully dwarves from Dragonlance when reading this.

yeah well,

[castlec]

my computer can only count to one, that never stopped it

Could it be?

[caston]

A whole tribe of people with the same level of maths as me? I have found my new home!

Discworld...

[DJTodd242]

"One. Two. Many. Lots."

Of course as soon as I saw the title all I could think about was Detritus the Troll.

Does this mean anything?

[tod_miller]

I always suspected that the native name of your town, and the local features affected your accent (explains Liverpool and Stoke)

Perhaps they are not used to takss involving more than 3 items because usually it goes like this:

Hunt
Kill
Eat

Bang over head
Shag it
Sleep

Now I think some of thier ways of going about business is even more refined than ours.

So, LISP programmers are dumb?

[phatjew]

. . . after all, all they have is CAR and CDR.

Get those research grants!

[EssTiDee]

1. Locate sub-average intelligent tribes in the deepest jungles

2. Learn their language

3. Propose and conduct some humiliating "research" that even a monkey could succesfully complete

Many. ??

Many. ??

Many. Profit!

Too Many replies

[prgammans]

Please no more replies I just can't keep track of them all.

In that case

[Lord Kano]

We need to teach more women the french phrase "Menage A Trois" early on in life.

LK

Obligatory discworld reference

[Zarhan]

Terry Pratchett: Men at Arms, page 132, footnote:

"In fact, trolls traditionally count like this: one, two, three...many, and people assume this means they can have no grasp of higher numbers. They don't realize that many can be a number. As in: one, two, three, many, many-one, many-two, many-three, many many, many-many-one, many-many-two, many-many-three, many many many, many-many-many-one, many-many-many-two, many-many-many-three, LOTS.

Re:Inca's and Zero

[Polaris]

In fact certain Inca tribes worshipped the zero, leading to the inevitable question, Is nothing sacred?

Re: Troll

[Black Parrot]

> Or the trolls in Terry Pratchett's Discworld books

Finally, a /. story where trolls are on-topic! [Head explodes]

Re:Get those research grants!

[cruachan]

1. Locate sub-average intelligent slashdot poster

2. Leave aformentioned slashdot poster in amazonian jungle with same level of technology as amazonian tribe s/he ridiculed.

3. Wait for slashdot poster to die in hostile environment which ridiculed tribe thrives in

4. Collect his/her life insurance

5. Profit!!

They may not be great at arithmetic ...

[Anonymous Coward]

But theyre pretty good at fooling earnest anthropologists who only want confirmation of their pet theories ...

Re:Too Many replies

[MadKeithV]

Score: Many, Funny.

Re:Discworld...

[AndroidCat]

Or King Arthur of MPATHG: [utwente.nl]

ARTHUR: Right! One!... Two!... Five! GALAHAD: Three, sir! ARTHUR: Three!

Re:INDIA (was Re:Inca's and Zero)

[hal2814]

"in American English, you have only one word for Indians" Well, I keep on trying to use the word Injun to describe Native Americans, but everyone always gets mad at me. Something about politcial correctness or insensitivity or something.

Re:Get those research grants!

[CastrTroy]

No, that's not going to work here. 1,2,3 profit jokes don't work if 3 doesn't exist.

Re:Unable to distinguish items

[OpCode42]

>> If we counted in base 100 would women finally remember their own mobile phone numbers?

Just because the ones they give you dont work, doesn't mean they can't remember them... ;)

Re:INDIA (was Re:Inca's and Zero)

[anpe]

In an unrelated story, american people (who only have one word to represent the concept of Indians and Native Americans) where presented people from India and Native Americans. As language shapes the mind, American people were unsurprisingly unable to make any difference.

Re:Where have I heard this before?

[Anonymous Coward]

They only thought the Hottentot were saying the word many. It was actually a word later translated to mean "Why is this white idiot asking all these questions?"

Re:Could it be?

[janbjurstrom]

You know what they say, "In the land of the only-to-2-counting, the 3-counter is king."

Blackadder

[slashusrslashbin]

BLACKADDER: This is called adding. If I have two beans, and then I add two more, 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.

Re:Where have I heard this before?

[Anonymous Coward]

congress should outlaw testing on crows. If a few of them get ahold of cell phones for instance, it's difficult to say just what kind of trouble we'd be in for...

nope, it's easy...with crows, it'd be murder!

Re:Flamebait??

[tod_miller]

Of course it gets complicated when mounting multiple partitions, and don't talk about swap drives as this can cause volumes to not want to mount anymore.

Re:Where have I heard this before?

[inimini]

I've heard this before... In the bar!

I start out intending to drink one beer,
Then I think that two beers can't be bad...
But somehow I end up having had many beers!

Free as in Freedom: free as in free beer does not sound bad either!

Re:Personality depends on language, too

[rjamestaylor]

That explains the last presentation you gave...I have my notes here somewhere...ah. Here:

• [
• Rough translation from German...]
  Great to be here and away from the oppressive Bush
  regime that threatens world peace espoused by
  good Germans and ...
  (*notices Americans in the room*)
  [English]
  and of course I'm just kidding -- 4 more years!

Re:MOD PARENT UP

[gowen]

I don't agree that Whorf is "discredited "

He lost all credibility for me when he turned up in Deep Space Nine.

Re:Could it be?

[batemanm]

You know what they say, "In the land of the only-to-2-counting, the 3-counter is king."

I would have thought it was more along the lines of
"In the land of the only-to-2-counting, the 3-counter is burnt at the stake for being a witch."

I ran a similar experiment once

[Colonel Cholling]

The Kanka-Bono tribe amazingly have no words for basic concepts like "wireless router," "dual opteron server blade," and "network print server." When our team of researchers presented them with these items, they merely tried using them to break open coconuts. The obvious conclusion is that, since their amazingly primitive language lacks the words for these items, their tiny non-Caucasian brains are simply unable to form distinctions among such obviously diffferent objects. Thus the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was vindicated. Then they ate our Dell service rep. And there was much rejoicing.

Re:Where have I heard this before?

[Thuktun]

Personally, I think maybe congress should outlaw testing on crows. If a few of them get ahold of cell phones for instance, it's difficult to say just what kind of trouble we'd be in for...

We'd soon see posts in slashdot about welcoming our new crow overlords?

Detritus from Diskworld

[brandonY]

They think trolls are stupid because they only count one, two, many, but the counting system is:

one, two, many, many-one, many-two, many-many, many-many-one, many-many-two, lots...

Re:Where have I heard this before?

[dasmegabyte]

Ah, don't worry too much about the crows, man. They're all busy accompanying the souls of the avenging dead.

That's a big job for a medium sized carrion bird. I'll bet crows are pretty pissed at how easy ravens got off, lousy curved beak bastards.

Re:Where have I heard this before?

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

I can just visualize it. Everyone is gone from the set, but they've left the prop weapons and blank ammunition unlocked. The bird flutters down, packs some extra powder in it, packs some more cotton wadding it it. Flutters over to the director's script, crosses out "20 ft away" and scribbles above it "5 ft away from firing gun". Smirks to himself, flies off.

Exactly!

[siskbc]

Language follows culture, not vica-versa. When electronic mail arrived, we didn't run around flumoxed because there was no word for it. We invented a word. For a while, people were pretty bad with email, even though there was a word for it, because it's a difficult thing to understand. Then, after a few years, everybody "got" it.

That's why I'm figuring, you know, maybe these Amazon fuckers are just bad at math. If you're that bad at math, so bad that using the fingers to count doesn't help, you really don't need words for complicated mathematical contstructs. Like, say an equivalent for the word "four."

yes, I'm KIDDING!

Counting Crows!?!

[payndz]

My god! Adam Duritz was right all along!

Re:Where have I heard this before? Whorf-Sapir ...

[forrestt]

You mean straight men.

Re:Babel-17

[B3ryllium]

"Dude."

Re:Chicken and Egg.

[Phleg]

Exactly. This is why people have trouble in accurately defining very explicit but esoteric words, such as "irony".

Re:Babel-17

[jebell]

In my experience, "dude" is definitely male. I've never heard someone refer to a chick as a "dude."

Oh, right, sorry I didn't mean to offend by use of the word "chick." I mean to say, "broad" or "dame."

Re:New words for new concepts

[Country_hacker]

Aww Belgium, Did you have to remind me? Now I'm going to have to read the books again. :-)

Re:funny but missing the point

[Anonymous Coward]

Some people claim that western cultures took the zero from India, but I say that we took nothing from them.

Of course not! They still have their zero, we merely copied it. Unfortunately, the Indian Gov't has filed an IP case with the world court...

Re:Where have I heard this before? Whorf-Sapir ...

[nacturation]

Irconceivable!!