One, Two, Many - Language Shapes Thought 919
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.
Where have I heard this before? (Score:4, Informative)
[ George Gamow, "One, Two, Three...Infinity" 1953 ]
Re:Discworld... (Score:4, Informative)
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.
- Men at Arms
Sapir-Whorf (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I wanna be a "researcher" too. (Score:5, Informative)
were tested for practical skills involving
quantities of items or events larger than 3.
Physics class (Score:1, Informative)
INDIA (was Re:Inca's and Zero) (Score:4, Informative)
You see, in American English, you have only one word for Indians, unlike in other languages where they can actually tell the difference between Native Americans and the people who invented the decimal system, grammar, and many other useful things, like "Karma".
Actually, it is surprising (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Where have I heard this before? (Score:5, Informative)
Well yes, but if you read the article, it's not claiming to be a new theory, simply *proof* of an existing theory. From the article:
Re:INDIA (was Re:Inca's and Zero) (Score:3, Informative)
http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/HistTo
Re:I wanna be a "researcher" too. (Score:2, Informative)
"... whose language only contains words for the numbers one and two, were unable to reliably tell the difference between four objects placed in a row and five in the same configuration
Now what makes me able to tell the differnce between four and five objects? Could it be that i was tought the concept through the language i speak?
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
There are also a lot of findings to the contrary (Score:5, Informative)
Example #1: Different languages divide up the color space differently. For example, Russian divides the color space covered by the English word "blue" into two separate color terms. However, language doesn't appear to affect the way people perceive color. For example, when researchers ask informants to judge color chips as "same" or "different," there appears to be no effect at all from the division of color space in the informant's native language.
Example #2: Chinese doesn't have a way of marking counterfactual or hypothetical statements as some languages do. One researcher (Bloom) had speakers of English and of Chinese read the same story in their respective native languages, and the speakers of Chinese did in fact have trouble answering whether such-and-such really happened. Bloom took this as evidence that language strongly affects thought. But another researcher said that the problem was just a bad translation into Chinese, and repeated the experiment with a better translation. Now the Chinese speakers had no difficulty saying "Of course such-and-such didn't happen."
On the other hand, the tense/aspect system of Russian does appear to have an effect on the way that speakers evaluate the temporal relationships in non-linguistic pictures of events. So it is occasionally possible to tease out a case where language does seem to have an effect on non-linguistic thought.
In sum, a blanket statement that "language determines thought" is much too strong. Even if the finding of the article mentioned above is accurate, the weight of the evidence seems to be that these cases are the exception, not the rule.
BTW: I'm sure that somewhere in this discussion, someone is going to bring up the idea that the Inuit (Eskimos) have some huge number of words for snow. That claim almost always gets trotted out in this kind of context. This is a kind of academic urban legend that just won't die. The linguist Geoff Pullum thoroughly debunked this whole fable some time back, and traced the series of misunderstandings and exaggerations which had given rise to it. In fact, it appears that Inuktitut has just two words for snow.
Re: No Orwell references? (Score:3, Informative)
> I'm surprised nobody's made the "reduced language = reduced ability to form mental concepts" link with Orwell's '1984'. This seems like some strong evidence that it might actually work.
When politicians try spin control via calling something what it ain't, does it ever convince anyone who didn't already want to be convinced?
Re:I wanna be a "researcher" too. (Score:3, Informative)
One of the tests where to lay out a pile of nuts, and
the people in question were supposed to lay out an
equal number of nuts in front of them. With 1,2 and 3 nuts
they were perfectly able to do that.
With more than 3 nuts, they were not.
Relation to programming languages (Score:2, Informative)
they study the various new things that people do with interest and then
find that it was eminently doable in Common Lisp all along and that they
can use these new techniques if they think they need them.
-- Erik Nagggum
languages shape the way we think, or don't.
-- Erik Naggum, comp.lang.lisp
``Lisp has jokingly been called "the most intelligent way to misuse a
computer". I think that description is a great compliment because it
transmits the full flavor of liberation: it has assisted a number of our
most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts.''
-- "The Humble Programmer", E. Dijkstra, CACM, vol. 15, n. 10, 1972
You may find this conceptually simple, but real Lisps decided long ago
that the human language tendency to have verbs and nouns draw from the
same lexicon, but mean different things according to context actually
works tremendously well. Lisp was developed in the English language
community. Algol and several other languages that fight against this
tendency in human languages were developed in non-English communities.
If you do not like the ability to spell a verb and a noun the same way,
take it up with English or German, not with languages that evolved with
designers and users speaking the respective languages.
-- Erik Naggum
High on the list of things Lisp offers that most other languages botch is
the idea that (+ x 1) for any integer x should return a number bigger than
x in all cases. It seems like such a small point, but it's often quite
useful. -- Kent M. Pitman
> The continuing holier-than-thou attitude the average lisp programmer...
There are no average Lisp programmers. We are the Priesthood. Offerings
of incense or cash will do.
-- Kenny Tilton at c.l.l
Dalinian: Lisp. Java. Which one sounds sexier?
RevAaron: Definitely Lisp. Lisp conjures up images of hippy coders,
drugs, sex, and rock & roll. Late nights at Berkeley, coding in Lisp
fueled by LSD. Java evokes a vision of a stereotypical nerd, with no
life or social skills.
One of the major attractions that Common Lisp offer me personally is that
there is just so much in and around it that I would benefit from. I came to
the point of SGML expertise where (I thought) I would not be able to develop
any further, where there would be nothing more for me to learn, and I found
myself always helping people without the reward of learning anything new.
This exhausted me and contributed strongly to abandoning 6 years of
concentrated effort on something I have additionally come to think of as
fundamentally braindamaged. I decided to work in an area where the
probability of dealing with people who were smarter than me was nonzero and
the Lisp and Scheme worlds offer this in abundance. To work in areas where
the sum total of knowledge is acquirable in your youth may seem exciting to
the youth, but to realize that you have wasted your most absorbent days on
something that would bore you when you exhausted the supply of ideas is
nothing but painful to the old.
-- Erik Naggum
"Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material."
- Alan Kay
[Emacs] is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is
beautiful.
-- Neal Stephenson, _In the Beginning was the Command Line_
Just because we Lisp programmers are better than everyone else is no
excuse for us to be arrogant. -- Erann Gat
In Lisp, if you want to do aspect-oriented programming, you just do a
bunch of macros and you're there. In Java, you have to get Gregor
Kiczales to go out and start a new company, taking months and years
and try to get that to work. Lisp still has the advantage there, it's
just a question of people wanting that. -- Peter Norvig
"Conceptually FORTRAN remained on familiar grounds in the sense that its
p
Gully Dwarves (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Where have I heard this before? Whorf-Sapir ... (Score:5, Informative)
It has been discredited many times, as believable as it sounds. It is however a fascinating story; B.L. Whorf was an amateur linguist who was professionally a insurance claims inspector specialising in fire-related claims. He noticed that several fires where started when workers through cigarette butts into drums that in English we call "empty", even though they contained invisible and explosive fumes. Whorf realised that the workers knew this technically, but he wondered if being forced to think of the drums as "empty" changed their view of the drum. He did lots of research on languages of central america, and came up with interesting theories because many of these languages (eg Hopi) appear to have very different verb tenses; Whorf proposed that this gave their speakers almost-Einstein-like views of time and space.
A numbers of tests have been down over the years. Some languages have only a few words for color, for example. However, experiments show that this does not impair speakers of these languages from differentiating different shades of colors.
Re:funny but missing the point (Score:5, Informative)
Re:INDIA (was Re:Inca's and Zero) (Score:2, Informative)
HTML is easy, use it. Hell, if you want to be really lazy use slashdot's URL tag: http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/HistTopi
Counting vs. biggest conceivable number (Score:3, Informative)
If you want to know what's the biggest number you can conceive of, use flash cards with differenct numbers of dots. Flash them for a tenth of a second or so, quicker than you can count. See what's the highest number you can accurately identify. For most people, it's between 4 and 7 IIRC, which makes us no better than crows.
Re:funny but missing the point (Score:4, Informative)
I'm sorry but that statement is misleading. The 0 is generally accepted to have been invented in the Dravido-Indic cultures, what is currently Southern India. See following URL: Google Cache of Invention of 0 [64.233.167.104] This was then spread through the Persian/Arab (Islamic) scientists and eventually to Europe.
Re:INDIA (was Re:Inca's and Zero) (Score:2, Informative)
Indian mathematicians take the credit, however they were largely influenced by Ptolemy a Greek astromoner and Babylonians [wikipedia.org] who both show a earlier use of the zero, although these were, like the later Indian examples, place-holders and not the zero as we use it today. Indian mathematicians also would not consider zero as a number until many centuries later. The earliest definition and use of the zero was Brahmagupta [wikipedia.org], yet problems arose with his and Mahavira's definition even then and was further explained and expanded upon 500 years later unsuccessfully by Bhaskara. Its important to understand, that even then the usage of zero was not fully understood as it is today (by most).
The MesoamericanMayans [wikipedia.org] used the Zero in mathematics and did some amazing things, creating a calender superior to the Gregorian Calendar. Though unfortunately the Mayans written materials were burned by the Spanish and the vast majority of materials remaining are stone inscriptions. However it is clear, they created this independently, without influence of the Greeks and Babylonians, which is impressive. However they did not influence the Western world, unlike Brahmagupta, so are less noted in history.
Re:funny but missing the point (Score:2, Informative)
The oldest verified independent invention of zero was by the Babylonians in the third century BC. It was subsequently independently invented by the Mayans in the third century CE (AD), and lastly by the Indians in the fourth century AD (although there is some dispute that they may have simply held on to the concept since Babylonian times).
Great, concise overview here [mediatinker.com].
Re:funny but missing the point (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Where have I heard this before? (Score:2, Informative)
First Google hit for "crow tool use" yields this [ox.ac.uk].
Pretty interesting stuff.
Re:funny but missing the point (Score:2, Informative)
I just Googled it up and found this article to be relevant:
http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/about/zero.jsp [yale.edu]
This article overrides my understanding in that the Babylonians added the concept of zero to the Sumerian counting system.
It was the Indians (particularly Brahmagupta) who really formalized zero in arithmetic and the use of zero in the Western world seems to follow from that (via the Arabs, who were most advanced in these mathematic areas).
After all, the term algebra is from the Arabic al-jabr.
Re:Babel-17 (Score:3, Informative)
Now as Dave Barry I'm no expert on Japan. I have studied the language for a year and spent the summer over there though. Which means that I'm a happy beginner of the language and culture.
In any case. The Japanese language have a bunch of words for I. You have the common watashi and the polite watakushi. There are also the male boku and ore as well as the female atashi. Those are the ones I'm aware of.
When it comes to no they sure do seem to say it a lot. For instance if you ask if a car is a horse or something similar. (Well I didn't do that, but the language is unfamiliar enough that you can do stupid things like that.) If you ask them to do something or if you are allowed to do things then you may instead get the answer that it's a bit inconvinient to do so.
Slightly more diplomatic than the typical western approach in other words.
Slovak and the more forms of Plural (Score:1, Informative)
We have something similar - but the word forms are different for 1 item, 2-4 items, and 5 or more items. (But for some words it is the same as in English - different word for plural and singular.)
example:
jeden vlak (one train)
dva valky, tri vlaky, styri vlaky (2,3,4 trains)
pat vlakov, sest vlakov (5, 6 trains)
But you cannot just say the second form of plural (vlakov) without a numeral before it.
If ju want to say an indefinite number of trains, you just say "vlaky".
Re:Where have I heard this before? (Score:3, Informative)
Incidentally, the turn of phrase "double-plus-good" is straight from the book. It reflects the effort to reduce the number of adjectives in the language to two: good and bad. Plus and double-plus were added as a way to emphasize those. Also, bad was rendered as synonomous with crime.
Some people compare the political correctness movements in the '90s to Newspeak.
Re:Not true. (Score:3, Informative)
The combination of tightening of chest, heart thumping, sweat breaking out, stiffening of muscles, dizziness, feeling of falling over the edge.
"Doki doki" (Really describing the heart-thumping bit) but encompassing all of the above.
Re:psych 101 (Score:3, Informative)
Americans show similar difficulty with some logic problems. Take the following puzzle: There are 4 cards, each has a letter on one side and a number on the other. The four cards show the following on their face up sides
5 7 G K
Turn over only the cards necessary to prove the proposition that all cards with a 5 on one side have a G on the other.
The answer is turn over the 5 and the K, but most people get that wrong. A similar problem would be to imagine that you are a bouncer at a club, and now the cards have an age on one side and a drink on the other. The cards you see are
18 27 Coke Martini
Which cards do you have to turn over to make sure that there is no under age drinking (this is US-specific; assume the drinking age is 21)? The 18 and the Martini, of course. Almost everyone gets the latter problem, but not the former problem. Why? Because it is not a problem they've been exposed to.
So what does all that have to do with this article? Well clearly this tribe has no words for numbers greater than 2 because it simply isn't useful in their lives. By extension, they have not been exposed to problems which require counting higher than 2. The language is a symptom of their lack of practice counting, not a cause. If they wanted to count higher, no doubt they would start by saying one, two, one and two, two and two, and so on, not unlike Roman numerals, and over time they'd start making up new names for numbers. However, simply throw these problems at them suddenly, and of course they will be bad, they haven't ever done this before.
Re:Babel-17 (Score:3, Informative)
If your society has no language for counting above "two", then it likely has no need for counting above two, and so when presented with a situation where they need to count above two, they will be confused, because it's something they haven't done before.
This guy was on Science Friday today, and I happened to catch it. He agrees with you that they have no need for counting above three, and that's why they have no word for it. However, he did add that they often get cheated while trading with other people that do have a counting system. If these people ever did develop a need for counting above two, they'd certainly develop one.
After all, when you're taught numbers, you're taught to count! So is it linguistic? I doubt it. I think the reverse is more true - thought (and society) shapes language.
I don't think many people would dispute that, but this tribes inability to count precicely does influence them when they need that ability but lack it, like when they occasionally trade with others.
The lead scientist went into a lot more detail than was explained in the poor article. They still posses the ability to determine imprecise amounts for instance, just not exact amounts. He also tried to teach them portugese words for numbers, but they just didn't get it (the kids however were quite good at learning it though).
I find it ludicrous that the psychologist made the leap "language directs thought" rather than "society directs language".
The two aren't mutually exclusive. Language can direct thought, and the society can direct language. For instance, the concept of zero as a number was unknown before it was invented by people from India.