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.
I wanna be a "researcher" too. (Score:3, Insightful)
Why does that not surprise me.
It's not so much that language shapes thought, it's entirely the other way around. If you and your tribe have never discovered mathematics, it's only natural that you have no words to express them. These people are making it sound like if we recite a list of number names we will become genius mathematicians.
This proves nothing (Score:3, Insightful)
Obviously, this should be self-evident. Sadly, it seems this is not the case.
Language is key (Score:5, Insightful)
I can only imagine that one in a completely different society would have a very different thought pattern. The common roots of Western languages indicates a similarity in thought, and people who learn foreign languages are far more adept at understanding and integrating with that society.
Similarily, in computer languages different grammatical structures lead different programmers to analyze and solve problems differently: i.e. functional vs imperative. Add the context-sensitive nature of human languages, and this becomes substantially more complex.
Ok, thats longer than my normal post, but this is a really interesting topic
No Orwell references? (Score:4, Insightful)
=Smidge=
Unable to distinguish items (Score:1, Insightful)
The items used were 2 mini Ipods, the new iPod, an iPaq and a miniDisc Player.
They were then asked if they preffer ATI or NVidia cards, and what FPS would you get if you enabled 4xAA on a GF3 running at 1024x768 Doom3 will full detail, demo 1.
I would like to see when of those researchers get bitten by something really wierd in the jungle, see who can find the plant that will save his life then.
Forget protecting the rain forest, how about protecting these people from the advanced of these researchers with nothing better to do than subject them to numeracy tests.
1 dangerous animal, 2 dangerous animal, lots, run!
You see, don't need more than that.
Does this overthrow the idea that we can cope with 10 items because we have ten fingers? Maybe fingers moulded the language which moulded our own capabilities. If we counted in base 100 would women finally remember their own mobile phone numbers?
Re:I wanna be a "researcher" too. (Score:3, Insightful)
Cart before the horse (Score:2, Insightful)
But later in the same article we find this: "There are not really occasions in their daily lives where the Pirahã need to count,"
This statement is in direct opposition to the stated theory. In this quote, the scientist is saying that the causitive arrow points the other direction. They don't have much need to count -> their language doesn't contain those words.
To my mind, their failures on the tests are more parsimoniously explained by their simply not having had much practice with a technique (counting) they don't use much and their language merely reflects this.
Re:Inca's and Zero (Score:3, Insightful)
All depends on your point of view. http://www.oberlin.edu/external/EOG/OYTT-images/E
So? (Score:5, Insightful)
But, even knowing that, is anything so dramatic going on? "Western" people with the proper training and experience could tell the difference at a glance between a screen full of C programming and a screen full of FORTRAN. My grandmother would struggle with that task. It would just all look like gibberish to her. Likewise, someone experienced in wine tasting can describe in detail the differences between two wines most of the rest us couldn't even tell apart.
A lot of what's necessary (or at least very helpful) in learning about programming or wines is the specialized language. When I'm told that the difference between two wines is that one is "fruitier" than the other, I've got something to look for. The nebulous and complex experience of tasting wine is brought into my understanding a little because I can now use a word to identify a part of what I'm sensing.
My point is, the idea that language affects how we think and what we perceive is not really all that novel.
Re:Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (Score:4, Insightful)
Seems like no-one takes the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis serious these days, but I always thought it makes sense.
Why? It seems to me that all manner of spontaneous word creation (and outright theft from other languages) is hobbled if it were true. I mean, if thoughts of 0 or 3+ things were important to these people, they would have that thought long before they came up with a clean word to express it. As another poster joked, a computer isn't hobbled by only having 0 and 1 at its disposal. I think it is more correct to say that these people are not Turing-complete (for whatever reason) rather than blaming the language.
Re:I wanna be a "researcher" too. (Score:3, Insightful)
After all, I would have thought that surroundings have a great deal of importance in how a group of peoples thought process is shaped, and the need for pattern recognition, which is more what the researchers are testing here.
Re:I wanna be a "researcher" too. (Score:2, Insightful)
Language shapes thought faster than thought shapes language, at least with the languages most people speak today; languages that have been developed for many, many years.
To me, it seems that we're standing on the shoulders of giants, families of problems have been identified, components have been named and transferred to language.
You'll see this when you start learning about a new topic in school. You learn the meaning of a number of domain-specific concepts. The reason these special words exists is that they're easier to manipulate than "layman's terms". The domain-specific language makes the domain easier to control, understand and manipulate.
This is also extremely visible in programming. Compare good old basic with linenumbers to modern languages, and try to imagine how you went about solving your problems in the past. Picking up a new programming language always seems to make me aware of at least one elegant way of solving a problem that I didn't know of before, because it's typically idiomatic of that language, it's a part of the day-to-day vocabulary.
Also, when doing modern OO analysis/design, it's surprising how often a problem solves itself once you come up with the right names for things. Very often, I find myself "knowing" the solution to a problem, but I always gain more insight into it by putting it into words, correctly naming the different components and interactions.
Language and concepts are tightly integrated (Score:4, Insightful)
One of my favourite examples, as a Norwegian stranded in the UK, a country where people simply does not get the concept of candy with ammonium chloride [finnishfood.net], is how to talk about it.
In the UK, the word "candy" has mostly gone out of use, and usually refers to brown sugar or alt least "old fashioned" sweets based on brown sugar. Instead you'd refer to the different types of confectionary directly, with most of the sugar based confectionary grouped under "sweets".
Now, ammonium chloride based candy is most definitively not sweets. Though it is always fun to trick Brits into chewing Turkish Pepper or some other Scandinavian ammoium chloride based candy... :)
The word "confectionary" similarly doesn't really cut it - it's recognised as a grouping, and if you asked people if thy wanted any confectionary they'd wonder what kind you were talking about.
Scandinavian languages on the other hands have words for this, since it's an integral part of our culture. In Norwegian you'd talk about "godt" or "smaagodt", referring to small sweets, bits of licorice, small chocolate pieces or candy full of ammonium chloride, as well as assorted sour stuff.
But what would a usable equivalent be in the UK? I usually end up resorting to candy, but Brits then tend to assume that since I'm foreign I'm probably resorting to US English, and talking about sweets...
Re:funny but missing the point (Score:4, Insightful)
That seems obvious. But then again humanity survived quite a long time without the 0 and when the Arabs finally invented it and later brought it to Europe, it for quite some time was heavily objected against in certain circles as being something devilish and all that.
There is a major mental difference between "I have no fish" and "I have a number of fish, but it just so happens that this number is 0." That is through even without speaking of performing arithmetic in base X and understanding the special role of that 0 thing in that context.
Re:So? (Score:2, Insightful)
The interesting thing in the study is that, without words for the numbers, members of the tribe could not distinguish between 4 items and 5 items. The specialized vocabulary of (in your example) wine tasting surely aids in your ability to describe your experience (at least, to those also familiar with the vocabulary), but I don't think you're claiming that you couldn't tell the difference between how two wines tasted before learning that vocabulary.
Re:There are also a lot of findings to the contrar (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Where have I heard this before? (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems reasonable that someone who has never needed to count beyond 2 is unable to do so. It also wouldn't suprise me if that same person didn't have a word for 3 or 4 or any way to express any number beyond 2.
Why would we assume from this that the language develops before the ability? Why couldn't it be the case that someone discovered a value 1 more than 2, and named it "three" or "tres", or even "George". Prior to giving it a name, the person would be aware that the value existed.
If you tried to teach the person that a value 1 more than 2 existed, you could say "three" all you wanted, and it wouldn't make a difference. Before they could map "three" to "a value 1 more than 2", they would need to have some understanding of what "a value 1 more than 2" is.
Re:Where have I heard this before? (Score:2, Insightful)
But once there was a grasp of the concept (or a word representing it) it meant a great leap for, for example, math.
And then... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:MOD PARENT UP (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Babel-17 (Score:3, Insightful)
That makes sense. Most children probably hear that word more frequently than any other word, so they pick it up quicker.
Child about to stick fork into light socket. Parent yells "no".
Child about to feed oatmeal to VCR. Parent tells them "no".
Child wants another piece of candy. Parent tells them "no" or maybe "yes", but commonly "no".
Child punches dog in the face. Parent tells the child "no", and maybe dog bites.
Any number of other scenarios in which the child is about to do something dangerous, stupid, or irritating. Parent tells them "no".
Re:Where have I heard this before? Whorf-Sapir ... (Score:5, Insightful)
I assume this is the same thing. Nomadic tribes don't deal with a lot of things, because everything they have they have to carry. So there's no need to count above two. If suddenly you ask a guy to keep track of four things, he's gonna have trouble: not because he doesn't have a word for it, but because he's going to have difficulty differentiating between the four things. It's no different than if I moved from driving a car to driving a semi trailer with no training. I'd get some of it, but important, non-intuitive concepts would be lost on me, and I'd probably crash. It's not because I don't have a word for them.
This is like the Inuit people and their umpteen words for snow. We outsiders can recognize the different types of snow with only a little practice, but since we don't get snow 8 months of the year, there's no need for it. English speakers understand foreign concepts like "esprit d'escalier" (the french term for all the cool things you wish you would have said when you leave somebody's house) or "bokeh" (the japanese term for the photographic effect that occurs with large aperatures in which the foreground is in sharp focus and the background is out of focus and fuzzy, thus drawing the eye towards the focus), even if we don't know what to call them.
It's experience that drives language, not vica versa -- althought the part of the brain that employees language is also responsible for the most critical human activity: symbolic logic.
Re:Babel-17 (Score:3, Insightful)
As I recall from my undergrad days, such a language actually exists. I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe it is the language of a Native American group (Hopi?). Obviously the people speaking this language have ways of expressing negatives, for example by simply making a contrary statement that expresses their wishes. "Should we go to the store?" instead of "No, we shouldn't." reply "We should go to the movies."
Nevertheless this theory has been disproven to my satisfaction. It's based on extremely shaky ground. For example, there are plenty of languages that lack conditionals - these people are certainly capable of understanding and expressing things that "may" happen. Some languages have 5+ "genders" for nouns - does that mean that English speakers can't wrap their minds around such an idea? It's pretty naive in my opinion to assume that because no direct translation exists for a concept or grammatical structure, that a group of humans with identical mental machinery are unable to express such concepts in some way. I am absolutely positive that given the motivation, the Piraha tribespeople could learn our number system. The fact that their language has no such words only demonstrates the lack of necessity for such concepts in their daily life.
Re:Babel-17 (Score:5, Insightful)
My 11 month old can understand a lot of words and commands, though she doesn't speak yet.
I have a two and a half year old who can tell you what she wants, and can understand nearly anything you might tell her. She can even express some abstract ideas "That's amazing", "This is fun".
It seems to me as a layman, that the only thoughts that occur naturally to children are "Feed me" and "make me comfortable again" (change diaper, make me warm, stop the thing that's hurting me). Everything else seems to be environmentally induced (most of the play I see in the 2.5 year old is mimicry of adult actions).
But evenso, I find it hard to grasp the concept of a language that goes to anything less than five-- because that's how many fingers you have and it seems to me that someone would want to count them sometime.
Also, personally, if I see a group of things, and it is five or less, I just know how many it is-- I don't have to consciously count them. Six though, I have to count. I do that by making two groups of three, so it's nearly instantaneous, but it is definitely not just "known".
On the other hand-- you only have two hands, so you'll rarely if ever manipulate more than two things at a time, so maybe that's it-- one, two, too many to do things with right now.
But for people who gather fruit and nuts... it seems like it would be a survival necessity to be able to tell the differnce between 4 cashews (I'm going to need to eat more) and 400 (I'm going to be so full).
And I think they can tell the difference. It seems, based on the article, that they just approximate volume. Because there is no need to tell the difference between 350 cashews and 400-- both of them will give a few people a snack. Similarly, who cares whether you have five avacodoes or six? That's a lot of avacadoes to eat.
Someone has to... (Score:4, Insightful)
No, I really do understand it. I just can't explain what it means. :)
In all seriousness, I would disagree in some cases (perhaps these are only exceptions...) where someone can conceive what is happening but either is not good enough at communicating, or is a horrid teacher, and so can not articulate.
I [think I] know this because I had a number of professors that suffered from this very affliction.
Evaluate the Study (Score:5, Insightful)
To contrast, let us imagine that the Pirahã are conducting a similar study on a member of another culture. As this site is of the
Additionally, the Pirahã have a phrase in their language which indicates a degree of certainty, usually applied at the end of a sentence:
My point here should be fairly obvious. We cannot assume that we know the critical details of the study based upon a web article which, between two columns of advertisements, still only takes two pages (on my monitor, at least).
Second, and more breifly, the assumption that counting capacity defines intelligence is inherently flawed. The Pirahã have no need for counting; this is not to say they are not capable of it. Most Americans don't need to know what a coral snake looks like or that touching the little yellow-and-black frog is a bad thing. This doesn't mean they couldn't learn.
In summary, while the study definitely presents an interesting idea, one must evaluate it critically before accepting it as fact. Mistakes can be made.
That was a lot more than I meant to type. Thanks for the time.
Re:Where have I heard this before? Whorf-Sapir ... (Score:3, Insightful)
I think there is definitely some validity to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but it's more subtle than is characterized in this article and in previous posts. Here's an example:
As a native speaker of American English I perceive a distinction between a pidgeon and a dove. I have a word each, after all. I would eat a dove. I would not eat a pidgeon.
To the best of my knowledge, German makes no such distinction. There is one word for both: Taube*. The Germans that I have spoken to about this perceive pidgeons and doves as being the same bird. When I think about it, the two birds do seem rather similar, but prior to these discussions I saw no real similarity. That is significant. I am perfectly capable of seeing pidgeons and dove as distinct or the same. I don't think language binds your thinkingit merely influences it.
* I have heard someone call a dove a "Friedenstaube" or "peace pidgeon/dove," but that was under weird circumstances.
Re:Chicken and Egg. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, but that's just not the case. This happens to be my field - language is far more complicated than you might imagine. Linguistics, psycholinguistics, and visual cognition are not trivial just because you don't understand them on a serious level.
Re:Where have I heard this before? Whorf-Sapir ... (Score:3, Insightful)
In English, we only have one word for "duck," despite the fact that there are many kinds of ducks. They all have different sizes, temperments and flavors, but we call them all "duck." Which leads to some pretty depressed diners, who like one sort of duck meat and then come to find the duck served at a different restaurant has a different flavor. It's a minor inconvenience caused by the fact that language evolves, it's not planned. It is not an indicator of a widespread cultural ignorance of ducks.
Re:Chicken and Egg. (Score:3, Insightful)
My life changed when my fifth grade teacher said the same words to me ~mmm mmm~ years ago. I immediately understood the basic truth of that statement and have never wavered in my belief of it.
More directly topical, I have studied three non-western languages (heavily influenced by Sanskrit, Bali, and/or Chinese) and find the mindsets of native speakers to be so shaped by their language that I have to immerse myself in the culture to understand anything more than the simplest conversations. American culture and non-western ones find little common ground unless the latter have been influenced by foreign media.
Re:Where have I heard this before? Whorf-Sapir ... (Score:3, Insightful)
If your claim is that language has no influence on the thought of its speakers, I disagree. I think the influence is subtle, but it's there. Language and culture have an influence on each other.
I'll bet you're right that Germans don't care which is which. The distinction is culturally unimportant. The culture influenced the language. However, since there is no distinction in the language spoken by the general non-bird-watching German public, they are less inclined to perceive a distinction than a speaker of a language that makes such a distinction. This is the influence of the language on the culture.
Do you not see this as being a two-way street? I imagine that influence of culture on language is greater than the other way around, but the influence is still there.
Re:superior language implies superiour thoughts? (Score:4, Insightful)
I find this really interesting, but is it that they can't tell the difference, or they don't care? I mean, there's the whole thing about Eskimos having 5 million words (I'm exaggerating 'cause I don't remember the real number) to describe snow. The rest of us who grew up in snowy climates, we could tell you that there are different kinds of snow, fluffier and less fluffy. The fact that I don't have good words to explain doesn't mean I don't perceive the difference. It's just that, when it's snowing, I don't necessarily care what kind of snow it is, and so to me, it's just snow.
I mean, the fact that the words exist mean someone was thinking about things that they had no good words for, and they invented the words. It seems to me very likely that the proper conclusion is that the life you live shapes both human thought and speech. If the tribe lead lives that needed a number "3", I'd guess they'd come up with it themselves, no problem.
Re:Chicken and Egg. (Score:4, Insightful)
As a behavioral scientist (read: psychology), I have to absolutely disagree that "it's all pretty much been wanking". What a sorry attitude.
I do agree that many lay persons are capable of contributing meaningful insight to some of these problems, but in my own area of specialty, I encounter a lot of situations where people really have no clue what I am talking about, but think that they do. (FWIW, I am a grad student doing my thesis on Hedonic Prediction (in particular), and Motivation/Judgment-Decision Making in particular: I find that it takes at least 15 minutes to explain what these are really about to most people, and why they are related to industrial psychology).
As far as linguistics are concerned, having lived in a foreign country and REALLY learned the language, I know that language is a very deep area of research.
Re:Babel-17 (Score:1, Insightful)
Here are four things YOU REALLY WANT.
Here are five identical things YOU REALLY WANT.
(Dollar bills, apples, pigs, virgins, whatever)
You can have this group of four - or this group of five.
Pick one of the two groups.
WORDS for four or five or NOT - only the idiots will choose 4 over 5.
Not true. (Score:3, Insightful)
An expert has posted previously we can understand an emotional concept but lack the words to express it. Anyone who speaks more than one language can come across phrases that have no real equivalent in their other language(s). In my case the Japanese emotional onomotopeia such as "doki doki" have no real English equivalent but can describe the feeling much better. The feeling in this case is what you would feel if somone removed a blindfold from your eyes and you found yourself standing at the edge of a 1500-foot cliff.
Re:Where have I heard this before? (Score:2, Insightful)
How do you describe love? Fear? Anger? (Score:3, Insightful)
As I mentioned elsewhere, some languages have words that describe feelings in ways that are not possible in English. That English lacks this kind of vocabulary makes you unable to conceive of it.
Japanese onomatopoeia [mit.edu] includes many words that describe feelings or states of the world. For your examples I offer "gura gura" and "hara hara" (also "doki doki"). A Japanese speaker hearing these words will have an inherant understanding of the feeling.
Even expressions for sounds are much richer in Japanese which is why you will find American Goodyear engineers using term like "gwooaarrrrrr" and "shhhiiiiii" to describe tire sounds during testing. They picked this up from their Japanese colleagues.
Re:Chicken and Egg. (Score:3, Insightful)
Not necessarily. I often find myself saying something like that when I mean "I have up a name for a concept that will explain that, but it's a word that I (or a small group) just made up, so I'd first have to go through a long explanation before you'd understand."
This isn't at all odd for software geeks. Every time you type a variable declaration, you are in fact making up a private name for a concept, and that name is only defined in the context where you declared it. Sometimes you may use variable names that are words in English or some other spoken language, but I think most programmers understand that such usage is really very rough, and to understand the code, you have to understand each name's meaning within that code.
On a more general level, there's a widespread observation that one of the most important part of any scientific field is developing the field's terminology. Many histories of science have illustrated this with one or more historical examples where a field went through a list of closely-related terms before finally settling on what seems to be the right one.
One of the ongoing battles with terminology is the need for biological education to instill in students the idea that "function" is a well-defined technical term, but "purpose" is not. The basic debate between these somewhat similar terms happened mostly in the 1800's, of course, but the general public (and the media) still uses these terms interchangeably. To someone who uses "purpose" in biological discussions, you could reasonably tell them that you can't articulate something, because they don't understand the terminology well enough to understand what you'd say. They'd get annoyed with you, of course, but you'd be right.
In general, to "articulate" anything, i.e., to communicate it to a listener, it's necessary that both parties not only use the same words, but have the same understanding of the words' meanings. If this has been shown to be not true, then you could very well be unable to articulate something (in terms that your listeners would understand).
In the case of software, we have a deeper problem: Even if your code is clear, it's often very difficult for a reader to dig out the meanings of all those names you've used. All too often, a name's meaning can only be learned by thoroughly studying the entire body of code, until you understand all the names and how they relate to each other. Since programmers rarely document the meanings of all their code's names, we often end up with "write-only" code whose meaning is understood (if at all) only by the original programmer.
Re:How do you describe love? Fear? Anger? (Score:4, Insightful)
But they can't tell me how to do it. They can tell me what I did wrong (You used to much heat there), but they can tell me what it is that lets them know that (You just learn it).
Language is how we convey and obtaing information and instructions. If Joe can't tell you how to weld or why a weldment is bad, does that mean that he doesn't really know how or understand the process (which it would seem like at first), or does it just mean that the bridge to convey his knowledge and understanding is broken?
Re:Chicken and Egg. (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually it's been pretty well debunked that language is the medium for our thoughts. Most of the current theories are similar to Fodor's concept of a "mentalese" or Vygotsky's non-linguistic agglutinate forms.
You are, however, correct in saying that language informs our thoughts with "informs" being the key word. There appears to be a strong connection between language and perception. While we may not think in language we appear to see in language. Language seems to teach our perception what is and is not important to take note of, our minds then process that data. This means that our minds should be able to still conceive certain concepts, but the data may not be obvious to the majority of the public and they certainly would have a difficult time articulating that information.
Re:Where have I heard this before? Whorf-Sapir ... (Score:3, Insightful)
The Inuit have many words for snow slash ice, but they're not really that different from our terms for different properties of snow ( drifting snow, packing snow, sleet, slush, etc ). The inuit language is polysynthetic, meaning you make up your own words from particles of meaning as you go along. Therefore, they have as many words for anything as they have time to speak them. Add the particle for snow to the particle for bureau, and voila! Snowbureau.
In many ways, this is not that different from English speaking idiots who think they can invent plurals however they like (statii, virii, emails, boxen and the like) or sound impressive by putting ir- onto the front of a word starting with r (irrespective, irregardless, irridiculous, etc).
Re:Someone has to... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Chicken and Egg. (Score:3, Insightful)
A crock of shit if I've ever heard one. There are times when I can't define a word explicitly (old age, you know) yet I know exactly what it means. At that point I have to go to a dictionary to refresh my failing memory in order to explain what the word means to others.
And there are words in other languages which have no direct translation into English. I can talk around the meaning all day to you, but I can never properly define the word to you; either you'll 'get it' someday, or you won't. Whether or not you do 'get it' has no bearing on whether or not *I* do, regardless of my lack of ability to translate it properly.
Max
Re:Someone has to... (Score:4, Insightful)
"There are various patterns that crop up that I have a knowlege of, but I have no words that describe the system, because I dont think in that manner."
"And knowing how to move the stuff around without messing up a peice is something that I have in physical memory."
What you are articulating, and using, is a concrete application of abstract algebra, at a level deep and fundamental enough that the algebraists don't really have the vocabulary. There is a thin thread between the concepts and the language. It stretches, well out of sight, but it does not go forever.
You can take a cube apart and flip one piece on an edge so the cube cannot be put back together. I'd guess you would know it couldn't be put back fairly quickly without moving anything. That would be using language even if it is just to yourself.
Probably the best evidence of the influence of language is the nearly simultaneous discoveries of major inventions, like calculus. It seems also that the practical is often far in advance of the theoretical.