Researchers claim to have solved the mystery of the people who simply do not count. It could be because they are lost for words.
The Piraha of the Amazon have almost legendary status in language research. They have no words at all for number. They use only only three words to count: one, two, many. To make things confusing, the words for one and two, in Piraha, are the same syllable, pronounced with a falling or rising inflection.
And to make things really difficult, the word for one can sometimes mean ”roughly one”, and the word for two can sometimes mean ”not many”.
Peter Gordon, a behavioural scientist at Columbia University in New York, reports in Science today that the Piraha may may not be very good at counting because because they do not have the words for it.
The Piraha have puzzled anthropologists for decades. Around 200 Piraha speakers live in settlements of 10 or 20 people on the banks of the Maici river in the lowland Amazon region of Brazil, using the same pronoun for ”he” and ”they” and being imprecise about quantities of fish and manioc.
They provided a test for an old riddle: do words determine thought or does thought determine words?
Gordon set them a series of simple numerical challenges. He asked the Piraha people to match small sets of objects by number.
The adults performed accurately with sets of two or three items, but the accuracy declined when tribespeople were asked to match sets of eight or 10 items.
”You can’t get beyond the concept of three, unless you have the word for it,” said Brian Butterworth, a neuroscientist at University College London. ”Children of three to four can easily do the tasks the Piraha adults were unable to do. With training even some non-human species can do these tasks. Chimps can. Monkeys can in some circumstances.
”It has been known for 50 years that birds can match sets of up to about seven. So I find it very strange that these Piraha adults are unable to do these tasks.
”Maybe there is more to it than just having a language short of number words.” – Guardian Unlimited Â