Mathless people

[cubedbee]

So sad.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- Some people have a great excuse for being bad at math -- their language lacks the words for most numbers, U.S.-based researchers reported on Thursday.

Members of a tiny, isolated Brazilian tribe have no words for numbers other than "one or a few" or "many" and seem to have trouble counting, the researchers reported.

The Piraha tribespeople are clearly intelligent, so the finding opens questions into how language may affect thinking, the researchers say in this week's issue of the journal Science.

Peter Gordon of Columbia University in New York and colleagues studied the Piraha because there had been reports about their unique use of numbers.

"I was able to take three field trips ranging from one week to two months living with the Piraha along with Dr. Daniel Everett and Keren Everett, two linguists who have lived and worked with the tribe for over 20 years and are completely familiar with their language and cultural practices," Gordon writes in his report.

"They live along the banks of the Maici River in the Lowland Amazonia region of Brazil. They maintain very much of a hunter-gatherer existence and reject assimilation into mainstream Brazilian culture," he added.

There are only about 200 Piraha and they live in groups of 10 to 20. Their words for numbers appear limited to "one," "two" and "many," and the word for "one" sometimes means a small quantity.

"There is no word for 'number', pronouns do not encode number (e.g., 'he' and 'they' are the same word), and most of the standard quantifiers like 'more,' 'several,' 'all,' 'each' do not exist," Gordon wrote.

Performance deteriorates
Gordon got the tribespeople to take part in some number matching tests.

"In all of these matching experiments, participants responded with relatively good accuracy with up to 2 or 3 items, but performance deteriorated considerably beyond that up to 8 to 10 items," he wrote.

"Piraha participants were actually trying very hard to get the answers correct, and they clearly understood the tasks," Gordon said in a statement.

While Piraha adults had difficulty learning larger numbers, Piraha children did not.

"One can safely rule out that the Piraha are mentally retarded. Their hunting, spatial, categorization and linguistic skills are remarkable and they show no clinical signs of retardation," Gordon added.

They also show some other unexpected differences from many world cultures.

"Not only do the Piraha not count, but they also do not draw," Gordon wrote. "Producing simple straight lines was accomplished only with great effort and concentration, accompanied by heavy sighs and groans."

[Altairjones]

Wow, I wonder what a brain scan would look like out of curiosity.

I wonder if there are striking differences between the left or right side per common belief now that one side is more art driven then the other.

[Robert Zimmermann]

No numbers. They must be really happy!

[Melanie Haber]

I wonder what their sense of degree is -- ugly vs. very ugly, loud vs. too loud. You'd think they'd be able to see that one person was taller than another, or some nights are darker than others, or that someone else got more food than they did.

[Dr T Non-Fan]

How many fingers do these people have? Many?

[Pseudolus]

Did anyone else read this thread and think "Gully Dwarves?"? No? No one? Just me then?

[Elisha]

Originally Posted by Pseudolus

Did anyone else read this thread and think "Gully Dwarves?"? No? No one? Just me then?

Ooooh...where is that from again? Dragonlance? I forget.

[Amateur Linguist]

For anyone who wants to know more about Piraha, here's a paper by a linguist who has lived with the tribe and studies the language and culture:

http://lings.ln.man.ac.uk/info/staff/DE/cultgram.pdf

It notes "several very surprising features of Piraha grammar and culture:

the absence of creation myths and fiction.
the simplest kinship system yet documented
the absence of numbers of any kind or a concept of counting
the absence of color terms
the absence of embedding in the grammar
the absence of 'relative tenses'
the borrowing of its entire pronoun inventory from Tupi
the fact that the Piraha are monolingual after more than 200 years of regular contact with Brazilians and the Tupi-Guarani-speaking Kawahiv
the absence of any individual or collective memory of more than two generations past
the absence of drawing or other art and one of the simplest material cultures yet documented
the absence of any terms for quantification, e.g., 'all', 'each', 'every', 'most', 'some', etc."

The author proposes that all these flow from a single feature of Piraha culture: "Piraha culture constrains communication to non-abstract subjects which fall within the immediate experience of interlocutors."

[Klaymen]

Ebert & Roeper could still judge movies in this language. :P

[AG]

You mean after all these years, I'm actually from Brazil?