August 20, 2004

• Sounds pretty specious to me.
• I'm fairly skeptical of this study, to be honest. Its been shown in studies that babies can count before they can speak (as soon as they can see, basically), so I would be surprised if the language we speak has anything to do with being able to do simple arithmetic.
• Some of the things mentioned to show how different the tribe are just aren't that strange. Native Britons had no written language (it wasn't until the Romans appeared that they did so), and 2,000 years is a miniscule time in the lifespan of human history. Lots of cultures have had no writing. Also, the Native Britons appeared to have no religion (or at least, no known religious artifacts) for a period of about 500 hundred years, too, so thats certainly not unique. And not all cultures use normal speech - there is a language based on whistles, isn't there, somwhere else in the world? (I remember reading about it - it can be heard up to 5 miles away or more, and is an excellent communication advantage, I'd assume) (I'm too lazy to research this post at the moment. Sorry, you'll have to wait for links))
• El Silbo from the Canary Islands is the whistling language you might be thinking of. I'm no anthropologist or linguist but would the exercise of concepts like math through language, verbal or otherwise, strengthen those inate counting abilities and without it those skill might not develop fully? It would be interesting to see more research into the subject though.
• By the way, they have a word for one, and a word for 2, so 1+1=2 would be in their vocabulary, their only other word for numbers is their word for many, so 1, 2, many, like the ants in "The Diamond Age" who have the number 0, and the number 1, meaning a lot.
• dng, it's also been shown that babies can make the full range of human speech, from the clicky sounds to the nasal n to a different sound for R and L, but after a certain stage of development, it's very difficult for people to use sounds they hadn't practiced with before. Therefore, it doesn't necessarily follow that just because you can count at one point of development means it can't be halted somehow.
• Not really the same, in fact more of a derail (but dng's whistling language made me remember this link in my bookmarks), but Khoomei is equally fascinating as both a communication "language" and a harmonious use of body cavities and vocal cords to create amazing sounds.
• Almost, LoopeyG. "The word he [Gordon] translates as 'one' means just a relatively small amount, the word for 'two' means a relatively bigger amount," he said in an interview from Brazil. Something that vague doesn't necessarily translate to arithmetic.
• the men could not get beyond two or three before starting to make mistakes.... Hah! I can get to TEN easily! then i have to take off my shoes
• I don't know from math, but as to the other part of the original question, that was always the most fascinating part of Orwell's 1984 to me--the idea that by controlling the meaning of words you control thought, since thinking requires a vocabulary to express itself. In the novel, the idea was that if you could remove the word for "rebellion" from the vocabulary, for instance, it would become super-duper-super hard for the average person to arrive at the concept of rebellion--hence keeping them docile. I'm sure language theorists and Foucault have kicked this around ad infinitum, but don't look for references from me. It's an interesting idea, and has a certain intellectual appeal. I'm not sure how much water it holds, though, since we're always coming up with new abstracts. Though those abstracts are usually spawned by combinations of known things in new ways. So if you limit the parts of things you can put together, you limit the new ideas you can build. Though Ayn Rand (see Anthem) would disagree, maybe. Not that I like to use Rand as a source, but hey. my brain hurts...
• "Linguists and anthropologists... are flabbergasted by the tribe's strangeness" Or maybe WE are the weird ones. Quite interesting though, especially when it gets to the discussion of language theories. Pinker is certainly not the final word on language. (on preview) TenaciousPettle: I think it's important not to look at just the limiting of ideas, but rather the concepts we already have that shape and define our ideas in set ways. For example, if instead of 'rebellion' we had a word that meant 'disturbance by the unenlightened'. Our view of the world is quite obviously shaped by our ideas about it, and our language both influences and is influenced by such conceptions.
• I getcha. Or if "kittens" had cultural connotations meaning "harbingers of ill fortune and death," chances are quite good we wouldn't find them so cute. ;)
• This reminds me of a New York Times magazine article a while back about the birth of a new language. I *think* it was deaf children in El Salvador. The war kept parents from sending the deaf children to any sort of school. When the war was over they all got put together for the first time, but the teachers they had were unqualified for the work. SO, the kids developed their own varient of sign language. The older kids quickly developed a shared system of places and names and activities, but the younger kids took that and developed out a complex syntax and structure, which finally made it a full fledged language. The last bit in the article (and here is where we FINALLY get to the point of this comment) was about some kid whose mother did not want to send her son to the school. They got along well enough, he had happy days swimming in the river and eating fish. But he had no strong concept (or at least could not express it if he could) of the past or of the future. Yesterday, the day before, many months before that .. they all seemed to be the same thing.
• TenaciousPettle, if you're interested in that kind of linguistic study, this Wikepedia article is a great place to start. I tend to think to myself almost exclusively through language and internal dialogue, and so I try to recognize that my own linguistic biases are probably greater than a person with a heavier reliance on pictures or abstracts. That doesn't necessarily mean my thought is, as a whole, more limited, just that my limits manifest themselves around language more than abstract thinkers. None of which is to say that given a large enough volume of words and languages you can't mitigate these biases, but I'm not convinced one can eliminate them.
• I'm more alarmed by their lack of words defining colors. Who needs math when you can draw? (i take calculus, have mercy...)
• I believe the problems the Piraha faced with numbers have more to do with memory than concepts. The test is biased because it only tested for the memorization of quantities instead of actual math skills like adding and substracting. I'm pretty sure Piraha people can do maths. But having no words for numbers makes more dificult for them to remember actual quantities since they must remember what they see (the ordered objects) instead of something more abstract like a word representing a quantity. It's pretty well documented that human beings have an inherent difficulty recongnizing the quantity of objects in a picture at first glance (without counting them) past six objects. So humans need conceptual tools, like words for numbers, to easily remember quantities, not to do the actual maths.
• Folks, you're discussing a newspaper story. I realize the actual Science report isn't available for free, but here's a much more knowledgeable discussion which may clear some things up. (Links to other news stories here.) Also, a cool (if completely unrelated) aspect of the language is that it "is phonologically the simplest language known, having just ten phonemes."
• Yesterday, the day before, many months before that .. they all seemed to be the same thing. I dunno, when I'm unemployed I get in a state like that. I mean really, something that happened 2 months ago seems like it happened yesterday while something that happened three days ago seems like it happened months ago. Thank god for seasonal change or I'd really lose it.
• Numeracy skills are certainly not innate and all of us needed to be taught about them. The necessity of this knowledge is connected to the kinds of activities our culture expects us to engage in and there numerous examples of traditional societies whcih operated quite successfully even with a severely restricted notion of counting. For example check out the Australian languages in this (inevitable link to a) table of numbers in 4,000 different languages. Quite a number of them don't get above the number two. Another example is from South West Africa as reported by Francis Galton in 1853:

  In practice, whatever [the Damara] may possess in their language, they certainly use no numeral greater than three. When they wish to express four, they take to their fingers, which are to them as formidable instruments of calculation as a sliding-rule is to an English schoolboy. They puzzle very much after five, because no spare hand remains to grasp and secure the fingers that are required for "units." Yet they seldom lose oxen: the way in which they discover the loss of one, is not by the number of the herd being diminished, but by the absence of a face they know. When bartering is going on, each sheep must be paid for separately. Thus: suppose two sticks of tobacco to be the rate of exchange for one sheep, it would sorely puzzle a Damara to take two sheep and give him four sticks. I have done so, and seen a man first put two of the sticks apart and take a sight over them at one of the sheep he was about to sell. Having satisfied himself that that one was honestly paid for, and finding to his surprise that exactly two sticks remained in hand to settle the account for the other sheep, he would be afflicted with doubts; the transaction seemed to come out too "pat" to be correct, and he would refer back to the first couple of sticks, and then his mind got hazy and confused, and wandered from one sheep to the other, and he broke off the transaction until two sticks were put into his hand and one sheep driven away, and then the other two sticks given him and the second sheep driven away. --- Francis Galton, Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa, 1853 p.81

  Galton thought that this was an indication of the Damara's racial inferiority but I think it's a fairly obvious demonstration of the power of culture.
• 1 + 1 = ? No, shit, I know this one, don't tell me...
• I only know you by the absence of a chin I knew, The Roman presence in the middle of the face Escapes you now, and leaves me quite bemused, One by one I miss the lack of features that I thought you used.
• Ok, that does it! bees - in my next life I'm going to marry you.
• It's a date, path!
• So where do you register for a wedding in the next life?
• Languagehat: bees and I will need no gifts. We'll be sufficient unto ourselves. He'll entice me with poetry and I'll till the soil, and sell the excess produce, and feed him grapes and pomegranates with my fingers, caressing his lips as I do so. And, I'll buy silk sheets to make sure that we meet the standards of his poetry. In addition, I'll go out and work 60 hours a week to make sure that my bees has everything he needs to listen to his muse. And, we'll.., no, I'm sorry, that part is personal, but it'll be so hot that..sorry, again, but my bees will find that I'm his muse.
• To follow up on f8xmulder's link, here's an old Scientific American article on kh
• Not. In. Front. Of. The. Kids. Can't you guys find a room? Where's GranMa when you need her?
• Dammit with the wacky out-of-order posting!!!