HofT wrote:From Acquiunk's very interesting article in the New Scientist:
"...Hunter-gatherers from the Pirahã tribe, 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, revealed the study."
I'm surprised that anyone is surprised at this result. Look no further than the Western languages, which have uniformly adopted words from Siberian tribes (tundra, taiga), Japanese (tsunami), Arabic (algebra) and on, and on. We wouldn't be using their terms if we had had the concepts to begin with.
I posted an article about this a while back. I thought it was extremely interesting. The thing that was surprising about the study was not just that they didn't have the words, but that they apparently could not learn the concept of a number greater than 3. This would sort of imply that giving them the words would not help as they were unable to learn the concept. Though I guess it's possible that giving them words first could help them grasp the concept, but I'll leave that to those who did the study.
A fascinating topic, in my opinion.
