51–54 of 54 posts
I am surprised that no one has mentioned the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis[0]. It's incredible, the effect that language can have on the mind. Given that they can communicate in whistles and hums, I'd also be interested in a study about their music as well. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually I struggle pretty badly with names - I have honestly forgotten my wife's name in the past - so I'd probably still go for counting people even if they were in my own family. But I get your point. What it doesn't address though, is my second point - things that don't have unique names. Remembering how many sheep you took out to the field, how many bowls you tooks with you to eat, how many pieces of wood you ne…
You may be "thinking backwards". If their language doesn't have this feature, or their society these concepts...it's because they don't really run into these situations to the point that it becomes detrimental. I don't know much about primitive tribes in the amazon, but I don't imagine that their traditional lifestyle involves very large flocks of sheep. My family bred dogs growing up so we always had a good number (…
Not necessarily. Just because something is detrimental, it doesn't mean that a society will automatically come up with a solution for it. It took people in the west millenia to come up with (or more accurately to be introduced to) zero - and the entire arabic numeral way of counting. That's not because it wouldn't have been useful before. It's simply that no one had figured out that this is a better way to count than their existing representations.
>I don't know much about primitive tribes in the amazon, but I don't imagine that their traditional lifestyle involves very large flocks of sheep.
You may well be right - I'm no expert in Amazonian culture, so I don't whether they have flocks/herds/whatever of any particular animal. But that's just one possible example. I struggle to believe that they've not got some situations in their lives where numbers would be an advantage. Like I mentioned - it could be counting animals, counting the number of bits of rotten wood that might need to be replaced in their house, dividing a crop of fruits equally between the tribe, or something entirely different. But the lack of numbers in the language is no proof that there was no call for them.
trivia: there are some languages out there which don't have different concepts for PIROS and VÖRÖS, and just bunch them together under a single color ("red" in english).
Yeah, it's called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity I believe that Russian has something similar to Piros/Voros with shades of blue.
синий: http://yandex.ua/yandsearch?text=%D1%81%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0...
голубой: http://yandex.ua/yandsearch?text=%D0%B3%D0%BE%D0%BB%D1%83%D0...
It was a bit of mind-blowing to learn that English world for #0000ff is "blue" and then suddenly "The sky is blue" (what?! no it isn't #0000ff)
The same thing goes for redheads - what? but this is not red!
Can't help but to think abotu lambda calculus encoded numbers.