Piraha

[Jonathan Lighter]

First, Everett isn't talking about Hoittentots.

Second, Everett's racial identity has no bearing on the subject of Pirahan arithmetic.

Third, the possibility that myths of  "a tribe that can't count three" are independent of a language that doesn't count to three seems to escape such thinkers.

Coincidence - it works while you sleep. TM.

JL
"James A. Landau" <JJJRLandau at NETSCAPE.COM> wrote: ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender:       American Dialect Society
Poster:       "James A. Landau"
Subject:      Re: Piraha
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On Fri 04/20/07 12:01 AM Geoffrey S. Nathan <geoffnathan at WAYNE.EDU>

wrote:



Folks, it may well be that 'we' know that there are no languages without

numbers, but Dan Everett has been saying for a while that Piraha doesn't

count beyond 'two', and doing a pretty good job of it. Also saying that

the language has no recursion. He even has a conference coming up next

month dealing with some of these issues. Conference site here:

http://www.llc.ilstu.edu/rechul/

This goes beyond the old folklore and seems to be a serious claim--Dan's

a good linguist, and he really knows 'his' language. There's a hot

debate about it that you can read about on his website:

http://www.llc.ilstu.edu/dlevere/

***********************************************

Without bothering to read Everett's claim, I will say it is a crock of shit and Everett is one of

those whites who have made "honkey" a swear word.



The claim that there exist primitive languages which cannot count beyond two has been made

before. Specifically there is a myth, yes I say myth, that the Hottentots (a group of Khoisan-

speaking pastoral peoples of southern Africa) are unable to count beyond three.

The mathematician Reuben Hersch posted on the Historia Matematica list



http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?forumID=149&threadID=382346&messageID=1177655#11

77655



There was an anthropologist here at UNM (his name unfortunately escapes

me for the moment) who had visited and worked with the Hottentots.

He told me that they were able to say whatever they wanted to, by

using some appropriate locution of the words they knew. For

instance, they could say that the gas tank is half full. This

doesn't mean that they possess the full system of rational numbers,

just that in practical situations their language was adequate to their

needs. Similarly, perhaps without words for north, south, east, west,

they could describe a route through the desert from here to there.

An unsympathetic alien could say that in English there are no words

for numbers bigger than 20; we have to manage by combining, for instance,

20 and 1 to say 21.



It is really astonishing that so incredible a claim as that some people

can't count above 4 has been published and swallowed without protest!



This post was preceded by



http://mathforum.org/kb/message.jspa?messageID=1177654&tstart=0



The Hottentot example given is clearly an anthropologist's garbled view

of a subject, mathematics, that confused the common word many, as exists

with our language, to cover all numbers greater than four. I would say

such a suggestion, that Hottentot's number line stopped at four is silly!



By chance I discovered Levi Leonard Conant _The Number Concept: Its Origin

and Development_ (New York: MacMillan and Co., 1896), available on the

Internet at the Cornell Digital Math Library, URL

http://cdl.library.cornell.edu/cdl-math-browse.html .

page 80

"the Hottentots [footnote 4] and the Hidatsa Indians call 100 "great 10",

their words being _gei disi_ and _pitikitstia_ respectively."



footnote 4 references "Mu"ller, _Sprachwissenschaft_, I, ii p. 184"



      - James A. Landau



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