On the banks of the Maici River in the jungle of Northwest Brazil lie the Pirahã, a hunter-gather people who number around 700. Their language is extremely interesting for many reasons, for one they have only eight consonants, three vowels, and ten phonemes, yet they have an extremely complicated system of whistles and intonations that allow for the language’s complexity. Yet, the thing most interesting about the Pirahã language is that it has no vehicle for numeracy— the Pirahã people can’t count. This raises questions about the nature of Linguistic Relativity, as this case clearly suggests that one’s language is key in the knowledge of numbers, and thus numeracy is not hardwired.
Pretty much all we know about the Pirahã comes from Christian-evangelist-turned-secular Linguist Daniel Everett. Everett was sent to evangelize the Pirahã people with his family back in the 70’s, after those before him had failed to learn such an impermeable language. What Everett discovered is that the language has no words for discrete numbers. What the Pirahã do have is three words which can be used to broadly approximate a notion of quantity: hói, a “small size or amount”, hoí, a “somewhat larger size or amount”, and baágiso, which can mean either to "cause to come together" or "a bunch.”
Surely the Pirahã must have developed some ad-hoc way of counting that doesn’t require words? In fact, they haven’t— the Pirahã demonstrably cannot count beyond three. Everett performed an experiment where he showed the tribespeople a row of items on a table, then took them out of view, asking the subjects to put the same amount of objects back onto the table. When there were more than three items the subjects failed most of the time. What’s more the Pirahã have a history of being exploited by traders who have abused their lack of numeracy skills- something they hoped Everett could help them with, although after eight months of work they failed to grasp numerical ability.
Everett also claims that the Pirahã have no notion of color over than “light and dark”, and they have a dissimilar relationship to time also, having no form of history of their ancestors. Everett has claimed that the Pirahã live “completely in the present”- perhaps an idealization on the part of Everett but interesting nonetheless.
The Pirahã need to be studied further. Everett is considered the only scholar to have worked on the Pirahã language, and other scholars need to learn it and perform similar experiments in order to verify Everett’s claims. With that said, the language is a remarkable example of Linguistic Relativity. One final remark: It is amusing that while many non Pirahã view the language as an inferior- described as “chicken language” by those living near to the Pirahã, the same applies the other way around: the Pirahã “consider all forms of human discourse other than their own to be laughably inferior, and they are unique among Amazonian peoples in remaining monolingual”.
Link to Piraha being spoken https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHv3-U9VPAs
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This post reminded me of a scene in Jean M. Auel’s novel, Clan of the Cavebear, in which the main character, a young human girl, Ayla, is being taught to count by a wise, sage-like Neanderthal, Creb. Creb is the only one of his Neanderthal clan capable of recognizing any numbers (and only up to about ten), and yet Ayla learns to count from him in mere moments, causing concern to the shaman over the eventual demise of Neanderthals altogether due to an inferior ability to adapt and learn. Now clearly the novel is a work of fiction, but the Pirahã language offers an argument against the conclusion Creb comes to. Perhaps the issue Creb had was that his language did not encapsulate numbers, so he had no way of representing them, as seems to be the case with the Pirahã. Yes, Ayla could pick up on counting more quickly, but even her numbering abilities could likely not exceed those of Creb, simply because there was no way for her to represent or store any larger in numbers in her mind with the language that she had.
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ReplyDeleteStanford professor Michael Frank gave a guest lecture to our Psych 1 class on Friday about language and mentioned the intriguing case of the Pirahã people who lack a number system. He discussed the anomaly in context of the Whorfian Hypothesis, which argues that one’s native language constrains one’s thoughts or at least guides one’s thoughts in a particular direction. In this example, the Pirahã have no concept of numbers higher than three, and thus, their perception of the world is limited by this absent part of their lexicon. In this example, any quantitative thoughts that the Pirahã people have are constrained by the language. In addition, their lack of words for different colors and unconventional relationship to time also alter the way in which they perceive themselves and the world itself. Nevertheless, one must applaud their desire to conserve their cultural heritage and language even with its lacking vocabulary.
This blog post reminds me of something else I heard about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child)
ReplyDeleteThis is about a girl who was locked in a room, never learning to speak, for years. Even after being found and released, "she remained unable to fully acquire a language". She was able to communicate nonverbally very well, but speech was something she never fully mastered. Throughout the years, after being placed in a number of less than optimal situations, she lost much of her ability to speak. Recently researchers wondered "whether she had reached the limits of her developmental potential".
I wonder if numbers is a concept that could be taught to the children - if perhaps the adults are simply unable to learn such a concept this much later in their life.
We all continue to have this argument that the lack of language words for counting is what is limiting the ability of this group to effectively count as we describe it. Yet, this goes against of the most basic concept when making causality conclusions which is that we have not isolated without a doubt that the language is what is causing the lack of numerical ability. What is there to say that there is not some sort of brain disorder or another cultural aspect of the Piraha people that has limited their ability to count and that the lack of language for numbers comes from the fact that they do not have the ability to count in general.
ReplyDeleteI just want to bring up this point in a very Devil's advocate way so that it can be seen that while language is important we should never lose sight of the fact that correlation and apart causality are not the only ways to describe and answer a problem!
I think it would be interesting to look at how particular circumstances influence the absence of certain categories of descriptors in languages like Piraha. A central driver in the original development of language and the addition of new words to languages is from a need to communicate. Therefore, it would seem to follow that if a circumstance makes certain descriptors less necessary they are less likely to develop. For example, perhaps the people who speak Piraha have some alternate way of describing numerosity and thus have less need for a number system. If this kind of idea is true then there would seem to be a bidirectional influence between one’s perception of the world and the lexicon available in one’s language.
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