More Mathematical Weirdness

What’s your favourite? Photo by Claudecf

This week’s New Scientist tipped me off that I’d missed an important press release. Prof. Dan Everett at the University of Manchester has press release that I missed. He has a paper out in the new edition of Current Anthropology that claims the Pirahã are a tribe that has no words for numbers or even a concept of counting. That seems to dovetail nicely with my own thoughts that mathematics is social as well as real. Nevertheless is it profoundly strange. The final sentence is also something I agree with on translation.

The relevant extract from the CA press release is below the fold. Prof. Everett has put a couple of brief items on the Pirahã, one in English and one in Italian, on the web and has also a short discussion on the LanguageLog.

New research by Dan Everett (University of Manchester) into the language of the Pirahã people of Amazonas, Brazil disputes two prominent linguistic ideas regarding grammar and translation. The Pirahã are intelligent, highly skilled hunters and fishers who speak a language remarkable for the complexity of its verb and sound systems. Yet, the Pirahã language and culture has several features that not known to exist in any other in the world and lacks features that have been assumed to be found in all human groups. The language does not have color words or grammatical devices for putting phrases inside other phrases. They do not have fiction or creation myths, and they have a lack of numbers and counting. Despite 200 years of contact, they have steadfastly refused to learn Portuguese or any other outside language. The unifying feature behind all of these characteristics is a cultural restriction against talking about things that extend beyond personal experience. This restriction counters claims of linguists, such as Noam Chomsky, that grammar is genetically driven system with universal features. Despite the absence of these allegedly universal features, the Pirahã communicate effectively with one another and coordinate simple tasks. Moreover, Pirahã suggests that it is not always possible to translate from one language to another.

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