A Pirahã man participates in a new experiment that, researchers say, indicates that his language contains no number words, even for the number one.
Talk about living in the moment! The Piraha people, a tribe in the Amazon, give insight into how innate a ‘taoist’ approach to life may actually be, and that the human mind has just gotten a little sidetracked of late. Of late meaning the last 10,000 years or so. For an overview, read: Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle.
Briefly, this author of the book is a missionary who went to proselytize to members of a remote Brazilian tribe (and eventually became a full-fledged linguist). This tribe has no creation myths or storytelling traditions. They live in the present and believe only in what they and their comrades directly observe — a cultural characteristic that lead Everett to abandon his own faith. Need I say more?
Also, this article, Numbers beyond words, discusses how this Brazilian group grasps exact quantities without naming them.
Hey guys! I know the people working on this
This is my food group. We should talk about it sometime.
Cheers,
Kelly
You know Everett then? Did he ‘go over’ to believing in only direct experience, or did he just loss enough old-time religion to drop the extreme of dogmatic belief?
I’m curious how they manage to make having faith only in direct experience a cultural tradition. I have found that even the belief in word meaning (that words has reality) is enough to ‘believe’ that which is not directly observable. So, perhaps they are actually somewhere in-between. Now, aren’t we a fascinating animal, eh?
As an aside, Kelly, by the brief description on your site, your studies in cognitive science sound fascinating.