Life without numbers in a unique Amazon tribe describes how the “Piraha apparently can’t learn to count and have no distinct words for colors”:
1 + 1 = 2. Mathematics doesn’t get any more basic than this, but even 1 + 1 would stump the brightest minds among the Piraha tribe of the Amazon.A study appearing today in the journal Science reports that the hunter-gatherers seem to be the only group of humans known to have no concept of numbering and counting.
Not only that, but adult Piraha apparently can’t learn to count or understand the concept of numbers or numerals, even when they asked anthropologists to teach them and have been given basic math lessons for months at a time.
Their lack of enumeration skills is just one of the mental and cultural traits that has led scientists who have visited the 300 members of the tribe to describe the Piraha as “something from Mars.”
Daniel Everett, an American linguistic anthropologist, has been studying and living with Piraha for 27 years.
Besides living a numberless life, he reports in a separate study prepared for publication, the Piraha are the only people known to have no distinct words for colours.
They have no written language, and no collective memory going back more than two generations. They don’t sleep for more than two hours at a time during the night or day.
Even when food is available, they frequently starve themselves and their children, Prof. Everett reports.
They communicate almost as much by singing, whistling and humming as by normal speech.
They frequently change their names, because they believe spirits regularly take them over and intrinsically change who they are.
They do not believe that outsiders understand their language even after they have just carried on conversations with them.
They have no creation myths, tell no fictional stories and have no art. All of their pronouns appear to be borrowed from a neighbouring language.
Their lack of numbering terms and skills is highlighted in a report by Columbia University cognitive psychologist Peter Gordon that appears today in Science.
Explanations range from inbreeding, to a culture of isolation, to a simple lack of words for numbers.
From the Wikipedia:
- As far as the Pirahã have related to researchers, their culture is concerned solely with matters that fall within direct personal experience, and thus there is no history beyond living memory.
- The language is claimed to have no relative clauses or grammatical recursion, but this is not clear. Its seven consonants and three vowels are the fewest known of any language.
- The culture has the simplest known kinship system, not tracking relations any more distant than biological siblings.
- The people do not count and the language does not have words for precise numbers. Despite efforts to teach them, researchers claim they seem incapable of learning numeracy.
- It is suspected that the language’s entire pronoun set, which is the simplest of any known language, was recently borrowed from one of the Tupí-Guaraní languages, and that prior to that the language had no pronouns whatsoever. Many linguists, however, find this claim questionable, noting that there is no historical-comparative evidence indicating the non-existence of pronouns in a previous period of the history of Pirahã; also, the overall lack of Tupi-Guarani loanwords in areas of the lexicon more susceptible to borrowing (such as nouns referring to cultural items, for instance) makes this hypothesis even less plausible.
- There is a disputed theory that the language has no colour terminology. There are no unanalyzable root words for color; the color words recorded are all compounds like bi3i1sai3, “blood-like”.
- They have very little artwork. The artwork that is present, mostly necklaces and drawn stick-figures, is crude and used primarily to ward off evil spirits.
- The Pirahã take short naps of 15 minutes to two hours through the day and night, and rarely sleep through the night. They often go hungry, not for want of food, but from a desire to be tigisái (“hard”).
- The Pirahã have not related to researchers any fiction or mythology.