Top 10 science stories of 2008 -- #8: a people with no numbers

December 26, 1:45 PMScience News ExaminerMeg Marquardt

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Linguist Dan Everett and a Piraha memeber.  Credit Martin Schoeller

In celebration of the approaching New Year, I present a list of the top ten science stories of 2008.  Taken from the vast expanse of all fields of science, they may not be everyone's top ten, but they are among the top news makers and will have repercussions well past the ending days of 2008.

In a culture such as ours, precision of language is essential, especially when it comes to numbers.  I can count to ten in four different languages (impressive, I know).  I obsessively check the word count on the documents I type.  I delight in being able to pull the perfect change out of my wallet at the cash register.  Take away numbers and I would be lost.  So the Piraha tribe truly are an anomaly of language, and a fascinating anthropological find.

Located deep in the forests of Brazil, the Piraha [pronounced pee-da-HAN] tribe does not use numbers at all.  They have words for vague abstractions (few, many, more), but no actual numbers.  How they function with such abstractions is a mystery to scientists, as having numbers and counting has long been thought to be a basic, fundamental part of human cognition.

And this phenomenon stretches beyond numbers.  The Piraha apparently have no fixed words for colors either.  They depend on comparisons instead. In the article by John Colapinto that appeared this year in The New Yorker, Dan Everett, an expert of the Piraha, gave the following example: "If you show [the Piraha] a red cup, they're likely to say, 'This looks like blood.' Or they could say, 'This is like vrvcum-a local berry that they use to extract red dye."  This, too, is an anomaly of language. No exact numbers, no exact colors.  The language changes to reflect the immediate world.  Their words flow and change, just like the river that courses past the villages they inhabit.

The phenomenon of language that the Piraha offer is just beginning to be studied and is one that is far too complicated for me to delve into in such a short column.  Colapinto's article offers a complex, in depth look at the quiet, strange world of that tribe in the Amazon.  It can be found in full in both on the New Yorker site and in The Best American Science and Nature Writing of 2008.  I highly recommend the reading the article – and most of the others that appear in that book – to anyone interested in further information on this remarkable linguistic and anthropological find.

Check out the rest of the list here.