Living in a world of ones and twos From: Indian Country Today (Lakota Times) | Date: September 22, 2004| Author: | . Provided by ProQuest LLC.Copyright information

Dempsey, E.S.
Indian Country Today (Lakota Times)
09-22-2004
A tribe without numbers

What if our language did not have words to describe numbers? Without the
words, would we know how to count?

The Piraha tribe lives along the Maici River in the Amazon region of
Brazil. They have words for one and two. For more than two, there is only a
word for "many." The Piraha language does not have "number" in its
vocabulary, and it does not have comparisons like "more sticks in this pile
than in that one."

Peter Gordon, a Columbia University professor of bio-behavioral science,
tested the Piraha's ability to ...

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