Thursday, December 30, 2010

Amazonian Tribe Doesn't Use Numbers




Scientists have found an Amazonian tribe that has no words for numbers. The Piraha people use “2” to mean even "5" or "6" and “1” is used for anything less than that. So words don’t stand for numbers, but for relative amounts.

These findings suggest language for exact numbers is a cultural invention rather than universally linguistic.

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