The Tribe That Can't Count | Pirahã Part 1
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- čas přidán 26. 06. 2024
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The sequel: • The Battle of the Ling...
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Sources:
Barkham, P. (2008). "The power of speech". The Guardian.
Everett, D. (1979). "Aspectos da Fonologia do Pirahã". State University of Campinas.
Everett, D. (2005). "Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã". Current Anthropology v. 46, n. 4.
Frank, M., Everett, D., Fedorenko, E. & Gibson, E. (2008). Number as a cognitive technology: Evidence from Pirahã language and cognition. Cognition v. 108.
Gonçalves, M. (2004). "Pirahã". Encyclopaedia - Indigenous Peoples of Brazil.
Majid, A. & Sutton, J. (2009). " Adventures in the jungle of language". The Psychologist. The British Psychological Society.
Malotki, E. (1983). "Hopi Time". TiLSM v. 20. De Gruyter Mouton.
Whorf, B. (1936). "An American Indian Model of the Universe". Published 1950 by Institute of General Semantics.
Chapters:
0:00 - Intro
1:58 - The Pirahã Couldn't Learn to Count
2:36 - Whorf & Malotki
3:51 - Everett's Theories
4:37 - The Eurocentrism Debate
6:28 - Credits
Written and created by me
Art by kvd102
Music by me.
Translations:
Izet - Bosnian
Leeuwe van den Heuvel - Dutch
CD-ROMy - German
Дзишу Фурыч - Russian
Diriector_Doc - French
#everett #linguistics
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im not a fan of HelloFresh that much.
Congratz on getting that bag!
"All languages have recursion"
"What about Pirahã?"
"They don't count"
Listen here you little
that was a good one
Source: EverettTannedBallsUniverisry
I remember the time I joked with a few people on what if Pirahã is actually a more complex language, but the speakers deliberately alter their speech in front of Everett to troll him into thinking it's the way they actually speak.
Imagine if Pirahã did have numbers, but they hid it from Everett.
Not so far-fetched tbh. Everett himself has alluded to something like this happening. He has previously theorised that the pirahaen interviewees stopped using the [t͡ʙ̥] sound when speaking to him and other non-Pirahãs, because they felt embarrassed that others would make fun of the weird sound in their language. If this is true then they must be keenly aware of how they are perceived to others, and it's totally within reason that they would intentionally do stuff to manipulate that perception. Hell, speakers of every language do that when being experimented on by linguists, it's one of the most common pitfalls of studies in this field anyway
@@diamdante Unfortunately, I feel that if they were so keen not to be embarrassed or looked down upon they wouldn't pretend not to know how to count, would they? Surely that would only be more embarrassing, if they know how to count and presumably see such a thing as simple.
I wasn't clear in my explanation. I suspect that [t͡ʙ̥] in the first place is a joke, and the "uhhh I'm so embarrassed" is just them ending the joke. The evidence for /t͡ʙ̥/ being phonemic in Pirahã is shaky at best, and it being a joke would explain why it is brought up early on in the research, when the interviewees were limited to just two guys, and then suspiciously never heard of again...
It's a little more plausible that he's just a liar, or ignorant of how the language works. Like if you ask me how many things there are and I say "a few" that doesn't mean I can't say the word 6, it just means I don't care to be specific.
Counting in complex and imaginary numbers
i cannot express how much i'm excited to hear about more dumb chomsky beef in part 2
The exchange of conflicting opinions isn’t interesting when there are no examples and/or observations presented.
Scientific conclusions and assertions must be independently testable and reproducible otherwise it’s just egotistical tongue-wagging.
@@lohphat Not at all. That's not the case for any of the hard sciences anymore (although it is still used), and it has never been the case for the human sciences, since, in most cases, it's impossible to isolate a variable and test them independently (especially if these are social phenomena). What makes something scientific is its compatibility with observations (directoy or indirectly) and its negative state of falsifiability. That's why reconstruction of languages that we don't have written register of are still scientific, although there are no direct observations of those languages and it is impossible to reproduce them.
@@calendariocalendula7158 The reconstruction of languages is decidedly not scientific and won't be until someone invents a time machine, you're just abusing the word 'science' to try to give credibility to a fundamentally subjective discipline, the development of hypotheses and the providing of rhetorical arguments in their support is not sufficient to constitute science, there must be proof of the hypothesis through observation. General relativity is science, it's a model that has been repeatedly supported by multiple observations and has proven to hold up in a multitude of contexts; unverifiable predictions are decidedly not scientific and, as such, the humanities are decidedly not scientific (and possibly can never be, unless we can some day figure out how to perfectly model the human mind to allow us to isolate variables and scientifically test hypotheses, assuming that's even possible, which is far from given).
And I'm not even sure what you mean by 'negative state of falsifiability', but I will say falsifiability is fundamental to science, if an hypothesis is not falsifiable then it cannot be of any use to science.
Oh, Chomsky. The guy who once said something smart about corporate media's motivations, and many young leftist now view him as some sort of intellectual leader... to be fair, mostly because he's old, speaks very slowly and silently and therefore hard to understand, but it FEELS smart... even though most of his ideas and politics are absolutely insane from the defense of Pol Pot to blaming the West for Russia attacking Ukraine and arguing Ukraine should just give up "to save more lives".
@@costakeith9048 Except that inference from indirect evidence has always been a crucial part of science. What you're saying is tantamount to "unless you can go back in time and see living dinosaurs, they never existed". Obviously, we can make reasonable inferences that the giant bone-shaped mineral deposits are the remains of long-dead animals, even without seeing living dinosaurs for ourselves. We can even make reasonable scientific inferences about how they may have looked and behaved. Likewise, we can show with direct evidence that languages evolve. From that, we can reasonably infer the existence of older parent languages, and use the indirect evidence from existing related languages to make scientific inferences about the features of those languages.
A negative state of falsification simply means that we have yet to demonstrate that a hypothesis is false, despite attempting to do so. Failure to falsify is the cornerstone of scientific epistemology.
The notable thing about the Pirahã isn't really that they don't have numerals, but that they had such a hard time _learning_ to count. Innumeracy seems to be the base state, with counting being a technology, something you invent when you have property or cattle or whatever to keep track of. Lots of languages spoken by hunter-gatherers only go "one, pair, group" with no actual number-words. Even more languages borrowed all their numerals from some other language, showing that they didn't use to have any.
They were able to ask for math lessons but apparently lack words for number so they could after the fact develop and adapt new words and a system of numerals.
Tally charts base5, base 10 Hindu or Roman numerals
They tried to teach these guys to count and test their math skill to a point where they could very their ability.
So those who participated could teach but things lost in translation would mutate into new things
What's the evidence for this? Because there's plenty of archeological evidence for hunter-gatherers counting. Plus humans do seem have some basic innate math abilities. It's not like there's that many hunter-gatherers left to ask about this kinda thing, also the Piraha aren't hunter-gathers.
Interesting observation.
Maths is a social construct lol
@@kimarna It's a bit iffy actually.
I'm pretty sure it's a debate.
I'm a conlanger and one of my goals is to eventually create a conlang designed for people to discuss claims about Pirahã. The conlang is going to have an evidentiality marker for "Everett is the only source for this" the way some languages have evidentiary markers for first-hand knowledge, second-hand knowledge, etc.
It would have few such evidentiality markers, in that case. Some other researchers have visited the Piraha and haven't been able to disconfirm any of Everett's claims.
@marmaladeINFP ??
Okay, so I thought that you would just repeat the same things that other people had said in their videos, but you actually went way far ahead and talked about some really insightful stuff!
Great video!
I tried to keep the Malotki/Whorf beef short, because as interesting as it is, it's been done so many times. I'm glad you thought I managed to bring some "new" (as far as YT is concerned) stuff to the table :)
During my last linguistics class of the semester my professor just went on a massive rant about how much he hates Whorf. It was great.
Our astonishment that a language doesn't have numbers (and that a society has no concept of counting*) shows just how intertwined numbers and amount are for most languages. Yet one could conceive of a way to practically refer to amounts without number: "we ate a *whole* chicken", "you drank *less* than me", "we live *far* away", "there are *few* taxis", "I don't have *enough* money", and "there are *a lot* of kebab shops round here". Are numbers essential for language? Or a primitive component as opposed to a developed one?
*I guess where the second video is going and know what side I'm on.
I guess for a tribal people a less concrete way to refer to amount can work, but as society as we know it it kinda becomes necessary. How do you pay for said Taxi? With less than a shoe, more than a kebab?
As you said it just shows how math and numbers are heavily intertwined with our way of life. They even have existential importance like with budgeting. You have to be able to calculate or at least approximate if a purchase will cause an existential danger to you your family.
@@Reflox1 The video mentioned they had trouble bartering with outside merchants. I'm guessing they traded items either via one-to-one swapping if they were roughly equal in value (e.g. trade 5 apples for 5 oranges by exchanging an apple for an orange 5 times). If the items were not equal in value (e.g. a fish might be worth four potatoes) they probably went on a pile-vs-pile gut-feeling estimation of value. Is this pile of fishes equal in value to that pile of potatoes? If not, ask for more potatoes.
This system would break apart if trading in large bulk, such as a merchant trying to buy off produce of an entire village, or if payment is deferred - they would have to think abstractly of a pile of potatoes they'll see in a week that would be of equal worth to a pile of fishes they have in front of them.
As I recall, the Piraha don't even have a lot of words to describe various amounts.
You forgot a great example in recipes, it's still common to measure "eyeballed" amounts. A pinch, a handful, a bite, a thumb, a fist-sized chunk...
All of those, rough amounts that serve just as well as obsessively dosing weight or volume.
hey this is a great video. Pirahã is a very interesting language, and the Pirahã people, all things considered, seem like a very nice and lovely people who we can all learn a lot from. Daniel Everett is also q a important linguist for his research on other stuff besides Pirahã too, and he deserves a lot of recognition
however, it is mildly frustrating that every discussion of Pirahã really necessitates a deep discussion about Everett himself, and I gotta be honest man he is somewhat of a shady figure. Even putting aside his claim that pirahaen culture caused him to become disillusioned with christianity which caused his wife to divorce him and his children to disown him (wtf), his claims about the language itself should also be held to some scrutiny
the one that sticks out to me most is that raspberry phoneme that you mentioned. Everett's 1982 paper identified [ Į̃ ] as a rare phone that is not found in any other language -- later research identifies it as a rarely-spoken allophone of /g/. On the other hand, the [t͡ʙ̥] phone everyone talks about is so shrouded in mystery. As far as I can tell, Everett mentioned it first in an interview in 2004. He has claimed that /t͡ʙ̥/ is phonemic in Wari' and that it entered Pirahã via loanwords brought into Pirahã society by Wari' people marrying into their villages, but even in Wari' [t͡ʙ̥] is marginally phonemic at best and only in some dialects. Everett later claims that pirahaen people stopped using [t͡ʙ̥], at least in front of foreigners, because they got embarrassed by other brazilians making fun of the weird sound. After that, mentions of [t͡ʙ̥] in Pirahã are super rare, and like in 2021 Everett did a reddit ama (lmao) where he walked back [t͡ʙ̥]'s existence in Pirahã entirely, and then coincidentally ignored all follow up questions on how he had a whole theory about it in the first place
It's entirely possible that all the huge gaps in this story are just gaps in my access to the body of research (another reason to abolish publishing companies btw), but overall I think it's worth examining all work into Pirahã phonology much more closely
Abolish publishing companies? Why?
@@1Thunderfire Watch the video "Should Knowledge Be Free" by Medlife Crisis (about 20min long).
It explains how academic publishing actively hinders research. Academics submit papers without being paid, they review the submissions without being paid, then they buy the journals at steep prices. Since academics are mostly funded by public universities, the taxpayer is paying twice for the private publishing industry.
The only benefit which journals provide is hosting the PDFs, which Arxiv and SciHub do for free.
Some of these are fair concerns, but not sure what his family life and religious conviction has to do with anything.
Especially considering the situation he describes is extremely common.
@@LowestofheDead You're paying for the prereview and editing by the editors, and the copy-editing by the copyeditors, and possibly art and layout and printing.
@@LoisoPondohva Well because it gives him a pretty personal involvement in the whole thing, which regardless of everything makes him less trust worthy.
I think a good example is color. Most people don't know the difference between cyan, azure, and blue, and considering them just lighter and darker blue, despite the fact that they are completely different hues the same distance red, orange, and yellow are from each other. What makes this interesting is the fact that Europeans didn't differentiate red and orange until they named the color after the fruit in the same way.
I wonder what would happen if we used RGB values in our language instead of color names. So an apple is "150 0 0-like".
@@sycration Thank you, you just gave me an idea for my artificial robot species and their language
Everett: "These people can't count, and none of you are going to walk into the jungle and prove me wrong."
Some future linguist: "Hold my beer".
Cunningham's Law, but in the Amazon.
Unfortunately not gonna happen. The tribe got "developed" out of their culture and they're all learning Portuguese
@@uchuuseijinwhy not just use Portuguese numbers within their own native language? Many other languages have done similar
@@kimarna well as my last comment implied they're on their way to using Portuguese everything
Daniel Everett's son, Caleb Everett, grew up with the Piraha. Caleb is now a linguist who wrote a book on numeracy and innumeracy. But as far as I know, he doesn't offer any evidence contrary to that of his father on this issue. Though the two seem to disagree on the theory of linguistic relativity.
I feel like the biggest problem is that the Pirahã are sample size of 1. I feel like you need other communities with different cultures, different histories and different languages but with the same feature of having no numbers and test it that way. otherwise, any generalization is just conjectural.
On the face of it a criticism that someone's paper is eurocentric seems odd, if the key claim in that paper is that the language one speaks will unavoidably dictate the concepts available for expressing oneself!
"I think everyone's expression is necessarily limited by their linguistic background."
"That's a very blinkered thing to say! Is it because you have a euro-linguistic background?"
"Right! You're getting it!"
"What? That was meant to be a criticism!"
😄
@@a.wadderphiltyr1559 just like calling someone Hitler... Hmm, maybe the world would be a better place without Europeans!
Lol you dont know what Eurocentrism means
Brazilian here, i'm very happy for being able to watch a video of yours on the native languages of my country, so thanks! :)
For topics like this, I am CONVINCED we need a longer format for you videos.
I think it's worth noting that Everett (at least in 'Don't Sleep, there are Snakes') concludes that the Pirahã gave up, not because the couldn't do it, but that they eventually figured out they didn't want to do it. That is, they concluded counting would breach what it is to be Pirahã.
I went into the whole drama expecting to dislike both sides, but I came out pretty sympathetic to Everett's work. I've read many anthropologists and missionaries who purport they have rapport with a culture which they clearly do not have. Everett didn't strike me this way -- there's the sort of humility to his interpretations which I tend to associate with actual understanding. He could be wrong of course, and I could be wrong about my evaluation of him, but his work is definitely worth reading.
Yeah, a similar story to that comes from when he tried to teach them how to build canoes instead of buying them from traders. They came to the conclusion that "The Pirahã don't build canoes"
That's interesting. In a way, it's kinda like when some minorities deliberately avoid certain behaviors or restrict themselves in whatever manner because those behaviors or manners are "(rich) white people" things
Your sick voice still sounds very good and soothing
thanks bestie
0:09 Spoiler Alert
In a ironic twist, Pirahã's way of knowing truth influenced Daniel to be an atheist 😅
shhhh spoilers for part 2 🤭
haha based
As someone who doesn't come from linguistics, Pinkers criticism is kinda weird. To me it really just sounds like "What you said goes against my beliefs and you should be chastised for that." It's not even really dancing around the issue, it's an ideological rebuke. Especially considering that he holds Chomsky in high regard as one of his greatest influences.
You are saying someone should be chastised for believing people who disagree with them should be chastised. Hypocrisy?
@@BewareTheCarpenter
Did I say he should be chastised? No, I did not. To me the criticism seems to be void because I don't follow Chomsky's ideas and don't set them as the gold standard. That's why it's weird to me and holds no value.
the left be like that
The right be applauding and entrhonizing a guy who thinks converting and imposing his own believes on others just bc they are in a more vulnerable position is OK and his words truth
Hey I'm a linguist and we don't give any credit to Everett, 1. Bc its a 1-only source and 2. Bc of his ideological and economical interests to push his ideas despite scholar evidence. He's just a delusional pro-colonialism guy with 0 scientific respect 🤷🏽♂️
I knew Chomsky because of his political activism, and I had no idea he was a linguist until very recently. When I saw him cited for the first time I got surprised and quickly googled to see if it was the same I was thinking about! haha
Dude should have stuck to linguistics imo.
@@IkeOkerekeNews Weird thing to say, I wonder if you object him speaking up against the Vietnam war, imperialism in general, the numerous unjustified atrocities being committed in order to keep benefiting from exploiting the periphery of capitalism, bringing to attention of the people how media aligns with those interests and actions, or what?
I find his political work to be of more relevance and importance than his linguistic one, he's an institution all by himself.
Great video, I only wish there was a bit more of a dive into what the Pirahã actually use when talking about amounts (unless that’s being saved for part 2)
I have a family of conlangs that I’ve been working on for a while, and their proto-lang basically works like this. In one branch of the family, they developed number words based off of their body parts (1 is the same as thumb, 2 is same as pointer finger, etc) and in the other branch they just borrowed all of their number words. So even though they were very closely related their numbers were completely unrelated and even different bases (base 6 to base 16)
I know this is a linguistics channel, but I recommend talking about Piraha and their view of religion briefly as well because to me it was super interesting and unique. Also the phonology is insane
i was a cs major but i've always been fascinated by linguistics so a lot of the electives i took in university were anthropology and linguistics. almost a decade later and i still think about a class that i took called "language, culture, and anthropology" where we spent a couple weeks on the piraha and everett. it absolutely changed my life. i remember having worked at my retail job all day and then finally cracking open "don't sleep there are snakes" after getting home and having all of the fatigue drain from my body. the me who started that class and the me who ended it are two completely different human beings.
I think we might be the same person lol. I'm also a CS major who took Language, Culture, and Anthropology based around Don't Sleep There are Snakes, however, I just finished the class this semester. Where did you go to school if I might ask?
i enjoyed this comment
@@zefmgamer3843 That's awesome! You're getting like a huge chunk of the spectrum of human communication with that mix of studies haha. I took that class at UTSA several years ago. The professor was a very nice and brilliant lady but she made my anxious sophomore ass read the c-word out loud during class and I was scared of her for the rest of the semester.
@@Fottrel The c-word is cunt?
@@gabor6259 yep! i had kind of a sheltered upbringing. i was raised in a very conservative christian family in rural south texas and was homeschooled for several years. i didn't swear until I was 14-15 and took that class when I was 18. plus it's a bit more of an uncommon and negative word in my local dialect than it is in other english dialects. i said "c-word" instead of the actual word in my comment because i'm paranoid about how youtube treats messages with more "serious" swearing haha
I love high quality videos about linguistics which means that I love this channel
While I wouldn't really be surprised if the challenge of learning Portuguese numbers in the end turns out to just stem from some incompatibility between languages, or poor methods of teaching on Everett's part, at the same time, I also do not think it's such a wild idea for a language to lack discrete numbers, in the sense of a series of ordered terms with which to identify the counts of things in increasing magnitude.
We are cognitively capable of recognizing the precise quantity of about 7 or so objects without counting, so the whole idea of numbers would only really be useful if you need to keep track of precise counts of things that routinely exceed that, or if you have situations in which you have to relay the count of things without the ability to just show the corresponding count in some direct way. So for the purposes of these people, the existence of numbers in their language might just not be such a necessity.
Lingustics drama LETS GOOOOOO. I hope you do a video on the Uralic-Altaic language family dispute in the future. That has a lot to unpack too.
Dang, it never really would have occurred to me that languages have no concept of adding things together in the way that we do
ahhhhhh im so excited for the next video i love this channel
Whatever else you want to say about Everett, 'Don't Sleep There Are Snakes' is one of the most interesting books I have ever read, and it sparked my interest in linguists. Even if thinking critically about it is essential (as is the case with anything really), I highly recommend it to anyone with even a casual interest in linguistics or anthropology.
I love this series!!! Great work 👏👏👏👏👏 Thumbs up!
Calling an ability to count eurocentric is eurocentric, because every civilisation (at least every I'm aware of) was capable to do that.
Now in this retarded postmodern society everything that's not politicaly correct is automaticaly shunned and called -ist, -phobe. It's f*cking ridiculous.
This Carbon Neutral claim , if based on carbon offsets most likely is false, as many carbon offset projects dont save any carbon at all
Do not throw shit to a brand until you are completely sure they deserve it.
@@maclinkastex3059 not throwing shit at them, just saying that the concept of carbon offsets rarely works out, and that this is something to be aware of. Im not accusing Hello Fresh of concously trying to decieve us
@@I-Maser Ok, I misunderstood what you were saying.
This is awesome! I read Everett's book more than 10 years ago before I knew anything about Chomsky or linguistics. And was thoroughly confused. Have slowly learned things over the years, but so helpful to have things laid out
I have a seminar on linguistic typology this semester and a few weeks ago there was a presentation on Everett, but it didn't really get into any kind of counter-arguments so I'm very excited for part 2!
Wow, over the last couple weeks I have found your channel and a couple other ones with AMAZING content and small sub counts. Thanks for a great video!
i predicted this was gonna be about pirahã from the title alone, such a fascinating language
Looking forward to the linguistics drama! It is the absolute best! I'm going to get the melons! So excited!
This is a great overview.
I Really Enjoy Your Videos! :D
cant wait to read the comments of angry Christian
sounds fine to me as long as you don’t have to do algebra, which i can’t imagine was very important for them at the time. in fact they might be better at some stuff. i’ve tried to train myself to see quantities without having to count and it makes stuff way faster, it’s like that rain-man trick. it makes “counting” way faster if you don’t assign actual numbers to items but just look at the whole quantity and compare it to another one.
The fact that the tribesmen asked him to teach them how to count shows that they wanted to learn. As such, their failure to do so can't be blamed on any prejudice of the man trying to teach them as if his background were at fault.
Can’t wait for part tw- ... I hope the next part comes out shortly... I think it will be good to be watching another of this?
you are my new favorite channel on yt
Oooh the can of worms you've opened with this video! Pirahã, Sapir(-Whorf), Chomsky..........really looking forward to the next part!
I really love how Everett's missionary efforts completely backfired, and made him an atheist :)
Haven't watched the video yet, but I'm gonna take a wild guess and say that this video is about the Piraha. I heard about them in a linguistics class once, and they way they essentially couldn't remember the number of things they were shown when said things were removed was pretty interesting to me.
20 seconds in and it seems I'm right about the video topic lol. Neat to hear how their name is properly pronounced, we said it quite differently in my class.
Bingo!
I mean, that makes sense, right? Most people think in words, and if you don't have words to describe something, it is much harder to remember.
But why call it Eurocentric? Are you telling me that Arabs, Japanese, Chinese, Indonesians, Māori, Zulus, Igbos, Eskimos, Comanche and Aztecs, virtually literally every single other people group on the planet don’t have the concept of maths and numbers?
Because he is using a Eurocentric view of the world "We civilized - they barbaric" Because they can't understand xyz concept.
He's even going out to "civilize" The tribes in the European missionary fashion By making them Christian.
Nothing to be touchy about. HIS view is Eurocentric because he is from Europe. Not from Arabia, Japanese, Whatever.
@@CountingStars333 Yeah lol if a Japanese linguist said the exact same thing, he'd be "Japanocentric" then because he compares the Piraha language to the one he knows best. Still stupid argument. Piraha is the exception when it comes to ALL languages, not just compared to European ones.
@@CountingStars333 I wasn't referring to that though. I meant why call the concept of numbers eurocentric as I believe he does. If you think that only Europeans have a concept of civilized peoples and barbarians that is completely untrue. The Chinese built their entire identity on being the only civilized reference point for all Asian peoples.
'we civilized, they barbaric' is not just an European view of the world, every other culture thinks like this too lol, good try at trying to demonize Europeans though
You really are one of my most favorite channels about languages. I wish you the best in getting more subs since you really deserve more views. I find your explanations clear and concise. Btw, is it a lot of work to draw for these videos?
Omg I love you and I love Pirahã!
Thank you so much for posting this fascinating video! In regards to the Wolfian theory, I wonder if you would be interested in another study. I was reading a journal on the development of gender identity between Bilingual and Monolingual Students in Greek and Albanian and I kept trying to remember the name of the Wholfian theory, but was unable to, hahahaha! Your video helped me recall that and gave me a relaxing morning. Thanks!
Hilariously Everett actually became an atheist after his time with the Piraha so he was the one converted in the end.
Congrats on your pronunciation of Pirahã!
oooh I had to write a paper about the everett-chomsky debacle in uni. i knew the material was pretty pro-everett, but I still ended up hating chomsky because of it. well, that and all the genocide denial.
I thought that another way language can change perception was perception of color - it can be harder to differentiate shades your language doesn't have seperate words for
Counting isn't Eurocentric. It isn't a European idea. We use numerals that come from India.
I guess the idea is, it's not a european idea, but it's an idea that europeans follow, and it's an idea that everett would have been familiar with. Not counting would have been more of a problem.
It can't be Eurocentric since nearly every language counts in some way. Maybe not in the way we do (Babylonians had a base of 6, the Japanese go up to 10,000 in the way the Europeans go up to 1,000), but there was counting in the Aztec culture, Chinese culture, Middle-Eastern culture, Indian culture virtually as soon as writing popped up. It's not at all right to say it's Eurocentric, it's just that Europeans use it, but not everything that Europeans use is automatically Eurocentric.
Those people calling everything eurocentric are so far up their own a-- that they ironically turn out to be incredibly racist themselves. They love to claim that things like modern science and medicine are eurocentric concepts, because as we all know, those savag- uhm, I mean, noble POC have of course never contributed anything of significance to either field (completely ignoring reality). The only difference between their ideology and that of actual, honest to god racists is the conclusion they draw at the end.
What do Indian numerals have to do with it? As if people can't count without writing the numbers. It isn't a European idea, but neither is it an Indian one.
@@StKozlovsky I was just pointing to a clear demonstration of how it really wasn't European. Of course counting existed before hand. Roman numerals existed anyways, Europeans weren't tunable to create counting systems.
i did a presentation on these guys for my anthropology class last year!!
With only one to two teachers there is also the possibility they just have terrible teachers.
Need a better sample size.
Though if it does depend on teacher, it would be interesting what works and what fails miserably.
Excited for the Chomsky video. He has a pretty big influence on the field on linguistics but I've never read his work
Nice one!
Isn't Eurocentrism itself an expression of Linguistic Relativity as the researcher is doomed to think of other cultures in terms of concepts created in Average Standard European paradigms? Even though trying to develop and use nonsubjective methodology...
Kinda joking around but doesn't it make a little bit sense?
5:50 reading this felt like the Sokal paper all over again
That was a bit of a cliff-hanger. Looking forward to your follow up on that Chomsky thing. I guess that involves delving into linguistic relativism and universal grammar.
Oh, Chomsky. The guy who once said something smart about corporate media's motivations, and many young leftist now view him as some sort of intellectual leader... to be fair, mostly because he's old, speaks very slowly and silently and therefore hard to understand, but it FEELS smart... even though most of his ideas and politics are absolutely insane from the defense of Pol Pot to blaming the West for Russia attacking Ukraine and arguing Ukraine should just give up "to save more lives".
chomsky's politics are shit, to say the least. in the field of linguistics, though, he plays a similar role to einstein. just as you cannot have modern physics without einstein, you cannot have modern linguistics without chomsky. as garbage as his other opinions might be, people listen when he talks about language
@@powerLien Ok to be fair I don't know much about his linguistics work, only his politics which is what most people (at least in my circle) know him for.
@@19Szabolcs91 Then you shouldn't judge his linguistic opinions by his political ones. Very few linguists (although I've met one or two) would deny that Chomsky is a great linguist, and even they agree that he revolutionized the field and made people think about language in new ways.
His views on world politics have, regrettably, always been weird and mostly wrong, though I don't know if he's just as wrong about his own country.
1:00 good one.
Btw hi from Brazil!
People the modern days often take for granted the concept of zero and negative numbers and think it would be incredible obvious to come up with them not realizing only a few centuries ago it would be incomprehensible concepts to anyone in any section of the world without mathetical development. So I would believe that it is not the shallow conclusion is that they are stubborn and stupid to be taught, but rather the worldview of tribal, classical society and modern/Western worldview have drifted so far apart that they are completely disparate. Thus it is not a mere problem of linguistic relativity. If the Pirahã was somehow forced to submit to modern industrial world (often by colonialism) only then they would need to invent new words to adapt and survive.
I mean, someone HAD to come up with the concept of numbers at some early point in human history so I find it difficult to believe the Pirahã literally can't learn it. We definitely need further research on this.
By the way, given they do understand the concept of two sets having the same amount of elements, we should send a logician to teach them the mathematical construction of numbers from set theory, which might help them understand (they would need the concepts of recursion and emptiness).
If it's true, it's more likely that it's simply very difficult to teach to adults, in the same way I struggle to recognise any non-english sounds (like the difference between a and ä), whereas young children being taught would pick it up very quickly.
@nashatbi Maybe counting as a verbal act is funny to them because they count using hand signs or something? They might be like "lol this guy saying his fingers out loud in his language and reaching only [mental picture of 10] and starting over saying numbers with a new number--- how slow and silly!"
Many cultures have a "lost art" of expressing precise high numbers non verbally, like an abacus made of finger positions.
In a 1494 Italian book called Summa de arithmetica, there's an image for how to sign numbers with your hands up to 9999
There's also Korean chisanbop/fingermath, which lets you count to 99 on your fingers but also had methods for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division
In Papua New Guinea, there is a group that uses a base 27 number system where they count on their eyes and ears lol
I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't feel a need to name numbers because they just think of the finger touching the finger segment
W Daniel Everett for trying to learn their language and convert them tbh
Great questions and observations about how language may or may not change our perspective of the world.
You brought in the examples of how we perceive time and counting, to add to this conversation, I thought about a different concept that is maybe easier to trace its linguistics and have had some research on that. But... colors.
Every culture have names for colors, some have more names and some have less. There is a famous case where Japan language didn't have the same distinction as ours for green and blue (example, green apples were called blue apples because the limits of each color were different).
Anyway, there is a long debate about it. Although we can't jump to conclusions that "japan doesn't understand green". It is absurd, they perceive green, but they just didn't have a word for it (and everything that comes along with it). There are some studies that got some interesting results when people had a larger vocabulary for colors, they could differentiate better and quicker than people who hadn't. Although, this is more of people getting more used to the differences and learning/practicing rather than change their perception/experience of the world.
Anyway, I just thinks those studies add to the conversation and have quite a lot of discussion on the subject.
Not actually about a specific language but on the topic of colours, but I've always been fascinated how brown is basically, dark orange, like how we have blue and dark blue, but since we have the word 'brown', we don't really think 'dark orange'? At least I think that the concept of dark orange is pretty weird for me, even if you go to a colour wheel and show me that brown is a dark orange, I'll still think that 'dark orange' is wrong and 'brown' is right, it's like brown is a whole other concept, to me at least.
@@hea1655 That is quite interesting. I never thought of it that way.
But I have been fascinated by colors that exists but aren't on the rainbow (like brown, pink and gray).
And, for me, as a mathematician and musician, I thought of an analogy with these colors (that are a mixture of, example, pink=red+whote). So, maybe, the rainbow colors are like perfect waves with every frequency. But those who are combinations of colors are just like chords in music. When you get a mixture of waves creating a new wave with its own frequency but it is not perfectly sinoidal, it is a mixture of 2 or more (like Fourier's Transformation)
I haven't seen anyone explaining it like that. I don't have anything to support, not even the knowledge to talk about how light behaves... But I thought it was an interesting idea.
(I have read some article about these colors that are not in the rainbow, don't recall what they said, but there are people looking at it)
(I just remember light doesn't interfere with each other, but maybe they are talking about when light "collide" from different directions, not about light interference on the same direction. Because, if so, how do we have new colors? Wait.... Nevermind, I think while I thought about it I debunked my analogy. There is red light and all other lights in different intensities,but our brain that interprets as pink. The lightwaves does not interfere with each other like soundwaves. Anyway, it is a cool.observation I never had. It was a time where I was looking at all the similarities in both sound and vision, but there are fundamental differences like this one)
hey! you have discovered the KEY feature of pinker!
when i read the title i knew it’d be the pirahã
Ok but why not explain the actual language and how they get past the issue of conveying quantities to other people? Like "bring me 3 apples"
Could it be that they simply do not make requests or give commands in that way, but have a word for "enough" when they see what they want?
Gotta love the complete lack of self awareness saying "Eurocentrism is not an argument" literally less than 30 seconds after calling a guy racist as if that is an argument.
what are you on about. i say whorf has "racist vibes" to set up the other side of the argument. i happen to agree here, whorf writes kind of racist-ly. the point, if you watch the video, is that these things can be true and still not relevant. i did not dismiss whorf's claims on the basis of his being racist, i did so on the basis of his being wrong.
@kklein Poisoning the well is worse than making a logical fallacy btw
lmao
toki pona speakers be like:
A simple way to test adding without numbers is have a group of piles of things, point to two of them, and ask which pile has as many as the two combined. Then you ask how they would describe the specific piles and their relationships. Only if they can't answer that last question do you introduce a foreign concept of numbers.
Unary is the easiest way to count initially, so you really should use that before moving to decimal, dozenal, or seximal.
"How many children do you have?"
*"Yes."* 😂
nice music !!
04:16
Remember the "Wine-dark Sea". That was probably the best way Homer had to describe the Sea, because Ancient Greek didn't have the word Blue.
Homer was comparing the sea to the wine in a vat trampled upon by foot-pressers as is still the custom in many villages : it is nearly black and it is also the color of the Black Sea’s waters, hence its name. There were words to denote blue, since very precise varieties of blue were isolated and obligatory for specific uses in art and architecture, but by then the Greek vocabulary was disunited and each shade of blue had a specific term. They just divided the color spectrum in different broad categories or primary colors.
The actual paper "Number as a cognitive technology: Evidence from Pirahã language and cognition" reports that the Piraha can't count. From the discussion: "Do the Pirahã then possess mental representations of the cardinalities of large sets? We do not believe that our experiments show evidence supporting this hypothesis." "large sets" here is more than 4, which is over the limit of subitizing. That is, normal people also don't count groups of 4 or 5. They can see immediately if two groups have the same number. Only larger sets require actual counting, and Piraha fail on those. See "Orthogonal Match" in Figure 2.
I know it's kind of a nitpick, but I always feel like portraying it as if the piraha people "can't count" goes too far in the direction of sensationalizing and dehumanizing them for the sake of making a generic point about the novelty of their language. I mean, a cuttlefish can count; these people can tell the difference between 3 objects and 4 even if they don't have particular words for it. I think we owe the piraha tribe the slight extra effort of saying they "don't have numbers" if we're going to come into their lives and study them. It's not like that isn't crazy enough as it is, from the Western perspective (or almost any perspective).
That's not like a moral criticism of the video lol just a thought I've had watching a bunch of videos about piraha before
The only comment I'd make, is a kinda existential one, if they may not have the abstractions necessary to comprehend exact quantities, what abstractions could I lack, that others speakers don't. And since, I wouldn't comprehend that, technically I could never know what is that I don't understand.
And that scares me
0:40 the LINGUOLABIAL trill is a raspberry but this is close enough
When is the continuation coming?
I recommend the book "Alex's Adventures in Numberland". He talks about a tribe that could only count to three, but they also don't mean exactly one, two or three: When they say "two" they mean "around two". He paired this with a study that suggested that even western children start out counting something like this, until they're eventually taught to treat numbers as exact.
i vote for more videos about drama and disagreements amongst linguists
Linguistic relativity (that how/what people think, is coloured by ones language) is true, and firmly scientifically proven. Regardless of how right or wrong Whorf's ideas about it, or the Hopi, was. In countless examples and instances, in comparing countless different languages and speakers thereof …including some instances, that have been talked about, on this very channel! Linguistic *_determinism,_* (that thought is determined by language) however, has been debunked.
Language is not categorized as "more complex" or "less complex", by thinking that having a concept of numbers is a crucial or important part of language, we're already engaging in ethnocentrism (believing one's culture is the only right way of looking at the world). The piranhas don't have a concept for numbers because they don't need it in their environment. They do a lot of fishing and measure the amounts of food (fish) in approximate ratios (how big or small the fish is). Them having no concept of numbers doesn't make their language any less complex.
-a guy who's studying anthropology
To quote Zuko from The Last Airbender when reading an important scroll: "Wait, where is the rest of it?????"
loved for the avatar reference
Why do we always end up fighting when there's something different to be discovered?
4:31 I cannot comprehend how you distinguish. Isn"t the way you focus upon, progress & abstract information the integral & indivisible base of experiencing?
nice video! i must question why the text is a little jumpy and stuttery at around 3:10 , it seems to just wiggle around on the screen
sometimes the editing just goes a bit goofy
@@kklein fair nuff! i've been there, video editing sometimes just scrimbles out like that
how do you see the difference between "concept of amount", as you mention in 4:22, and counting?
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they could tell that the number of dots in each set is the same, but couldn't say what that number actually is
Humans have an innate ability called subitisation that lets you know how many dots there are here: ●●●●● without counting them up. They know what 5 of something is, they just don't have a word that specifically means 5, allegedly.
Imagine knowing that two events were both in the past, but can't express WHEN they took place That's the best analogy I can come up with.
You had the based and cringe backwards in the beginning, it’s ok it happens!
Pogklein
Yes! Let’s explore the work of Noam Chomsky.
Pog
How did they talk to them? I feel like abstract concepts would be very difficult to convey if there's no translation available for their language
It is possible to learn a language through only exposure. Everyone does it once, when he is a little child. I am conversational in Spanish from just being in school with nearly all Mexican and Guatemalan kids. I never took a Spanish class.
I remember this from philosophy class in high school,