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+--- Thread: What happens when language has no words for numbers? (Anumeric people community) (/thread-5297.html)
What happens when language has no words for numbers? (Anumeric people community) - C C - May 4, 2018
http://theconversation.com/anumeric-people-what-happens-when-a-language-has-no-words-for-numbers-75828
EXCERPT: . . . This and many other experiments have converged upon a simple conclusion: When people do not have number words, they struggle to make quantitative distinctions that probably seem natural to someone like you or me. While only a small portion of the world’s languages are anumeric or nearly anumeric, they demonstrate that number words are not a human universal.
It is worth stressing that these anumeric people are cognitively normal, well-adapted to the environs they have dominated for centuries. [...] Yet numberless people struggle with tasks that require precise discrimination between quantities. Perhaps this should be unsurprising. After all, without counting, how can someone tell whether there are, say, seven or eight coconuts in a tree? Such seemingly straightforward distinctions become blurry through numberless eyes.
[...] Cultures without numbers also offer insight into the cognitive influence of particular numeric traditions. Consider what time it is. Your day is ruled by minutes and seconds, but these entities are not real in any physical sense and are nonexistent to numberless people. Minutes and seconds are the verbal and written vestiges of an uncommon base-60 number system used in Mesopotamia millennia ago. They reside in our minds, numerical artifacts that not all humans inherit conceptually...
MORE: http://theconversation.com/anumeric-people-what-happens-when-a-language-has-no-words-for-numbers-75828