We live in a world that is understood through numbers. We think in numbers. We create with numbers. We move with numbers. We are numbers. And with that said, we could ask ourselves: do numbers really exist? From time immemorial, daily life in our civilization has been based on the ability to count and measure in different units. In the past, we counted the number of cattle we possessed, the number of fruits we gathered, the stars of the constellations and how many moons it took to get from one place to another. Nowadays, we identify ourselves with numerical sequences, we measure an hour in sixty minutes, which in turn is made up of three thousand six hundred seconds, we pay in different monetary units for goods and services and we know if something is scarce or abundant because we have the ability to distinguish an element in an isolated way and analyze the number of times it appears in an environment. It would simply be impossible to understand our reality without numbers. Or is this really the case? The truth is that there are civilizations whose languages do not include numbers per se, and thus they interpret reality in a different way, which may lead us to question whether or not the ability to count, understood as the perception of different elements that can be conceptually grouped together, is an inherently human trait, or if it is an ability that we acquire through language.
The civilizations that have led us to debate this matter are located in the Amazon. We are specifically referring to the Pirahã tribe, made up of fewer than 400 people, who live on the banks of the Maici River, a tributary of the Amazon River. They call themselves the “straight heads” (as opposed to foreigners, to whom they refer as “crooked heads”) and they essentially live off fishing and agriculture. They are considered a seminomadic tribe because when the rainy season comes, they have to migrate inland to survive. As in almost all languages of the most remote civilizations, the Híaitíihi (as they are called in their native language), speak a language that combines whistles, murmurs and shouting, all of which have a specific meaning. Among their most striking traits are the lack of collective nouns or color terms, the lack of words to define abstract concepts, the inexistence of subordinate clauses or of past verb tenses and, of course, the anumeric nature of their language. Although it is true that some researchers believe this tribe has words to express “one unit”, “two units” or “five units”, their use is limited to elements that are easily associated with these amounts, such as “five fingers on a hand”, “two eyes, hands, legs, etc.”, or “one sun”, and thus it cannot be claimed that they consciously know how to count in the way numeric civilizations do. The truth is that, although these words exist, they are very rarely used, since the Pirahã speakers use two specific terms to vaguely refer to little/small and much/large. They do not distinguish between singular and plural, and thus, given the functions of these two words, it would be impossible to differentiate the concept of “a big fish” from “many little fish”. This is a mystery that may be resolved by future research.
Anthropologist Daniel Everett lived among the tribe for more than 25 years, along with his wife and children. In an attempt to help them improve their trade relations with other civilizations, Everett tried to teach them to count, but after eight months of failed attempts, he was never able to get the locals to be able to count more than three elements or perform simple mathematical operations, such as adding one plus one or one plus three. Of course, if the Pirahã people have grown up communicating without using amounts, dates or hours, how could it be easy for them to count or add when, for them, the concepts of expressing reality in numbers, or hypothesizing with them, don’t exist? This, in turn, is reflected by their absolute empiricist philosophy. When Everett asked them if they believed in a god, and how they thought the world had been created, they responded by saying something like “everything is the same”, meaning nothing changes and, therefore, nothing was created. This line of thought is logical and reflects a civilization that speaks a language in which the past does not exist. How could we reflect on something that we can’t even name?
The second tribe located in the Amazon is that of the Wuy Jugu people, although they are better known by the name their enemies gave them: Munduruku (which means red ants, in reference to their style of attacking in large numbers). This tribe lives from agriculture, fishing, hunting and gathering wild animals and plants, as well as from the production of arts and crafts. Like the Pirahã, numbers do not exist in this civilization either, although there are words to vaguely express amounts of elements in groups, such as “a pair” or “half a dozen”. However, when they were asked to participate in mathematical experiments, they showed similar abilities to those of the other tribe, which seems to confirm the theory that the concepts of singular, plural, exact numbers and other mathematical realities are learned through language. It is noteworthy to mention that members of both tribes show normal cognitive development and have no trouble relating to their environment. They simply live in a world that does not require them to count or measure with the same precision as other predominant civilizations. Interestingly, some of the members of the Munduruku tribe have had contact with the Portuguese language spoken in Brazil and, when they speak it, they are able to include small numbers in their reasoning, but they are not able to reproduce the same concepts in their native language, a fact which supports this argument.
Without a doubt, if we want to continue to learn about other ways of understanding the world through the languages of its inhabitants, it will be necessary to continue to research and relate to these fascinating and unique cultures.
Image reference: https://wallpapers.com/wallpapers/golden-lottery-balls-m8mmod9w25zehjcv.html
