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Leviathan Song posted:That seems hard to believe. Even within a hunter gatherer society phrases like go grab 5 fishing nets or 6 bowls would be pretty useful. People were definitely using fingers and tally marks way before agriculture so it seems like a pretty big leap that they didn't have any verbal way to count. I guess if you can just hold up fingers you never need a word for number. But yeah at some point it's going to be annoying if you have to drop what youre doing to hold up 8 fingers.
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Mar 7, 2024 22:28
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"One for me and one for my wife and one for my brother" communicates how many you want without having a word for "three" stack three up and say "I want these" communicates you want three there is a difference between a concept and having a consistent word for a thing
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Mar 7, 2024 22:29
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Leperflesh posted:"One for me and one for my wife and one for my brother" communicates how many you want without having a word for "three" Pre-agricultural cultures had words for numbers, we know this. For example 3 is 'kolme' in Finnish and 'kolma' in related Moksha, Ugric languages separated by thousands of years and thousands of kilometers.  IMO people frequently underestimate how intelligent non-agricultural peoples are, and I think it stems from 19th century racism and trying to rationalise the spread of "progress" and "enlightenment" done by colonial empires. We ought to avoid it. Nenonen fucked around with this message at 22:48 on Mar 7, 2024 |
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Mar 7, 2024 22:42
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Cactus Ghost posted:iirc the first solid evidence we have of counting comes after agriculture. it may just be that without a surplus to trade with a nonfamily outgroup, numbers aren't necessary. there's "enough" and "not enough" and thats... enough. quote:One of the first was the apparent lack of counting and numbers. At first I thought that the Pirahăs had the numbers one, two, and “many,” a common enough system around the world. But I realized that what I and previous workers thought were numbers were only relative quantities. I began to notice this when the Pirahăs asked me when the plane was coming again, a question they enjoy asking, I eventually realized, because they find it nearly magical that I seem to know the day that the plane is arriving. Anyone who’s interested, I’m begging you to at least get this book from your library Anne Whateley fucked around with this message at 22:50 on Mar 7, 2024 |
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Mar 7, 2024 22:45
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i like nice words
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Anne Whateley posted:Anyone who’s interested, I’m begging you to at least get this book from your library Nah, I'm good
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Mar 7, 2024 22:48
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Nenonen posted:Pre-agricultural cultures had words for numbers, we know this. For example 3 is 'kolme' in Finnish and 'kolma' in related Moksha, Ugric languages separated by thousands of years and thousands of kilometers. I'm neither agreeing nor disagreeing with you, but weren't the Uralic languages much more of a geographic continuum until like the 1200s? Slavic languages don't take over till relatively late.
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Mar 7, 2024 22:54
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Leperflesh posted:"One for me and one for my wife and one for my brother" communicates how many you want without having a word for "three" True, but you have no real way to know whether they had a word for those things or any other things. Maybe they had distinct words for berry and root or maybe they talked about plant feet and plant eggs or maybe they just pointed. It's not like we have written language predating agriculture. One of the earliest spoken proto languages that we have a decent grasp of, proto Indo European, also post-dates agriculture. It contains distinct words for numbers up to at least 100. If they definitely had 100 in 4000 BC then we don't really know if they just had enough and not enough in 12000 BC or they really only went to 10 or some tribe had a word for a trillion. As far back as we've been able to look they had numbers so they probably had numbers before that.
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Mar 7, 2024 23:00
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fascinating stuff. would make a great gbs thread
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Mar 7, 2024 23:04
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Nenonen posted:Pre-agricultural cultures had words for numbers, we know this. For example 3 is 'kolme' in Finnish and 'kolma' in related Moksha, Ugric languages separated by thousands of years and thousands of kilometers. While I wholeheartedly agree that people frequently underestimate how intelligent people were in the past, and the reconstruction of ancient languages such as proto-indo-european is also a fascinating area, "pre-agricultural language" is a very tricky phrase given that there are societies alive today that never developed agriculture but it was also starting to be developed even before those big civilizations we all learned about in school like the indus valley or the fertile crescent and it is very difficult to pin down who, exactly, in all these regions 5k+ years ago, used all of the words that we can reconstruct as having originated at least that long ago. There has also been a strong assertion that language dispersal went hand-in-hand with dispersal of agriculture technology: I've heard of the theory that the reason Basque is so weird and not proto-indo-european is that it's the last remnant of a pre-agricultural, neolithic language, all the rest of which was obliterated by the importation of both agriculture and proto-indo-european (descended) language into Europe. I.e. Leviathan Song posted:One of the earliest spoken proto languages that we have a decent grasp of, proto Indo European, also post-dates agriculture. Sooorta yeah, probably, more or less, or was created along with agriculture, or pre-dates agriculture at its origin... there's a debate. One thing more broadly worth understanding is how much way-of-life affects conceptualizations that then require words. Again it's not "they're too stupid to understand abstract concepts" it's way more "concrete things seem to dominate the conversation" when you're talking about traditional pre-agricultural cultures. There's a long-standing debate about abstract vs. concrete, including (especially) with regards to numbers. Just now doing some googling and I can see the old concrete vs. abstract debate has been challenged and if you're fascinated by cuneiform and pre-cuneiform counting technology, this is a cool and good read to look at.
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Mar 7, 2024 23:21
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if you laid out all these posts about culture heritage counting and agriculture how tall would they be compared to everest
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Mar 8, 2024 03:08
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Chief McHeath posted:if you laid out all these posts about culture heritage counting and agriculture how tall would they be compared to everest Many
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Mar 8, 2024 03:15
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Phy posted:Many lmao
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Mar 8, 2024 03:15
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quote:I began to notice this when the Pirahăs asked me when the plane was coming again, a question they enjoy asking, I eventually realized, because they find it nearly magical that I seem to know the day that the plane is arriving. I'm curious how you would express when something in the future was going to happen without counting. Tie it to something astronomical? "After the next full moon"?
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Mar 8, 2024 04:38
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hot cocoa on the couch posted:fascinating stuff. would make a great gbs thread
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Mar 8, 2024 06:29
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Mr. Funny Pants posted:I'm curious how you would express when something in the future was going to happen without counting. Tie it to something astronomical? "After the next full moon"? What sort of future events they needing to plan for? For crops if there's seasons wet/dry season but you can gauge that by few different ways (Average temp/length of day and whatnot). Sounds like traders come when they come. We think a lot in time as everything very time orientated but that just because it's how our societies set up, but if your food just comes from growing and hunting, like what are you keeping track of. I'm sure they'd be good at eyeballing how much supplies are needed and are left and that sort of stuff. Most other stuff you know, done when it's done.
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Mar 8, 2024 06:37
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If it comes from growing, you are very conscious of when things are sowed vs. when they produce. Not in numbers per se, but in terms of "this only grows in rainy season" and "we get two crops of X in the time it takes to get one crop of y."
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Mar 8, 2024 06:54
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hot cocoa on the couch posted:fascinating stuff. would make a great gbs thread If anyone actually reads the book, DM me and we can try to set up a thread in the Book Barn I guess
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Mar 8, 2024 08:53
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Anne Whateley posted:Yeah I’m sorry the detail got so big. Unfortunately it would make a terrible gbs thread because it would just get “lol they dumb” shitposts for a couple pages. gently caress you, just post
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Mar 8, 2024 09:38
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Anne Whateley posted:Yeah I’m sorry the detail got so big. Unfortunately it would make a terrible gbs thread because it would just get “lol they dumb” shitposts for a couple pages. I'm borrowing it from the library because of this discussion if it's any consolation 
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Mar 8, 2024 12:51
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dr_rat posted:What sort of future events they needing to plan for? For crops if there's seasons wet/dry season but you can gauge that by few different ways (Average temp/length of day and whatnot). Sounds like traders come when they come. We think a lot in time as everything very time orientated but that just because it's how our societies set up, but if your food just comes from growing and hunting, like what are you keeping track of. I'm sure they'd be good at eyeballing how much supplies are needed and are left and that sort of stuff. Most other stuff you know, done when it's done. Pre-agricultural societies still want to track the lunar cycle for tides and how much light you have at night. Knowing when to go down to the tidelands to dig up clams or whether you'll be able to keep persistence hunting something after sundown are very useful.
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Mar 8, 2024 14:42
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Leviathan Song posted:Pre-agricultural societies still want to track the lunar cycle for tides and how much light you have at night. Knowing when to go down to the tidelands to dig up clams or whether you'll be able to keep persistence hunting something after sundown are very useful. sure, but that doesn't require counting. it requires looking up and seeing the moon is waxing polynesians navigated across open ocean by the stars without sextants or charts, they just did it with practice and passed it on through apprenticeship. just because we use numbers to communicate an idea now doesn't mean that's the only way to do it.
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Mar 8, 2024 17:00
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Cactus Ghost posted:sure, but that doesn't require counting. it requires looking up and seeing the moon is waxing toddler-like fascination with subjectivity
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Mar 8, 2024 18:40
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It's important I mean, not at all, but "to this conversation" I guess to understand that "they don't have numbers" doesn't mean they don't have linguistic indicators of quantity; it means that they don't have such indicators separate from specific nouns. You could for example have a word for "one person" and a different word, or a variation on it, for "two people" and another for "three or more people"; and then you could also have a word for "one day's travel away" and another for "two day's travel away" etc., which may or may not use similar prefixes or suffixes or modifications along some consistent line. This allows you to differentiate important quantities for specific things but isn't "words for one, two, three" and also doesn't even necessarily suggest a shorthand for numerals, if the modifications of the words are inconsistent. You invent or develop a modified word for a quantity of that specific thing only when you actually need it, and only for quantities that you actually encounter. If there's never a hundred people that you need to count, you never need to make a word for "a hundred people", especially because a word for "a lot of people" is probably more than sufficient. To put it more succinctly, if you never need to compare apples to oranges, you don't need independent words to signify a quantity you can compare, or add up how many apples + oranges you have, etc. I do not know if Piraha do that, mind you. But once you start delving into the details of language, things like the above emerge and make a lot of sense. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 18:56 on Mar 8, 2024 |
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Mar 8, 2024 18:53
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Cactus Ghost posted:sure, but that doesn't require counting. it requires looking up and seeing the moon is waxing It does when you have a cloudy week or two. Counting days from the last full or new moon on a cloudless night let's you track it regardless of weather. I literally haven't seen the moon since the day after the last full moon. I can just look up the tides with my modern conveniences but being able to count off those 15 days is awfully convenient if you don't have that luxury.
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Mar 8, 2024 18:59
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the lunar cycle and the menstural cycle both being 28 days is very convenient, I dunno if anthropologists mention it but I bet those societies knew that if Brenda started her last period three days past the last new moon, and she's having her period now, they know pretty closely what the phase of the moon is today also if it's too overcast to see the moon it's too overcast to hunt after sunset and the next high tide is gonna be almost exactly one half day after the previous
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Mar 8, 2024 19:59
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Leperflesh posted:the lunar cycle and the menstural cycle both being 28 days is very convenient, I dunno if anthropologists mention it but I bet those societies knew that if Brenda started her last period three days past the last new moon, and she's having her period now, they know pretty closely what the phase of the moon is today I'd be interested to see if there is any evidence of that historically, but it might be tricky to find for a lot of reasons. It is also worth noting the moon cycle is off by a bit - I think it's closer to 27 days) so there is drift even if you're menstruating like clockwork--which is rare when you're not living a somewhat sedentary lifestyle - not eating regularly or having a lot of strenuous activity can delay the cycle pretty easily for a lot of people. (Mine usually stopped entirely whenever I was in the middle of sports seasons in high school and that was just swim team, and that was pretty common.)
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Mar 8, 2024 20:35
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Leperflesh posted:I do not know if Piraha do that, mind you. woke kaczynski posted:I'm borrowing it from the library because of this discussion if it's any consolation
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Mar 8, 2024 20:51
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Anne Whateley posted:They don’t. That’s the long quote I posted above explaining how they don’t. Getting the book from the library and finding out how things actually work is more interesting and informative than all this speculating Sorry I'm not going to read a whole book in order to have a slightly more detailed insight into discussing the Piraha. Like that's a cool idea but I get through about four books a year these days so that ones' not making the list. However: what I am describing about the use of numbers in language isn't speculation for other languages, it's how they actually work. DurianGray posted:I'd be interested to see if there is any evidence of that historically, but it might be tricky to find for a lot of reasons. It is also worth noting the moon cycle is off by a bit - I think it's closer to 27 days) so there is drift even if you're menstruating like clockwork--which is rare when you're not living a somewhat sedentary lifestyle - not eating regularly or having a lot of strenuous activity can delay the cycle pretty easily for a lot of people. (Mine usually stopped entirely whenever I was in the middle of sports seasons in high school and that was just swim team, and that was pretty common.) We're talking about not seeing the moon for maybe a week or two becuase it's overcast, not never seeing the moon for months and drifting off by a day during that time, as if you somehow need to know the exact phase of the moon in order to predict when the next high tide will be. It's true that seafaring peoples had an intimate relationship with the tides: it's just a bit silly to suppose that they couldn't possibly live without abstract numbers in their language because of that, or especially need to know the exact day of the full moon a week in advance.
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Mar 8, 2024 20:56
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Leperflesh posted:the lunar cycle and the menstural cycle both being 28 days is very convenient, I dunno if anthropologists mention it but I bet those societies knew that if Brenda started her last period three days past the last new moon, and she's having her period now, they know pretty closely what the phase of the moon is today I don't know how it is in hunter-gatherer socities but not everyone's menstrual cycle is exactly 28 days. Mine used to be roughly 30 days, now it's usually less than 28 days. Physical activity, stress, etc can gently caress with it too.
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Mar 8, 2024 21:10
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That's true, and I know they can shift around and align with other womens'. Still and again though, the point is there's ways to understand about a month has passed that don't rely on counting up to 28 with words that mean those numbers like, we know many of these languages didn't have words for numbers, so "that's impossible, they need to know!" just outright loses to "whatever they need to know, they have ways to figure out and say," self-evidently
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Mar 8, 2024 21:14
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 Actually, only 12.4 percent of women have a 28-day cycle! Most women cannot predict the full moon by checking for blood.
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Mar 8, 2024 21:39
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That's why the length of month varies between 28 and 31 days.
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Mar 8, 2024 21:46
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Arsenic Lupin posted:
quote:Most women (87%) had actual menstrual cycle lengths between 23 and 35 days, with a normal distribution centred on day 28, I think that's good enough to guess when the next night with plenty of moonlight for hunting will be I wonder if closely-related people, such as in a small pre-agricultural community, would have less variation, too?
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Mar 8, 2024 22:03
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dr_rat posted:What sort of future events they needing to plan for? For crops if there's seasons wet/dry season but you can gauge that by few different ways (Average temp/length of day and whatnot). Sounds like traders come when they come. We think a lot in time as everything very time orientated but that just because it's how our societies set up, but if your food just comes from growing and hunting, like what are you keeping track of. I'm sure they'd be good at eyeballing how much supplies are needed and are left and that sort of stuff. Most other stuff you know, done when it's done. But my question was in reference to a future event that wasn't tied to anything in their daily life: "When is the plane arriving?" What sort of answer were they expecting? "It will come the before/the same day/the day after such and such moon." See what I mean? He can't say, "12 days from now," if they don't count, it has to be a reference point they know.
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Mar 8, 2024 22:48
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I wondered about that too, but I think they would be impressed even if he just said “it’s definitely not coming today” or “it’s coming after lunch today”
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Mar 8, 2024 22:53
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The fact that the 'twoness' of two days is the same as the 'twoness' of two people seems very obvious to us because of the ways we learn about numbers and counting, but the relationship between them is very abstract if you think about it. What do 28 stones have to do with the lunar cycle? The obvious answer is gently caress all, it takes a real leap to find that connection. Even in our 'Western' (i.e. heavily Indian/Arabian influenced) mathematics there were centuries and centuries when the mathematics of the 'natural' or 'counting' numbers was a completely separate field from the mathematics of 'geometric' or 'measured' numbers like dimensions of objects or lengths of time. I might be misremembering my mathematical history but I believe that at the height of Classical Greek culture they were aware of this problem but couldn't resolve it, and it wasn't until Descartes and Cartesian co-ordinates that the two fields were unified. I think when it is said that this culture or that culture "doesn't have numbers" we should not infer that they do not have concepts of relative quantity or even absolute quantity, rather that they do not have concepts of numbers as abstract things that are distinct from the ways they are used. They may well be able to understand and communicate the idea of 'two days' or of 'two people,' they just do so in a way that is particular to communicating those ideas and doesn't employ an abstract concept of 'twoness'. Jamsque fucked around with this message at 01:31 on Mar 9, 2024 |
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Mar 9, 2024 01:21
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Arsenic Lupin posted:
loving Selene, can't get anything right
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Mar 9, 2024 01:25
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Arsenic Lupin posted:
... on Mt. Everest
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Mar 9, 2024 01:27
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Mount Everest: You don't need numbers to post about your menstrual cycle ITT
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Mar 9, 2024 01:29
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If we didn't have a moon we'd use bloodcycles instead of months.
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Mar 9, 2024 01:35
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