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army1987 comments on Logical Pinpointing - Less Wrong
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The Pirahã are unfamiliar with counting and we still can kind-of meaningfully communicate with them. I agree with the rest of the comment, though.
I was ready to reply "bullshit", but I guess if their language doesn't have any cardinal or ordinal number terms ...
Still, they could count with beads or rocks, à la the magic sheep-counting bucket.
It's understandable why they wouldn't really need counting given their lifestyle. But I wonder what they do (or did) when a neighboring tribe attacks or encroaches on their territory? Their language apparently does have words for 'small amount' and 'large amount', but how would they decide how many warriors to send to meet an opposing band?
Here's a decent argument that they probably don't have words for numbers because they don't count, rather than the other way round, contra pop-Whorfianism. (Otherwise I guess they'd just borrow the words for numbers from Portuguese or something, as they probably did with personal pronouns from Tupi.)