Harald:
> Don't be silly. Most hunter-gatherers in e.g Papua and Amazonia still
> trade as much today, and with little correlation to their numeral
> system. One does not even need numerals to trade.
Me being silly? What exactly are you talking about when you say Amazonia?
The Piraha perhaps? That looks to me to be nothing short of a linguistic
oddity. They don't even draw, supposedly. Dr Gordon (no relation)
apparently concludes that the Piraha have no sign of mental retardation.
How nice of him to conclude that :O
Now why would one use that as a fair example of the majority of
hunter-gather bands or tribes, most of which no longer even exist?! The
old saying is that necessity breeds invention and so what if at least
some hunter-gatherer populations _did_ need to count to ten. Why should
we conclude that they absolutely wouldn't need to? I can think of many
things that hunter-gatherers might catch an inkling to count.
Civilization can take on many unexpected forms.
You may have had a different ethnology professor but the one that I had
when I took a filler course while in CompSci had established in class
clearly that hunter-gatherers are an overwhelming minority in the world
today compared with other kinds of societies. In terms of world
population, what is the percentage of people living as hunter-gatherers
today? One percent? Clearly this is very different than in the
paleolithic. In statistical terms, the sampling size may be indeed too
low to yield an appropriate picture of paleolithic linguistics.
So to reason that hunter-gatherers wouldn't normally have number systems
based on a handful of hunter-gatherer societies that still exist appears
to me to be completely assumptive.
> Besides, the tendency is exactly same in vocabularies gathered in the
> 17th to 19th centuries.
Do you think the percentage of societies that were hunter-gatherers was
terribly much higher only a few centuries ago? What do you base this on?
> The only really old attestation I know of of a hunter-gatherer numeral
> system is in Greek sources and is up to (incl.) 4.
Which source? Only one? And you base your assumptions on one attestation?
I don't expect to find much recorded on 'barbarian' peoples in classical
history.
What's silly here is that we seriously reconstruct ten numbers and even
a hundred for Proto-Indo-European and yet, being that the speakers of
the language were probably mostly pastoral, they weren't exactly far
removed from hunter-gatherer lifestyles themselves. In this case, I
suppose they had sheep to count, even if they weren't sleepy. However,
as I've said above, how can we say that hunter-gatherers have absolutely
no need for a number system? Even if it's a minority of cases, it's
possible for a hunter-gatherer society to have a number system up to
ten. How can we prove otherwise?
I think the question we should be asking is not whether hunter-gatherers
could have number systems in the past but what causes some languages
like that of the Piraha to NOT have numbers.
> Look at 19th century Australian aboriginal languages. Almost nowhere
> is anything but a 2-4 numeral system attested (compared to 300 or so
> cases to the contrary).
And perhaps, I could cede, that in a majority of cases hunter-gatherer
societies have few numbers at their disposal, but we cannot say
logically that it's not possible. So we don't know whether Uralic
speakers could _only_ count to six based on an _absence_ of data nor
can we conclude with certainty that older languages, such as Proto-
Nostratic perhaps, did not have number systems. Instead we have to
remain open-minded and take stock of what we don't know.
= gLeN