Re: [tied] Re: IE right & 10

> 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?

I mean the 170 or so lgs in Brazil and those in the rainforest areas in
adjacent countries. See e.g The Amazonian Languages by Aikhenvald & Dixon
and The Languages of the Andes by W. Adelaar.

> 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

It's true - Everett told me once that he was allowed to take a girl away
from the "village" to get surgery. She was in hospital for halv a year
and learned some portuguese as well as to count in portuguese. Now, back
since long with the tribe, she can't count anymore (in Port. or Pirahã)
but she laughs when he tells a joke in Portuguese.

Perhaps, surprising to you, the Pirahã have been trading with
riverboat-traders for 200 years, and yet they have no numerals at all,
let alone a system that stops at six.

> 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?!

It's only in your imagination that I "used that as a fair example of
the majority ..". When I say most hunter-gatherers in Amazonia I mean
most hunter-gatherers in Amazonia, and they are almost universally
trading with their immediate neighbours and have 2-4 numerals. Ask me
for references if you wish.

But typically, quickly after contact with the west, they die, leave the culture
and/or borrow higher numerals.

> The
> old saying is that necessity breeds invention and so what if at least
> some hunter-gatherer populations _did_ need to count to ten.

Most know how to count to ten. Most however only have words up to 2-4.
Some (not so few) have higher numerals, which are almost always
finger-based and stretch to say 5, 10 or 20.

> Why should
> we conclude that they absolutely wouldn't need to?

That we don't conclude. All we conclude is that super-unlikely that any
had a numeral system of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, many.

> 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?

Probably less. More like 1/1000 i.e 6 million.

> 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.

No it isn't. (A sample size of say 600 languages anyway).

> 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.

Based on roughly 600 cases from 200-300 years back.

> > 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 percentage of the world that was hunter-gatherer doesn't matter. I
know however that there were more hunter-gatherer societies, in terms of
absolute number of societies, a few centuries again. Check your Australian,
Thai-Laotian, Papuan and Amazonian history.

> > 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?

Aristotle book XV if I remember correctly.

> Only one? And you base your assumptions on one attestation?
> I don't expect to find much recorded on 'barbarian' peoples in classical
> history.

1/1 case at least doesn't disprove my thesis and certainly doesn't support
yours.

> 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.

Nonsense. They are vastly different.

> 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.

Yes, it's possible. (But we were discussing something else).

> 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.

In the case of most hunter-gatherers, the fact that the count stops at 2-4
has a very attractive explanation in subitizing.

In the case of Pirahã, an almost unique case, my belief is that it's a
convention that is extremely unlikely to be viable in any other kind of
society than that of the Pirahã. Pirahã culture is one of the most extreme
cases of an culture that is not interested in technology or intellectual
achievement (indeed earlier researchers found them "dull and uninterested"
compared to most other Indian peoples).

> > 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.

Of course it's not logically impossible. But With this kind of reasoning
we might as well not rule out the possibility that they had a count with
base 546838.

/H