Harald:
> 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.
The funny thing is that it's _not_ surprising to me but what I'm saying
is that just because you have a hunter-gatherer society doesn't guarantee
that they _don't_ have a number system. You can have lots of hunter-
gatherer societies that don't have a developped system at all, and I
accept that. I just don't accept the common view that somehow proto-
languages older than IE or Semitic can't possibly have them just because
the people who would have spoken these languages were hunter-gatherers.
Otherwise, Proto-Algonquian wouldn't have a number system. Nor Proto-
Austronesian. Don't think those guys and gals were farmers.
>> 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.
Alright. That conclusion I agree with then. However, as I stated before,
Uralic only has _reconstructable_ numbers up to "6". It has to be
understood that the term "unreconstructable" doesn't necessarily mean
"non-existent". For some reason, people get confused.
> Probably less. More like 1/1000 i.e 6 million.
Certainly not many and fewer that aren't in some way influenced by
modernization. It's hard to live anywhere in the world without at least
one plane going by every once in a while. Not even Newfoundland is
immune to the modern day! :)
> No it isn't. (A sample size of say 600 languages anyway).
I think it's not secure. Look at Native American languages for example.
They all share certain areal features with each other. Naturally so,
since they have been in close contact with each other on the same
continent for thousands of years. However, if one took samples from
only that group because they were the only ones left in the world after
the bomb hit, one would get a distorted picture of the full spectrum
of human languages across the globe. We'd end up thinking that the
world's languages are mostly replete with ejectives, for one thing!
So similarly, I can't agree with crabby ol' Brian about there not being
a difference between the few hunter-gatherer societies left in the world
today and the many hunter-gatherers that once lived and traded unabated
by as-yet non-existent settled cultures some 10,000 years ago. As I said
above, modernization of some sort is practically impossible to avoid
nowadays. Perhaps the only safe place to preserve a true hunter-gatherer
culture anymore is the Antarctic or another planet for god's sakes.
> Aristotle book XV if I remember correctly.
Thanks, I'll check that one out.
> 1/1 case at least doesn't disprove my thesis and certainly doesn't
> support yours.
Proto-Algonquian and Proto-Austronesian, remember?
> Nonsense. They are vastly different.
Then what do you think IE people were doing some three thousand years
previous to 4000 BCE? Certainly, the time it took for these people to
go from being hunter-gatherers to pastoralists couldn't have been
very long and why would pastoralists be any more prone to having
number systems than hunter-gatherers? Any particularly cogent reason?
I realize, of course, that their lifestyles are different but the
transition between the two ways of living must have taken place amongst
the IE nonetheless and I hardly think that pastoralism is the reason
for *okto:u.
>> 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).
Alright. That's fair.
> Pirahã culture is one of the most extreme cases of an culture that
> is not interested in technology or intellectual achievement [...]
Then perhaps what you're suggesting is that the world-view or the raison
d'etre of a society more likely shapes whether they feel a need for
numbers than environment or lifestyle. This would make sense considering
for example that Mayans were exceedingly gifted at mathematics, even
having a glyph for 'zero', but perhaps only because they found it
terribly necessary to understand the universe for great fear that it
would end. Their sedentary lifestyle then is only the _product_ of their
world-view and belief systems, not the source of it.
So with that idea, not knowing what the overall views were of ancient
people speaking languages like Proto-Uralic, it would be in that
respect especially unfair to assume that they couldn't have a number
system past 'six' if lifestyle is not a factor here.
> 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.
That's hyperbole. Base-10 systems are most common, the two hands thing
'n all.
= gLeN