ONE, TWO, MANY—EVIDENCE FOR THE WHORFIANS.

ONE, TWO, MANY—EVIDENCE FOR THE WHORFIANS. I was aware of claims that some languages do not have a word for numbers greater than two, so that counting becomes simply: “one, two, many…” This article from BBC News in 2004 reports that the Paraha tribe in Brazil only have words for one, two and many, but the word for one can also mean “a few” and the word for two can also mean “not many.” There are about 200 people in the tribe, who live as hunter-gatherers in the Amazon in groups of 5 or 10. Peter Cook of Columbia University wrote that “…the Piraha’s impoverished counting system truly limits their ability to enumerate exact quantities when set sizes exceed two or three items,” I posted here on the linguistic controversy between followers of Noam Chomsky and the followers of Benjamin Lee Whorf, who contended that languages can shape the way people think (and I noted here that I have Whorfian tendencies.) The BBC article notes that the Paraha findings support Whorf’s theory.