The Pirah√£ are a tribe in the Brazilian Amazon who apparently
don’t have words for specific numbers. A recent study reported
by Science News suggests that despite this, the Pirah√£ people
can do numerical tasks, challenging the idea that we need number
words to think about and recognize exact quantities. Previous
researchers had put a single object on a table, asked a Pirah√£
participant “How much is this?”, added another, asked again and
so on, while responses were recorded when different words were
used for different quantities. Frank did the same, but also
counted down, starting with a large number of objects and taking
one away each time. He got different answers for the same number
of objects and it transpired that the words didn’t mean ‘one’,
‘two’ and ‘many’, as previously thought, but ‘few’, ‘some’ and
‘more’. In fact, the researchers noted that the Pirah√£ have no
linguistic method whatsoever for expressing exact quantity, not
even ‘one’. In a subsequent part, the researchers asked the
Pirah√£ parti