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If this stuff is interesting to you, you should read about Geoff Saxe's work [0] with the Oksapmin people of Papua New Guinea. This book is newish (and I haven'

by pfooti 9y ago

If this stuff is interesting to you, you should read about Geoff Saxe's work [0] with the Oksapmin people of Papua New Guinea. This book is newish (and I haven't read it, but I've read almost all of the studies the book is built on) and synthesizes a couple of decades of research into how these people count and talk about number and how that practice changed over time (there's some fascinating conclusions about how the base changed from base-27 to base-20 when western money, in particular the 1 pound : 20 shilling ratio, came to be more widely-used). And yeah, more or less base-27. They used body parts to refer to numbers 1-27, and often anything higher than that was just "a lot", but they could count more using the system if needed. How the Oksapmin people mingled both traditional counting and modern arithmetic is pretty fascinating (and says a lot about the underlying cognitive processes that make humans able to reason about number). 0: http://a.co/6gbRM1x http://a.co/6gbRM1x

adrianratnapala 9y ago
Did they use 27 as a radix when they went for bigger numbers? For example and Oksapmin might have say "four score and seven years ago", using their 27-numeral vocabulary to supply words for "four", "seven" and "twenty", but in this case the (closest thing to) a radix is 20, not 27.
- pfooti 9y ago
  for the most part, they didn't go for bigger than 27 very often. At the time Saxe started studying them in the late 1970s, they were living very close to nature, and often didn't have cause to need to accurately count higher than that (if you have one or two fish, the distinction is important - if you have 27 or 28, less so). But yes, the word fu (not foo, but enjoyably similar) which kind of means "a full amount", or enough, and was used as "one radix", so people do something like fu + another number word to mean 27 + that other number. I don't remember if there was evidence of treating it like a radix (like multiple fu + something), but I don't think that happened. Again, in this particular culture and economy, there wasn't much of a need to think about large numbers precisely. Which is part of what makes all this pretty fascinating - humans have some inbuilt capacity to reason about numbers (some studies of babies show that they can distinguish between two and three of things just as readily as two hundred to three hundred, sort of a visual field scale independence - I'd have to dig to find that study, I read it about eight years ago, I think it was in nature), but beyond a certain level it becomes intrinsically intertwined with our development of language and other conceptual frames.
  - adrianratnapala 9y ago
    Again, in this particular culture and economy, there wasn't much of a need to think about large numbers precisely. I suppose so, but there's a reason I picked 87 years. It's a time-scale that we care about when talking about people and society. We don't strictly need precise numbers for that you could say "around when granddad was born" -- but if we do have precise numbers then we can and will use them.

by pfooti 9y ago

adrianratnapala 9y ago

Did they use 27 as a radix when they went for bigger numbers? For example and Oksapmin might have say "four score and seven years ago", using their 27-numeral vocabulary to supply words for "four", "seven" and "twenty", but in this case the (closest thing to) a radix is 20, not 27.

pfooti 9y ago
for the most part, they didn't go for bigger than 27 very often. At the time Saxe started studying them in the late 1970s, they were living very close to nature, and often didn't have cause to need to accurately count higher than that (if you have one or two fish, the distinction is important - if you have 27 or 28, less so). But yes, the word fu (not foo, but enjoyably similar) which kind of means "a full amount", or enough, and was used as "one radix", so people do something like fu + another number word to mean 27 + that other number. I don't remember if there was evidence of treating it like a radix (like multiple fu + something), but I don't think that happened. Again, in this particular culture and economy, there wasn't much of a need to think about large numbers precisely. Which is part of what makes all this pretty fascinating - humans have some inbuilt capacity to reason about numbers (some studies of babies show that they can distinguish between two and three of things just as readily as two hundred to three hundred, sort of a visual field scale independence - I'd have to dig to find that study, I read it about eight years ago, I think it was in nature), but beyond a certain level it becomes intrinsically intertwined with our development of language and other conceptual frames.
- adrianratnapala 9y ago
  Again, in this particular culture and economy, there wasn't much of a need to think about large numbers precisely. I suppose so, but there's a reason I picked 87 years. It's a time-scale that we care about when talking about people and society. We don't strictly need precise numbers for that you could say "around when granddad was born" -- but if we do have precise numbers then we can and will use them.