SHOCKER! Meet The Brazilian Tribe That Has Words For Only 'One', 'Two' & 'Three' And Cannot Count Higher

The Piraha tribe from Amazon in Brazil are popularly known in language research for their complete absence of words for number After counting one, and two, the next and only numeric word they have is “many.”

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To even confuse visitors and outsiders more, the words for “one” and “two” are the same syllable pronounced with falling or rising inflexions. In addition to the confusion

The Piraha of the Amazon have an almost legendary status in language research. They have no words at all for number. They use only three words to count: one, two, many.

To make things confusing, the words for one and two, in Piraha, are the same syllable, pronounced with a falling or rising inflexion. And to add to the confusion, the word for one can sometimes mean “roughly one”, and the word for two can sometimes mean “not many”.

Peter Gordon, a behavioural scientist at Columbia University in New York, reports in Science today that the Piraha may not be very good at counting because they do not have the words for it.

Dr Gordon set them a series of simple numerical challenges. He asked the Piraha people to match small sets of objects by number.

The adults performed accurately with sets of two or three items, but the accuracy declined when tribespeople were asked to match sets of eight or 10 items. Their skills, he reports “were similar to those in pre-linguistic infants, monkeys, birds and rodents”.

Lions have a sense of numbers. Chimpanzees and even macaque monkeys can count up to nine. But the Piraha can be inaccurate even when they use their fingers to show numbers lower than five.

While this may be classified as a cultural restriction, it is one that makes monkeys and chimpanzees better at counting than humans