The Veddas, an indigenous people of Sri Lanka, are reported to have only words for the numbers one (ekkamai) and two (dekkamai). For larger quantities, they continue: otameekai, otameekai, otameekai . . . (‘and one more, and one more, and one more . . .’).Another example is the Caquintes of Peru, who count one (aparo) and two (mavite). Three they call ‘it is another one’; four is ‘the one that follows it’.
In Brazil, the Munduruku imitate quantity by according an extra syllable to each new number: one is pug, two is xep xep, three is ebapug, and four is edadipdip. They count, understandably, no higher than five. The imitative method, while transparent, has clear limitations. Just imagine a number word as many syllables long as the quantity of trees leading to a food source! The drawling, seemingly endless, chain of syllables would prove far too expensive to the tongue (not to say the listener’s powers of concentration). It pains the head even to think about what it would be like to have to learn to recite the ten times tables in this way.
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There is a tribe in the Amazon rainforest who know nothing whatsoever of numbers. Their name is the Pirahã or the Hi’aiti’ihi, meaning ‘the straight ones’. The Pirahã show little interest in the outside world. Surrounded by throngs of trees, their small clusters of huts lie on the banks of the Maici River. Tumbling grey rain breaks green on the lush foliage and long grass. Days there are continuously hot and humid, inducing a perpetual look of embarrassment on the faces of visiting missionaries and linguists. Children race naked around the village, while their mothers wear light dresses obtained by bartering with the Brazilian traders. From the same source, the men display colourful T-shirts, the flotsam of past political campaigns, exhorting the observer to vote Lula.
Manioc (a tough and bland tuber), fresh fish and roasted anteater sustain the population. The work of gathering food is divided along lines of sex. At first light, women leave the huts to tend the manioc plants and collect firewood, while the men go upriver or downriver to fish. They can spend the whole day there, bow and arrow in hand, watching water. For want of any means of storage, any catch is consumed quickly. The Pirahã apportion food in the following manner: members of the tribe haphazardly receive a generous serving until no more remains. Any who have not yet been served ask a neighbour, who has to share. This procedure only ends when everyone has eaten his fill.
The vast majority of what we know about the Pirahã is due to the work of Daniel Everett, a Californian linguist who has studied them at close quarters over a period of thirty years. With professional perseverance, his ears gradually soothed their cacophonic ejections into comprehensible words and phrases, becoming in the process the first outsider to embrace the tribe’s way of life.
To the American’s astonishment, the language he learned has no specific words for measuring time or quantity. Names for numbers like ‘one’ or ‘two’ are unheard of. Even the simplest numerical queries brought only confusion or indifference to the tribesmen’s eyes. Of their children, parents are unable to say how many they have, though they remember all their names. Plans or schedules older than a single day have no purchase on the Pirahã’s minds. Bartering with foreign traders simply consists of handing over foraged nuts as payment until the trader says that the price has been met.
Nor do the Pirahã count with their bodies. Their fingers never point or curl: when indicating some amount they simply hold their hand palm down, using the space between their hand and the ground to suggest the height of the pile that such a quantity could reach.
It seems the Pirahã make no distinction between a man and a group of men, between a bird and a flock of birds, between a grain of manioc flour and a sack of manioc flour. Everything is either small (hói) or big (ogii ). A solitary macaw is a small flock; the flock, a big macaw. In his Metaphysics, Aristotle shows that counting requires some prior understanding of what ‘one’ is. To count five, or ten or twenty-three birds, we must first identify one bird, an idea of ‘bird’ that can apply to every possible kind. But such abstractions are entirely foreign to the tribe.
With abstraction, birds become numbers. Men and maniocs, too. We can look at a scene and say, ‘There are two men, three birds and four maniocs’ but also, ‘There are nine things’ (summing two and three and four). The Pirahã do not think this way. They ask, ‘What are these things?’ ‘Where are they?’, ‘What do they do?’ A bird flies, a man breathes and a manioc plant grows. It is meaningless to try to bring them together. Man is a small world. The world is a big manioc.
It is little surprise to learn that the Pirahã perceive drawings and photos only with great difficulty. They hold a photograph sideways or upside down, not seeing what the image is meant to represent. Drawing a picture is no easier for them, not even a straight line. They cannot copy simple shapes with any fidelity. Quite possibly, they have no interest in doing so. Instead their pencils (furnished by linguists or missionaries) produce only repeating circular marks on the researcher’s sheet of paper, each mark a little different to the last.
Perhaps this also explains why the Pirahã tell no stories, possess no creation myths. Stories, at least as we understand them, have intervals: a beginning, middle and an end. When we tell a story, we recount: naming each interval is equivalent to numbering it. Yet the Pirahã talk only of the immediate present: no past impinges on their actions; no future motivates their thoughts. History, they told their American companion, is ‘where nothing happens, and everything is the same.
