linguistic determinism

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The language, Pirahг, is known as a “one, two, many” language because it only contains words for “one” and “two”—for all other numbers, a single word for “many” is used.

For one, two and three objects, members of the tribe consistently matched Gordon’s pile correctly. But for four and five and up to ten, they could only match it approximately, deviating more from the correct number as the row got longer.

The Pirahг also failed to remember whether a box they had been shown seconds ago had four or five fish drawn on the top. When Gordon’s colleagues tapped on the floor three times, the Pirahг were able to imitate this precisely, but failed to mimic strings of four of five taps.

Gordon says this is the first convincing evidence that a language lacking words for certain concepts could actually prevent speakers of the language from understanding those concepts.