Beyond Zero and One (Andrew Smart) / quote 80 of 171
The Mundurucu and words for numbers
Numerical cognition and its relationship to linguistic evolution is a large area of active research. In contrast to the Mangarevan example, where a complex cultural ecology involving a distributed trade network may have spurred the development of advanced math, the Mundurucu people in Brazil’s Amazon River basin have been extensively studied because their language has only a few words for numbers, even though they too trade with external groups in complicated economic ways. The Mundurucu have approximate number words for plus or minus one, two, three, and four. For larger quantities, they use vague words like “a few,” “a handful,” or “many.” Some researchers suggest that what prevents the Mundurucu from developing exact numbers is the nature of their language, which does not make a grammatical distinction between singular and plural, among other things.