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'Anumeric' people: What happens when a language has no words for numbers?

  • Written by Caleb Everett, Andrew Carnegie Fellow, Professor of Anthropology, University of Miami
imageA Pirahã family.Caleb Everett, CC BY-SA

Numbers do not exist in all cultures. There are numberless hunter-gatherers embedded deep in Amazonia, living along branches of the world’s largest river tree. Instead of using words for precise quantities, these people rely exclusively on terms analogous to “a few” or...

Read more: 'Anumeric' people: What happens when a language has no words for numbers?

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