Comments on: Study: Amazon tribe has no abstract idea of time

By: Vladimir

Vladimir — Fri, 27 May 2011 14:01:43 +0000

Smart Amondawa! I heard theoretical physicists were trying all the time to get rid of “time” variable, without it their equations look much better.
V

By: Setsuka

Setsuka — Thu, 26 May 2011 01:31:59 +0000

Oh, dear…. My rant didn’t completely apply to the article! My apologies. However, I would suspect that “yesterday” might be a word, even if bigger time periods aren’t. Oh, and I’m still quite suspicious about “not having a word for” such things. Like I said, such claims tend to be false….

By: Setsuka

Setsuka — Thu, 26 May 2011 01:27:01 +0000

I have to say, I’m always suspicious of the “no word for” idea. For instance, some news sites have claimed that, say, Finnish has no word for dyslexia. (This is apparently due to their consistently phonetic writing system.) Of course, Finnish DOES have a word for dyslexia. (Actually, it has several….)

There are, of course, exceptions. For instance, the Pirahã language doesn’t have numbers. It’s just that most of the time, when people say such-and-such language doesn’t have a word for something, it turns out that it does.

Imho, the idea of not having words for “month” and “year” is a lot more plausible than no way to express time in general.

But that’s my rant.