Here’s an interesting article at New Scientist about some anthropological studies with a tribe of hunter-gatherers called the Piraha. Basically, the gist of it is that in their language, they have words for the numbers “one” and “two” but beyond that, they have vague words to describe “many.” So scientists of some sort did different games and experiments with them to have them mimic and try to articulate numbers past two. Basically, their ability to do so decreased as the value of the number increased.

They go into a topic called “linguistic determinism” wherein a person’s ability to think or to understand a particular concept is directly linked to their ability to verbally articulate it. In other words, if you don’t have a word for it, it’s extremely difficult to think something.

Linguistic determinism is still debated among researchers, but it’s pretty interesting, and I think there must be some element of truth to it. It relates very closely to George Orwell’s concept of “newspeak” in 1984

1. This Newspeak dictionary site looks pretty interesting
2. And here’s another blogger’s essay against linguistic determinism