General Knowledgespeaking topic
Some communities count 'one, two, many' and have no words to distinguish three from five; yet these people get along perfectly well in daily life. We assume numbers are 'real,' but perhaps they too are an invention. What would a world of thought without numbers be like?
— linguistics, the Piraha people and anumeric languages
practice with this topic
Set the timer (5-30 min), take 20 seconds of prep if you like, start talking. Jot your thoughts onto the sticky-note board.
similar topics
- In the Middle Ages the hour was not yet divided into minutes; people said 'around midday prayer' or 'when the cows are milked.' Minutes and seconds were adopted alongside trains and factories, because workers had to be synchronized. Was slicing time into minutes progress, or did it turn us into cogs in a wheel?
- In ancient Egypt the year began with the rising of the star Sirius, which announced the flooding of the Nile; their calendar was tied not to an abstraction in the sky but to the breathing of a river. For us, New Year's is a box on a calendar; for them it was life beginning again. Should time be anchored to numbers, or to nature?
- In some communities the idea of 'mine' barely exists on its own; just as a fish in the ocean belongs to no one, the field is held in common. The West finds private property so natural that it can hardly imagine an alternative. Is something being 'yours' a law of nature, or a line humans drew afterwards?
- Why has Shakespeare's 'Hamlet' been staged continuously for four hundred years? Let's talk about the universality of the hesitation in 'To be, or not to be.'
- When the Gregorian calendar was adopted in 1582, ten days were 'deleted'; people went to bed on October 4 and woke up on October 15. What happened to the rent, the birthdays, the debts that fell on those days? If time is an agreement, can ten days really be voted out of existence?