Subitizing: Counting Without Words
Humans possess an innate ability called "subitizing", which allows us to instantly recognize quantities up to four without counting. This blog post explores how this cognitive limit shaped early grammar…
Tag: pirahã
The World’s Simplest Alphabet?
Imagine a language that can express every human thought with only 12 letters. Discover the world of Rotokas, a language from Papua New Guinea with the smallest alphabet on Earth.…
The Language That Broke the Rules: Daniel Everett and the Pirahã Controversy
Deep in the Amazon, linguist Daniel Everett encountered a language that seemed to break all the rules. His claim that Pirahã lacks recursion—a feature once thought to be the bedrock…