140. Num8er5
The Allusionist
Helen Zaltzman
4.7 • 3.8K Ratings
🗓️ 30 August 2021
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We use verbal numbers and we use numerals - why do we need both? Why do we have the ones we have? What happened to Roman numerals? And what's loserish about the fiftieth Super Bowl? Stephen Chrisomalis, professor of anthropology and linguistics and author of the book Reckonings: Numerals, Cognition and History, returns to the Allusionist to explain our current numbers, and why we shouldn't get too arrogant about them.
There's more about this episode, and a transcript, at theallusionist.org/numbers.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the illusionist in which I, Helen Salzman, Oop, Languages knows. |
| 0:08.3 | Oop! On today's show we have the return of Stephen Chris Amalis, professor of anthropology |
| 0:16.0 | and linguistics and study of numbers. He came on the show before to talk about words like |
| 0:21.6 | zillion and cagillion indefinite hyperbolic numerals. And now he's here to talk about definite |
| 0:28.4 | non-hypabolic numerals. Well, they're less definite than my hope. Just to remind you that the |
| 0:35.1 | new Illusionist live show impens, 4th September 2021 at 4.30pm at the London Pockaar's festival, |
| 0:42.4 | get your tickets, get your tickets now, or you can also watch online. And for up to a week after, |
| 0:48.0 | for your geographical and time zone convenience, ticket links are at theillusionist.org-sash-events. |
| 0:53.6 | And if you saw or listened to previous live illusionists like no title or WPM, you know it's |
| 0:59.4 | going to be a very good time. On with Stephen Chris Amalis and numbers. |
| 1:09.5 | We tend to imagine that numbers are an absolutely essential thing, without which any sort of society |
| 1:16.4 | couldn't exist. But there is actually reasonably good evidence that many, many societies, both |
| 1:22.4 | historically and even some societies in the present day, get by without a great need for verbal |
| 1:29.0 | number. That the kind of things that we imagine must happen every day, the counting of every day |
| 1:35.1 | objects simply doesn't happen through language. That's not to say that they're not able to distinguish |
| 1:41.9 | between three stones and four stones, or they're not able to think about their children as |
| 1:49.2 | individuals. The relevant question is not how many children do I have, but who are my children? |
| 1:55.5 | And so even when it comes to language, there's some pretty good evidence to suggest that verbal |
| 2:01.1 | numbers are not as necessary as we imagine them to be. And every number system has an end point. |
| 2:09.6 | There's some number beyond which you can't count. And I've heard, you know, I've heard, oh, |
| 2:15.1 | what about Google? There's this number Google. And that's true. There is this, oh, that's one |
| 2:21.5 | followed by a hundred zeros. That's true. But this is not a real number in the sense that if you |
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