• pocopene@lemmy.world
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    10 days ago

    I once heard about a tribe in South America. Say a man had four wives. If he was asked how many wives he had, and in that moment he only could see two of them, he had to answer “I have two wifes”. I wonder if in this culture sarcasm would be a thing.

    • vsg@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

      It seems that people in this culture can only talk about what they see. Or the guy lacks object permanence.

      • Tuuktuuk@nord.pub
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        3 days ago

        This might be about the languages where the only “numbers” they have are “zero”, “one”, “a few” and “many”.

        If a conversation was held in English, then for the speaker “two” and “four” are synonyms.