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SUMMARY:Fox's son\, they slept five\, imitation of people: Kuikuro numeral
 s and counting - Bruna Franchetto\, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (
 UFRJ)
DTSTART:20161205T171500Z
DTEND:20161205T190000Z
UID:TALK68286@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Dr Oliver Mayeux
DESCRIPTION:Kuikuro people live at the Southern periphery of Amazonia\, in
  the multilingual and multiethnic regional society known as Upper Xingu (B
 razil). They speak one of the dialects of a Southern Carib language. On mo
 re than one occasion\, in the Kuikuro village of Ipatse\, the old Hopesé\
 , Johé and Aitsehü\, who still remember the Kuikuro numbers or numbering
  or counting systems\, concluded their explanations with a narrative (what
  we would call mythical). The Fox steals a woman to make her his wife\; sh
 e became pregnant and gave birth to a child without joints. Arms\, hands\,
  feet\, legs were stiff limbs and made as single pieces. While his wife wo
 rked in the cassava field\, Fox broke the limbs of the child with bites an
 d blows\, forming\, so to speak\, all his joints. The association between 
 this narrative and the Kuikuro numeral and counting systems\, whose base i
 s fifth-vigesimal\, leads us to consider together the creation of disconti
 nuous from continuous\, and vice versa (remembering Lévi-Strauss)\, and t
 he pre-lexical cognitive nature of count(able)-mass distinction present in
  natural human languages. There are a number of questions for which we pro
 pose some answers. Do the “cardinal” Kuikuro numbers denote precise qu
 antities? Why are the numerals tilako (three) and nhatüi (five) used to d
 enote a few and many\, respectively\, as they were borders of the nearly e
 nough and the almost excessive? What about the obsession with ordering? Or
 dinal numbers are constructed either by derivational morphology from cardi
 nal numbers\, or they introduce relational terms\, like kinship terms. Dat
 a and issues arising from the investigation of Kuikuro numbers and countin
 g will lead us to comparisons with other numeral systems of the South-Amer
 ican lowlands\, exploring an incipient but already rich literature on the 
 subject\, together with the controversy triggered by the supposed discover
 y of peoples and languages “without numbers” (the Pirahã case). 
LOCATION:Faculty of English\, Room GR-06/07
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