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What happens when you can't count past four?
The New Yorker article I linked to earlier made brief mention of the Mundurukú tribe, that Dehaene and Pierre Pica studied recently (2004),
The Mundurukú … have words for numbers only up to five. (Their word for five literally means “one hand.”) Even these words seem to be merely approximate labels for them: a Mundurukú who is shown three objects will sometimes say there are three, sometimes four.
This is something I only briefly looked at when it was news in 2004, but it’s rather an interesting language. (Rather similar to the Pirahã’s language, which Dan Everett did some incredible research on some time ago, in terms of regionality and oddity — Language Log has covered this extensively.)
Anyway, this Guardian article from 2004 provides a nice starting point if you’re interested in the Mundurukú language.
From there, you can read the Pierre Pica, et al., article if you have a subscription (here, if you don’t), as well as a piece by Rochel Gelman and Randy Gallistel, “Language and the Origin of Numerical Concepts” (that one’s free).
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