2011/9/12 Philip TAYLOR (Webmaster, Ret'd) <p.tay...@rhul.ac.uk>: > > > Tobias Schoel wrote: >> Shouldn't real dinosaurs (real as in MTV Real Life) calculate using only the >> Peano Axioms and the unary system? I mean, the natural numbers and the peano >> axioms are nature given / god given (choose whatever you like) and every >> human before homo sapiens had only the cognitive capabilities to use the >> unary system: “Hey, I saw ||||| deer, let's go hunt them.” “Oh no, I saw ||| >> lions, they would kill us.” > > Are you sure ? My understanding of palæoanthropology is that, long > before man was able to differentiate ||||| deer from |||||||| deer, > he could tell | deer from || deer from > || deer, and that was the > limit of his calculating ability. > I am not an expert but I have seen in some internet textbook of Sanskrit that originally there were just three numerals: one, two, many. This is probably a reason why some languages have singular, dual and plural.
> ** Phil. > > > > -------------------------------------------------- > Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: > http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex > -- Zdeněk Wagner http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/ http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
