Can a concept exist without words to describe it? as stated by The Economist. It is indeed a nice topic.
The Pirahã, a group of hunter-gatherers who live along the banks of the Maici River in Brazil, use a system of counting called one-two-many. In this, the word for one translates to roughly one (similar to one or two in English), the word for two means a slightly larger amount than one (similar to a few in English), and the word for many means a much larger amount. In a paper just published in Science, Peter Gordon of Columbia University uses his study of the Pirahã and their counting system to try to answer a tricky linguistic question.This question was posed by Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1930s. Whorf studied Hopi, an Amerindian language very different from the Eurasian languages that had hitherto been the subject of academic linguistics. His work led him to suggest that language not only influences thought but, more strongly, that it determines thought.