South America for Kids — Yanomami Counting

LET’S TRY YANOMAMI COUNTING

The YANOMAMI are a group of about 35,000 people who live scatted across 200-250 villages in the AMAZON RAINFOREST. They have long been a the focus of anthropologists who study them as an example of a people who live in almost complete isolation from contemporary society.

A customary Yanomami numeric system has only three “numbers”:
1 = MONI,
2 = POLAKAE and
many = JAR(E)H(E).
The Yanomami use their fingers and hands for counting: one finger = IMI, all fingers on a hand = IMIK.

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