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I visited a Bedouin tribe once, many years ago. There were many interest aspects to their culture, but here I will describe only one of them.

They had a decimal number system, which they employed with great aptitude in their daily life – but they did not, however, use it for “counting”.

When most people count, say a box of apples, they assign a number to each apple until all apples have been assigned a number, and then, if they need refer to anything that they have counted, they can use those numbers.

The tribespeople laughed at this method when I explained it to them. They said “If you call one apple 4, and one apple 5, what difference does it make that four is less than five? It is no better than naming them after warring tribes, or after constellations of the night sky!”

Their method of counting was different. They had a set of words that they used for labelling (I should here add that they had quite well trained memories), as distinct from counting.

The were treated almost as sacred entities – there was no fixed order to them and, more than this, it was enforced by their tribal laws that they should avoid as much as possible repeating the set in the same, or even a similar order, more than once. They called this set of words the unfixed names, and the tribespeople took the greatest pride in this invention – they regarded our system (and a great deal of habits of our culture) as breeding numerology and superstitions.

If they had to count the number of oranges in a box, and possible have to make reference to them later, they would point at each orange, and assign it an unfixed name, and also say a number, and go on in this way, increasing the number by one each time, and assigning each orange a different name.

They would not pay any attention to the number that was counted when any orange was being pointed to, but could perfectly recall each unfixed name assigned to each. This they regarded as being the only honest way to count and make reference to sets of objects.