这个单词的形状是什么?(上)

This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science. I’m Karen Hopkin.

这里是科学美国人——60秒科学系列，我是凯伦·霍普金。

Some words imitate the sounds made by the things they describe, like “buzz” or “hiss” or “zip.”

有些词模仿它们所描述的事物发出的声音，如“buzz”或“hiss”或“zip”。

For you language lovers, that’s called onomatopoeia.

对于语言爱好者来说，这叫做拟声词。

But what if the the way a word sounds could evoke some other feature of an object, like its shape?

但是，如果一个单词的发音方式能够唤起物体的其他特征，比如它的形状呢?

Well, a new study suggests not only that it can but that the same word can do so across multiple languages.

一项新的研究表明，这个词不仅可以这样，而且可以在多种语言中使用。

The findings are in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

这项研究结果发表在《皇家学会哲学汇刊B辑》上。

The researchers were interested in studying the evolution of language ...

研究人员对语言的进化很感兴趣。

Both the ancient origins of language going back hundreds of thousands of years ago or even millions of years ago and also the ongoing evolution of modern languages.

语言的古老起源可以追溯到数十万年前甚至数百万年前，现代语言也在不断进化。

Marcus Perlman, a lecturer at the University of Birmingham in the U.K.

英国伯明翰大学讲师马库斯·帕尔曼。

He says that, a century ago, linguists insisted that the words we assign to various objects and actions are essentially arbitrary and that words don’t necessarily resemble or sound like the things to which they refer.

他表示，一个世纪前，语言学家坚持认为，我们赋予各种物体和行为的词语本质上是任意的，词语不一定像或听起来像它们所指的事物。

There’s nothing doggy-sounding about the word dog or feline-sounding about the word cat.

“dog”这个词没有狗的声音，“cat”这个词也没有猫的声音。

That makes sense because different languages have different words for the same thing.

这是有道理的，因为不同的语言用不同的词来表示同一事物。

One person’s pup is another one’s perro.

一个人用pup(英语小狗崽)，而另一个人用perro(西班牙语小狗崽)。

But there’s a lot of evidence now suggesting that the arbitrariness doctrine is proving to be false.

但现在有很多证据表明，任意性原则被证明是错误的。

Onomatopoeia is a case in point and so is sign language, which makes frequent use of gestures that resemble their referents, like tracing the tracks of tears as a symbol for crying.

拟声词就是一个很好的例子，手语也是如此，它经常使用与所指相似的手势，比如追踪眼泪的轨迹作为哭泣的象征。

To further explore this connection between words and their meanings, Perlman and his colleagues turned to something called the bouba/kiki effect.

为了进一步探索单词及其含义之间的联系，帕尔曼和他的同事们转向了一种叫做bouba/kiki效应的研究。

What it is about is that when you see two shapes—one looks like a cloud or like a flower, kind of roundish, and the other one is more spiky, maybe looks more like a star

这个效应是当你看到两种形状时——一种像云，或像花，有点圆，另一种更尖，可能看起来更像星星，

—and when you’re asked to say which one is bouba, you will be more likely to point to a rounded one and, for kiki, to a spiky one.

当你被要求说出哪个是bouba时，你更有可能指向一个圆形的，而对于kiki，你更有可能指向一个尖的。

Aleksandra Cwiek of the Leibniz-Center General Linguistics in Berlin.

柏林莱布尼兹中心普通语言学的亚历山德拉·克维克。

She says that if you were to look at the words bouba and kiki, which are totally made up, one possible explanation for the effect could be the appearance of the letters.

她表示，如果你看一下bouba和kiki这两个词，它们完全是虚构的，对这种效应的一个可能的解释可能是字母的出现。

The shape of b-o-u-b-a, the shapes of those letters kind of evoke the sense of roundness. These letters are round.

b-o-u-b-a的形状，这些字母的形状唤起了圆形的感觉。 这些字母是圆的。

But what happens when you don’t see the words but hear them?

但如果你看到的不是这些词，而是听到了它们，会发生什么呢?

And does it matter what language the listener speaks?

这和听者说什么语言有关系吗?

So we thought it would be a wonderful idea to just study bouba/kiki across the world.

所以我们觉得在全世界范围内研究bouba/kiki是个很棒的主意。