【英语时差8,16】挑个词

 People who think about language talk about how the sounds of words bear no relation to objects in the world. Indeed, this has been a leading assumption in much of modern literary criticism, philosophy, and even linguistics¹.   Not necessarily so, says Brent Berlin, an anthropologist² at the University of Georgia in Athens. Berlin suspected that there was more than an arbitrary connection between word sounds and the physical characteristics of objects being described, and he set up an experiment to test his hypothesis.

First, he examined the words for two animals, the tapir and the squirrel, in 19 South American Indian languages. He was searching for similarities in sound-pattern. In 14 of those languages, the tapir--which is a big, slow-moving beast--was given a name with the sound "aah," whereas the small, quick squirrel was given a name based on the sound "ee."Next, to see if these sound-meanings could be generalized, Berlin read the unfamiliar³ words to a group of English speaking test subjects, asking them to guess which word meant "squirrel." He reasoned that if word and object are arbitrarily connected by language, the result should be random⁴; sometimes right, sometimes wrong. In fact he found a greater-than-chance-level number of correct guesses.

And something else interesting showed up: when he used words from the five languages that didn't fit the original "aah"-"ee" pattern, the subjects' responses were indeed random--unless the "ee" sound happened to be present, in which case they tended to guess "squirrel."  

1 linguistics   

n.语言学

参考例句：

• She plans to take a course in applied linguistics.她打算学习应用语言学课程。
• Linguistics is a scientific study of the property of language.语言学是指对语言的性质所作的系统研究。

2 anthropologist   

n.人类学家，人类学者

参考例句：

• The lecturer is an anthropologist.这位讲师是人类学家。
• The anthropologist unearthed the skull of an ancient human at the site.人类学家在这个遗址挖掘出那块古人类的颅骨。

3 unfamiliar   

adj.陌生的，不熟悉的

参考例句：

• I am unfamiliar with the place and the people here.我在这儿人地生疏。
• The man seemed unfamiliar to me.这人很面生。

4 random   

adj.随机的；任意的；n.偶然的(或随便的)行动

参考例句：

• The list is arranged in a random order.名单排列不分先后。
• On random inspection the meat was found to be bad.经抽查，发现肉变质了。