科学美国人60秒 这个词的形状是什么？（在线收听）

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

Some words imitate the sounds made by the things they describe, like “buzz” or “hiss” or “zip.” For you language lovers, that’s called onomatopoeia. But what if the the way a word sounds could evoke some other feature of an object, like its shape? Well, a new study suggests not only that it can but that the same word can do so across multiple languages. The findings are in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. [Aleksandra ?wiek et al., The?bouba/kiki?effect is robust across cultures and writing systems.]

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

凯伦·霍普金：这是《科学美国人》的60秒科学。我是凯伦·霍普金。

有些单词模仿它们描述的事物发出的声音，比如“嗡嗡声”、“嘶嘶声”或“zip”对于语言爱好者来说，这就是拟声词。但是，如果一个单词的发音方式能唤起一个物体的其他特征，比如它的形状，那该怎么办呢？一项新的研究表明，它不仅可以，而且同一个词可以跨多种语言使用。研究结果发表在《皇家学会哲学学报B》上?bouba/kiki?这种效果在不同文化和书写系统中都很有效。]

研究人员对研究语言的进化感兴趣。。。

Marcus Perlman: 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.

马尔库斯·帕尔曼：语言的古老起源可以追溯到数十万年前甚至几百万年前，现代语言也在不断进化。

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

霍普金：英国伯明翰大学的讲师马库斯.帕尔曼说，一个世纪以前，语言学家坚持我们对各种物体和动作损坏的词汇基本上是随意的，而且这些词不一定像他们所说的那样听起来像或听起来像。

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

帕尔曼：狗这个词没有狗的意思，猫这个词也没有猫的意思。

Hopkin: That makes sense because different languages have different words for the same thing. One person’s pup is another one’s perro.

霍普金：这是有道理的，因为不同的语言对同一件事有不同的词。一个人的小狗就是另一个人的佩罗。

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

帕尔曼：但现在有很多证据表明，武断主义被证明是错误的。

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

霍普金：拟声词就是一个很好的例子，手语也是一个很好的例子。手语经常使用类似于其指代物的手势，比如追踪眼泪的痕迹作为哭泣的象征。为了进一步探索词汇及其意义之间的这种联系，帕尔曼和他的同事们转向了一种称为“布巴/基基效应”的东西。

Aleksandra ?wiek: 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-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.

Aleksandra?wiek：当你看到两个形状时，一个看起来像云或花，有点圆，另一个更尖，可能看起来更像星星，当你被要求说出哪一个是bouba时，你更有可能指向一个圆的，对kiki来说，指向一个尖的。

Hopkin: Aleksandra ?wiek of the Leibniz-Center General Linguistics in Berlin. 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.

霍普金：柏林莱布尼茨普通语言学中心的亚历山德拉·韦克。她说，如果你看看bouba和kiki这两个完全是虚构的单词，其中一个可能的解释就是字母的外观。

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

?wiek:b-o-u-b-a的形状，这些字母的形状让人联想到圆的感觉。这些字母是圆的。

Hopkin: But what happens when you don’t see the words but hear them? And does it matter what language the listener speaks?

霍普金：但是当你看不到这些词却听到它们时会发生什么呢？听众说什么语言重要吗？

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

?wiek：所以我们认为在全世界范围内研究bouba/kiki是个好主意。

Hopkin: With the help of 22 different collaborators, the researchers tested the bouba/kiki effect in 25 different languages from Albanian and Armenian all the way to Zulu-with Farsi, French and Finnish in between. Participants were told to look at the two shapes and then listen to the sound: either ...

霍普金：在22名不同合作者的帮助下，研究人员用25种不同的语言测试了bouba/kiki效应，从阿尔巴尼亚语和亚美尼亚语一直到祖鲁语，其间包括波斯语、法语和芬兰语。参与者被要求看两个形状，然后听声音：要么。。。

[CLIP: Bouba sound]

Hopkin: Or ...

[CLIP: Kiki sound]

Hopkin: Then they were asked, “Which shape corresponds to the sound?” Whether they were German ...

霍普金：然后他们被问到，“哪个形状与声音相对应？”不管他们是德国人。。。

Valerie Greger: Welche Form geh?rt zu welchem Klang? [Which shape corresponds to the sound?]

瓦莱丽·格雷格：哪种形式属于哪种声音？[哪个形状对应于声音？]

Hopkin: or Spanish ...

Dennise Dalma: ?Cual figura corresponde al sonido? [Which shape corresponds to the sound?]

Hopkin: Russian ...

霍普金：或者西班牙语。。。

哪一个数字对应于声音？[哪个形状对应于声音？]

霍普金：俄罗斯。。。

Yuri Lazebnik: Для каждого слова которое вы сейчас услышите, укажите с какой из картинок оно у вас ассоциируется? [For each of the words that you are about to hear, indicate with which of the pictures you associate it.]

Yuri Lazebnik：对于你现在听到的每一个单词，请告诉我你把它和哪张图片联系起来？

Hopkin: or Thai ...

Supatchaya Tongtheng: ????????????????????????????????? [Which shape corresponds to the sound?]

Hopkin: Most participants said the rounder shape was bouba and the pointy one was kiki.

Perlman: This suggests that the effect is legit and does seem to be driven by some widely observed correspondence between the spoken words and the visual features of the shapes.

霍普金：大多数参与者说圆形的是bouba，尖形的是kiki。

帕尔曼：这表明这种效果是合法的，而且似乎是由人们广泛观察到的口语和形状的视觉特征之间的对应关系所驱动的。

Hopkin: There were some exceptions. Perlman says that speakers of Romanian, Turkish and Mandarin Chinese were more likely to make the reverse call (although my Turkish friend and her family fell squarely in the classic bouba/kiki camp).

霍普金：有一些例外。帕尔曼说，讲罗马尼亚语、土耳其语和汉语普通话的人更可能做出相反的决定

Beria Sunar: That blob looks like a bouba. Kiki has a sharp and spiky sound-like the spiky shape.

Hopkin: As to what that could mean about the evolution of language: imagine our early ancestors when they started using spoken words to refer to things.

贝里亚·苏纳尔：那团看起来像一个布巴。Kiki的声音尖锐刺耳，就像尖尖的形状。

霍普金：至于这对语言的进化意味着什么：想象一下，我们的早期祖先开始使用口语来指代事物。

?wiek: They couldn’t say, “Listen, my friend, now we’re gonna call this new object a table.”

Hopkin: So to get the conversation off the ground, they probably tried to come up with sounds that somehow evoked the object at hand.

维克：他们不能说，“听着，我的朋友，现在我们要把这个新物体叫做桌子。”

霍普金：所以，为了让谈话开始，他们可能试图想出一些声音，以某种方式唤起手上的物体。

Perlman: As a general principle, it might be that new words that are heard to resemble their referents in some way or another would have been more likely to be understood and adopted by a wider community of speakers.

Hopkin: So if folks from far-flung cultures generally agree that bouba is bulbous while kiki is sharp ...

帕尔曼：作为一项一般原则，人们听到的新词在某种程度上与所指词相似，可能更容易被更广泛的说话者群体理解和采用。

霍普金：所以，如果来自遥远文化的人们普遍认为bouba是球状的，kiki是锋利的。。。

?wiek: It shows us the potential of those correspondences to be to have been relevant at the very dawn of language-that, in fact, our ancestors could have relied upon those when establishing the first word forms.

?wiek：它向我们展示了这些对应关系在语言诞生之初就具有相关性的潜力，事实上，我们的祖先在建立第一个单词形式时可以依赖这些对应关系。

Hopkin: ?wiek says she’d like to explore the effects of other nonsense words-ones that use different consonants and vowel sounds ...

霍普金：?wiek说，她想探索其他无意义单词的效果--使用不同辅音和元音的单词。。。

?wiek: But also testing real vocabularies of languages across these possible dimensions that evoke the sense of roundness or sharpness or maybe other sensations in us because that might bring us closer to how the first words came to be ...

?wiek：但也要在这些可能的维度上测试语言的真实词汇，这些维度唤起我们的圆感或锐利感，或者其他感觉，因为这可能会让我们更接近第一个单词是如何产生的。。。

Hopkin: Which means that bouba and kiki will not be the last word.

Special thanks to my friends: [Valerie Greger, Dennise Dalma, Yuri Lazebnik, Supatchaya Tongtheng and Beria Sunar].

霍普金：这意味着bouba和kiki不会是最后的决定。

特别感谢我的朋友们