時差N小時:挑個詞 Pick a word

People who think about language talk about how thesounds of words bear no relation to objects in theworld.

人們認(rèn)為談?wù)撜Z言的單詞讀音和世界上的所指物之間不存在必然關(guān)系。

Indeed, this has been a leading assumption inmuch of modern literary criticism, philosophy, andeven linguistics.

事實(shí)上,這一直是眾多現(xiàn)代文學(xué)批評、哲學(xué),甚至語言學(xué)的一項(xiàng)主要假設(shè)。

Not necessarily so, says Brent Berlin, ananthropologist at the University of Georgia in Athens.

然而雅典喬治亞大學(xué)的人類學(xué)家布倫特·柏林卻表示未必就是如此。

Berlin suspected that there was more than an arbitrary connection between word sounds andthe physical characteristics of objects being described,

柏林懷疑單詞讀音和被描述對象的物理特征間不只是隨意關(guān)系,

and he set up an experiment to test his hypothesis.

而且他以實(shí)驗(yàn)來驗(yàn)證自己的假說。

First, he examined the words for two animals, the tapir and the squirrel, in 19 South AmericanIndian languages.

首先,他仔細(xì)檢查了19種南美印第安語言中貘和松鼠兩種動物的單詞。

He was searching for similarities in sound-pattern.

他正在尋找的是相似的語音模式。

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."

在14種語言中,體型龐大,緩慢移動的野獸貘的名字中被賦予了“aah”,而體型嬌小,行動迅速的松鼠則被冠以“ee”的名字。

Next, to see if these sound-meanings could be generalized,

接下來要做的是驗(yàn)證這些聲音的含義是否可能具有廣義性,

Berlin read the unfamiliar words to a group of English speaking test subjects,

柏林為一群英語口語測試者朗讀不熟悉的單詞,

asking them to guess which word meant "squirrel."

讓他們猜猜哪個詞的意思是“松鼠。”

He reasoned that if word and object are arbitrarily connected by language, the result shouldbe random; sometimes right, sometimes wrong.

他推斷如果單詞和對象之間通過語言是隨意的關(guān)系存在,那結(jié)果應(yīng)該是隨機(jī)的;時對時錯。

In fact he found a greater-than-chance-level number of correct guesses.

但事實(shí)上他發(fā)現(xiàn)大于偶然次數(shù)的正確猜測。

And something else interesting showed up: when he used words from the five languages thatdidn't fit the original "aah"-"ee" pattern,

而且更為的有趣發(fā)現(xiàn)是:當(dāng)他使用來自五種語言不符合原來的“aah”- “ee”模式單詞時,

the subjects' responses were indeed random--unless the "ee" sound happened to be present, inwhich case they tended to guess "squirrel."

受試者們的反應(yīng)確實(shí)是隨機(jī)的,除非“ee”聲碰巧出現(xiàn),在這種情況下,他們更傾向于猜測“松鼠”。