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People who think about language talk about how the sounds of words bear no relation to objects in the world.
人们认为谈论语言的单词读音和世界上的所指物之间不存在必然关系。
Indeed, this has been a leading assumption in much of modern literary criticism, philosophy, and even linguistics.
事实上,这一直是众多现代文学批评、哲学,甚至语言学的一项主要假设。
Not necessarily so, says Brent Berlin, an anthropologist at the University of Georgia in Athens.
然而雅典乔治亚大学的人类学家布伦特·柏林却表示未必就是如此。
Berlin suspected that there was more than an arbitrary connection between word sounds and the physical characteristics of objects being described,
柏林怀疑单词读音和被描述对象的物理特征间不只是随意关系,
and he set up an experiment to test his hypothesis.
而且他以实验来验证自己的假说。
First, he examined the words for two animals, the tapir and the squirrel, in 19 South American Indian languages.
首先,他仔细检查了19种南美印第安语言中貘和松鼠两种动物的单词。
He was searching for similarities in sound-pattern.
他正在寻找的是相似的语音模式。
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种语言中,体型庞大,缓慢移动的野兽貘的名字中被赋予了“aah”,而体型娇小,行动迅速的松鼠则被冠以“ee”的名字。
Next, to see if these sound-meanings could be generalized,
接下来要做的是验证这些声音的含义是否可能具有广义性,
Berlin read the unfamiliar words to a group of English speaking test subjects,
柏林为一群英语口语测试者朗读不熟悉的单词,
asking them to guess which word meant "squirrel."
让他们猜猜哪个词的意思是“松鼠。”
He reasoned that if word and object are arbitrarily connected by language, the result should be random; sometimes right, sometimes wrong.
他推断如果单词和对象之间通过语言是随意的关系存在,那结果应该是随机的;时对时错。
In fact he found a greater-than-chance-level number of correct guesses.
但事实上他发现大于偶然次数的正确猜测。
And something else interesting showed up: when he used words from the five languages that didn't fit the original "aah"-"ee" pattern,
而且更为的有趣发现是:当他使用来自五种语言不符合原来的“aah”- “ee”模式单词时,
the subjects' responses were indeed random--unless the "ee" sound happened to be present, in which case they tended to guess "squirrel."
受试者们的反应确实是随机的,除非“ee”声碰巧出现,在这种情况下,他们更倾向于猜测“松鼠”。
