What would you do if you suddenly bumped your toe against a door frame?Depending on the severity of the pain, you might scream in pain, utter a series of curse words, or say very specific things like “Ouch” or “Wow!” Sometimes they utter exclamations.
Most languages have words that function as interjections to express pain. In Chinese it is “”.Aiyo.“” in French.Aie” and in some Australian Indigenous languages it is “TroublesomeAll have sound elements that appear to be very similar, according to a new study. And it’s no coincidence. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. Researchers found that pain projection involves the vowel “ah” (written as (a) in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)) and vowel combinations that use it, such as “oh” and “ay.” We found that there is a high possibility that it will be included. These discoveries may point to the origins of human language itself.
Lead author of the study Katarzyna Pisanski, who researches speech communication at France’s National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), said: “In all countries, the overexpression of ‘(a)’ in pain interjections is I can see it.” “It was a really strong and robust effect.” Pysanski and her colleagues also found that (a) the nonverbal, often involuntary pain signals called vocalizations that people make around the world; I also discovered that it controlled the screams. This means that words like “ouch” may have been shaped by more primitive pain sounds that humans evolved to produce, perhaps long before language or speech developed. suggests.
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Maia Ponsonnet, lead author of the study, said:Troublesome“And the French.”AieWhile learning Australia’s indigenous languages. Obviously, “this is a very naive observation,” says Ponsonnet, a linguist who also works at the CNRS. “You shouldn’t draw inferences from observations in just two languages.” So Ponsonnet and his colleagues looked at dictionaries and databases for 131 languages around the world to compare pain and two other basic emotions, disgust and disgust. I looked for an interjection to express joy. The sample included dozens of language families from Asia, Australia, Latin America, Africa, and Europe.
The researchers found significant statistical similarities in pain interjections across languages. In fact, these interjections are more similar to each other across languages than other words in the same language. This effect is do not have This also applies to interjections that express pleasure or disgust. This was driven by one category in particular: vowels. Vowels similar to (a) are often combined with other vowels to create sounds such as “ay” and “oh.”
“It’s not often that a hypothesis is tested on such a large scale that it turns out so clearly,” says Mark Dingemanse, a linguist at Radboud University in the Netherlands who also studies interjections.
This pattern suggests that the words we humans use for pain are not as arbitrary as many other words. Rather, they may be shaped by some common factor. Do those similarities come from the primitive non-verbal sounds that seem to come out automatically from us humans when we are hurt? There is a lack of research on this, so Ponsonnet teamed up with Pisanski, who studies the evolution of vocal communication in mammals, to conduct another experiment. Researchers recruited 166 people who spoke English, Japanese, Spanish, Turkish, and Mandarin Chinese and asked them to make the sounds they would make when they felt pain, disgust, or pleasure.
Now, the researchers found that the utterances of each emotion contained similar vowels across these five languages. Because of its aversion, the most common vowel was (ə) (pronounced like “eh”). To my delight, it was (i) (pronounced like “ee”). And when it came to pain, it was the now familiar (a).
The fact that (a) was overrepresented in both primordial utterances and pain interjections suggests that these two types of utterances may be related, Pisanski said. Masu. Words such as “pain” and “” may be used.Troublesomehas been shaped by the unconscious sounds we evolved to make to signal pain and suffering to each other.
Disgust and pleasure aside, the results tell a different story. Although the vocalizations of these emotions were similar around the world, the interjections were much more diverse. Perhaps this is because these emotions involve more cultural aspects than pain, Pisanski suggests. “I think pain is pain no matter where you come from,” she says. “It’s a biological experience.”
Our shared biology influences many aspects of language. Researchers are continually discovering instances of symbolism, or sound symbolism, in which the essential properties of a word have some bearing on its meaning. These examples run contrary to decades of linguistic theory that has viewed language as fundamentally arbitrary (e.g., the structure and sounds of the word “bird” have essentially no relation to actual birds. (meaning that there is nothing that makes you think of it).
However, symbolism is often do It appears throughout human language. Sign languages employ a lot of symbolism, although they have long been ignored by many linguists. In American Sign Language, “bird” is formed by using your fingers and thumb to imitate the opening and closing of a bird’s beak. Also, in spoken language, the term onomatopoeia refers to words that directly imitate sounds, such as “bang” or “splat.” Many species of birds, such as cuckoos and black-capped tits, have names that reflect their calls.
However, these connections between form and meaning are so abstract that they may be almost invisible until uncovered by researchers. For example, there is the classic “Booba Kiki” effect. People around the world are more likely to associate the nonsense word “bouba” with a round shape and “kiki” with a prickly shape.
“This is a beautiful thing about the symbolism and symbolism of sound, because somehow we all… feeling “In this case,” says Aleksandra Kakyutwik, a linguist at the Leibniz Center for General Linguistics in Germany. “It’s amazing to see people agree with that,” said a paper published last week. Journal of the Acoustical Society of AmericaĆwiek et al. showed that people associate the trilled “R” sound with roughness and the “L” sound with smoothness.
“Knowing when unrelated languages do similar things reminds us of our common humanity,” Dingemans says. In 2013, he discovered, “Huh?” And similar words in other languages are universally used in conversation. “No matter how different our languages are, which is also fascinating, they unite us.”
