外刊听读| 经济学人 相似的“妈妈”发音

Johnson

约翰逊

Mum’s the word

不要外传

Why some terms sound similar in completely unrelated languages

为什么有些词语在不同的语言中发音相似

 

1 A MAP BOUNCING around social media shows “languages where the word for ‘mother/mom’ takes an m-sound”. It puts old maps of defunct empires to shame; scores of countries are shaded red.

 

一张在社交媒体上流传的地图展示了"'母亲/妈妈'这个词带有m音的各种语言"，其中有几十个国家被涂成红色。它让那些灭亡帝国的旧版图感到羞愧。

 

2 There are two ways this near-universality might have come about. One is by spread. It is possible that language was invented only once, before the human exodus from Africa. This hypothesis—that there was once a “Proto-World” language— has led some researchers to scour distant languages in search of commonalities, which can then be used to try to reconstruct the parent words. But such work is rejected by most mainstream linguists. Human language is maybe 100,000 years old, possibly much older. Languages change vastly even in mere millennia. “Proto-World” proposals remain controversial at best.

 

这种近乎全世界共有的现象可能有两种产生方式。一种是通过传播。在人类从非洲出走之前，语言有可能只被发明了一次。曾经有一种“原世界语”假说，为了验证它，一些研究人员搜索久远的语言，来寻找它们的共同点，然后尝试重建“母词”。但是这种努力不被大多数语言学家所接受。人类的语言可能有10万年的历史，也可能更久远。即使在短短的几千年里，语言也会发生巨大的变化。“原世界语”的设想充其量也是有留有争议的。

 

3 There is another reason so many languages might have an m-sound in “mother”. Linguists generally argue for “the arbitrariness of the sign”: no connection exists between the word dog and the furry quadruped. A rare exception is onomatopoeia, where words representing the bark of a dog (bow-wow or Spanish’s guau-guau) vaguely resemble the sound. Yet most things are not subject to naming this way.

 

还有一个说法能够解释这么多的语言中有同一个 "母亲"的发音。语言学家通常将之解释为"语言符号的任意性"：狗这个词和毛茸茸的四足动物之间不存在任何联系。一个罕见的例外是拟声词，代表狗叫的词（bow-wow或西班牙语的guau-guau）声音隐约相似。然而，大多数事物的命名都不是用拟声的方法。

 

4 What about mama? It does not sound like a mother, but it does piggyback on another feature of language: the fact that some sounds are more widespread than others around the world. There are many dozens of observed consonants, from the clicks of some African languages to the “ejectives” (which make use of air pressure built up in the mouth) of Caucasian ones. These sounds are rare and hard for non-natives to learn.

 

那么妈妈呢？它听起来并不像母亲，但它确实捎带上了语言的另一个特点：有些声音在世界各地比其他声音更普遍存在。有几十个被观察到的辅音，从一些非洲语言的吸气音到高加索语言的"外爆音"（利用口腔内积聚的空气压力）。这些声音很罕见，非母语者很难学会。

 

5 In contrast, a few—such as b, m, p, t, d and k—show up far more frequently, in nearly every spoken language in the world. That is almost certainly because they are easy to make. A baby vocalising will, at first, make a vowel-like sound, usually something like “ah”, which requires little in the way of control over the mouth. If they briefly close their mouth and continue vocalising, air will come out of their nose, thus making the m-sound that is used in “mother” around the world.

 

相比之下，少数几个音--如b、m、p、t、d和k--出现的频率要高得多，它们几乎出现在世界每一种口语中。有一个几乎可以肯定的原因，它们很容易产生。婴儿一开始会发出类似元音的声音，通常是像 "啊"，这种声音不需要婴儿对嘴进行控制。如果他们短暂地闭上嘴巴，继续发声，空气就会从他们的鼻子里出来，从而发出世界各地的"妈妈"中的m音。

 

6 Though the “mamas” bear the most obvious similarity, the “papas” have striking commonalities, too. Babies can easily stop their breath when they close their lips (rather than going on breathing through the nose). This produces a b- or a p-sound. It is surely for this reason that so many names for “father” use these consonants: papa in English, abb in Arabic and baba in Mandarin. T- and d-sounds are similarly basic, involving a simple tap of the tongue against the teeth: hence daddy, tatay (Tagalog) or tayta (Quechua).

 

尽管 "妈妈 "具有最明显的相似性，但 "爸爸 "也有惊人的共同点。当婴儿闭上嘴唇（而不是继续用鼻子呼吸）时，他们很容易暂时停止呼吸，这就产生了b-或p的音。肯定是因为这个原因，许多 "父亲 "的发音中都使用这些辅音：英语中的papa，阿拉伯语中的abb和普通话中的baba。T音和D音也是类似的基本音，涉及到舌头对牙齿的简单敲击：因此，daddy、tatay（他加禄语）或tayta（克丘亚语）。

 

7 Father and mother are, therefore, an oddity. F- is not especially easy to articulate; th-sounds are even harder. English, Greek and Spanish are unusual in having them, and French-, German- and Italian-speakers struggle mightily with them, often substituting related consonants. Even surrounded by English from birth, Anglophone babies master consonants in an order that roughly mirrors their frequency around the world. Children may struggle with th-sounds when they are five, or older still in many cases.

 

因此，父亲和母亲是一种奇特的现象。F-并不是特别容易的发音；th音更难。英语、希腊语和西班牙语都有这些音，而讲法语、德语和意大利语的人对这些音的掌握很费劲，他们常常用相关的辅音代替。即使一出生就被英语包围，英语国家的婴儿掌握辅音的顺序也大致反映了它们在世界各地的使用频率。孩子们在5岁时可能会对th音感到吃力，在大多数情况下，这种吃力会持续更久。

 

8 This helps solve the mystery of why, despite parents being formally known as “mother” and “father”, so few children call them that. (The same thing can be seen elsewhere, too: Russian for “father” is formally otyets, but children call their dads papa.) Few parents will insist on children using the proper term to refer to them, especially if it means waiting until a child is seven and can pronounce it.

 

这有助于解释为什么尽管父母的正式称呼是 "母亲 "和 "父亲"，但很少有孩子这样称呼他们。(同样的事情在其他地方也可以看到。正式俄语中的 "父亲"是otyets，但孩子们却叫他们的爸爸为papa）。很少有父母会坚持让孩子使用适当的词语来称呼他们，特别是如果这意味着要等到孩子七岁并且能够发出这种声音。

 

9 Languages can violate these rules, though they do so within reason. Marathi has aai for “mother”, no doubt because vowels are especially easy for infants. And Georgian, like a few other languages, switches the expected labels: “mother” is deda and “father” is mama. No one uses a tongue-twister like, say, throlth.

 

语言可以违反这些规则，尽管它们是在合理范围内。马拉地语的"母亲"发音中aai，无疑是因为元音对婴儿来说特别容易。格鲁吉亚语，像其他一些语言一样，切换了预期的标签。"母亲 "是deda，"父亲 "是mama。没有语言使用绕口令般的发音，例如throlth。

 

10 Roman Jakobson, a Russian linguist, explained the final piece of the puzzle in the 1950s. Are babies consciously naming their parents the same way the world over? Probably not. They are cooing and babbling to practise the use of their vocal apparatus. It is the parents, desperate to communicate, who identify those early sounds as the baby’s “names” for them. (This may be why the names often feature two repeated syllables, to distinguish them from random sounds.)

 

俄罗斯语言学家Roman Jakobson在20世纪50年代补上了这一难题的最后一块拼图。世界各地的婴儿是否有意识地以同样的方式为他们的父母命名？结果可能不是。他们在轻柔低语，咿咿呀呀地练习他们的发声器官。背后的原因是因为父母急于沟通，将这些早期的声音确定为婴儿对他们的 "名字"。(这可能就是为什么这些名字经常有两个重复的音节，以区别于其他随机的声音）。

 

11 It is hard to find linguistic universals amid the world’s dazzling variety. It is heartwarming to find a commonality embedded in another universal: the love that babies inspire in their mamas and their papas.

 

人们很难找到世界上各种令人眼花缭乱的语言之间的普遍性。然而，令人感动的是，人们在另一种普遍性中发现了一个共同点：婴儿在父母身上激发出的爱。