What would you say if you suddenly stub your toe on a door frame? Depending on how much it hurt, it might cried out in painrelease a stream of ads—or make a very specific exclamation, like “ouch” or “ouch.”
Most languages have a word that serves as an interjection to express pain. In Mandarin, “oh-yo” in French, “Wow“. And in several Australian indigenous languages, “he did“. They all have sound elements that seem pretty similar, and that’s no coincidence, according to a new study Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. Researchers have found that pain is interjections it is likely to contain the vowel sound “ah”. (a) written in the International Phonetic Alphabet or IPA) and the vowel combinations that use it, such as “ow” and “ai”. These findings are reversible the origin of human language the same
“In every country, you see this over-representation of ‘(a)’ in pain interjections,” says lead study author Katarzyna Pisanski, who studies voice communication at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). “It was a very strong and robust effect.” Pisanski and his colleagues also found that (a) the non-linguistic, often involuntary, cries of pain that people make around the world dominate what they call vocalizations, such as “ouch.” to have shaped the words more primal sounds humans evolved from pain, perhaps long before language or speech developed.
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Maïa Ponsonnet, lead author of the study, first noticed that “he did“and the French”Wow” while studying indigenous Australian languages. Of course, “it’s a very naive observation,” says Ponsonnet, a linguist who also works at the CNRS. “You shouldn’t draw any inferences from observations of two languages.” So Ponsonnet and his colleagues scoured the dictionaries and databases of 131 world languages for interjections that express pain and two other basic emotions, disgust and joy. The sample included dozens of language families from Asia, Australia, Latin America, Africa, and Europe.
The researchers found striking statistical similarities in pain interjections between languages. In fact, these interjections were more similar between languages than other words in the same language. This effect—did no interjections expressing joy or disgust are true, driven by a particular category of vowels: (a) – which often combine with others to produce sounds like “ouch” and “ow”.
“It’s not often that a hypothesis … is tested on such a large scale and comes out so clearly,” says Mark Dingemanse, a linguist at Radboud University in the Netherlands who also studies interjections.
The model suggests that the words we humans use for pain are not as arbitrary as many other words. Instead, they are probably shaped by some common factors. Could these similarities come from the primal, non-linguistic sounds that humans seem to automatically produce when we are hurt? Research on this is scarce, so Ponsonnet teamed up with Pisanski, who studies the evolution of vocal communication in mammals, to carry out another experiment. The researchers recruited 166 speakers of English, Japanese, Spanish, Turkish or Mandarin to create the sounds they would make if they felt pain, disgust or joy.
This time the team found that—for each emotion—vowels had similar vowel sounds in those five languages. For disgust, the most common vowel was (ə) (pronounced like “uh”); for joy, it was (i) (pronounced like “ee”); and for mine, it was now known (a).
According to Pisanski, the overrepresentation of (a) in primal vowels for pain and interjections suggests that these two types of expression may be related. Maybe words like “ouch” and “he did” are adapted to the involuntary sounds we have evolved to express pain or distress to each other.
To their disgust and glee, the results tell a different story. Although the vocalizations of these emotions are similar around the world, their interjections were much more diverse, perhaps because these feelings have more cultural dimensions than pain, suggests Pisanski. “Pain is pain, I think, no matter where you’re from,” he says. “It’s a biological experience.”
Our shared biology influences many aspects of language. Researchers are constantly finding cases of symbolism or sound iconicity, in which the inherent nature of a word has some connection with its meaning. These cases run counter to decades of linguistic theory, which considered language to be fundamentally arbitrary (meaning, for example, that there was nothing in the structure or sounds of the word “bird” that would naturally make someone think of a real bird).
Yet iconicity often he does they appear throughout human language. Sign language, long forgotten by many linguists, uses a lot of symbolism: in American Sign Language, “bird” is created by using your finger and thumb to mime opening and closing a bird’s beak. And in spoken languages, the term onomatopoeia refers to words that directly imitate sounds, such as “bang” or “splat.” Many types of birds, such as the cuckoo and the grasshopper, have been given names that echo their calls.
But these connections between form and meaning can be so abstract that they are invisible until researchers reveal them. For example, there is the classic “butterfly” effectin which people all over the world associate the nonsensical word “bouba” with a rounded shape and a pointed “kiki”.
“That’s (what’s) beautiful about the iconicity and symbolism of sound, because somehow we all have it the feeling about this,” says Aleksandra Ćwie, a linguist at the Leibniz Center for General Linguistics in Germany. “It’s great to see people agree with them.” in one paper published last weekalso Journal of the Acoustical Society of AmericaĆwie and his colleagues showed that people associate the trilled “R” sound with roughness and the “L” sound with smoothness.
“Knowing when unrelated languages do things in a similar way will bring home our common humanity,” says Dingemans, who made the discovery in 2013. “Huh?” and similar words in other languages are universal in the conversation “The extent to which the languages are different – and that’s also fascinating – they also unite us.”
