Expressions of Pain May Have a Common Origin

What would you say if you suddenly stubbed your toe on the door frame? Depending on how much it hurts, cry out in painshout profanities or say a very specific exclamation like “ah” or “ow”.

Most languages ​​have a word that acts as an exclamation to express pain. In Mandarin it is:ai-yo.“in French”Yes.” And in several Indigenous Australian languages, “collar.” They all have sonic elements that sound very similar, and that’s no coincidence, according to a new study out of New York. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. Researchers say pain injections More likely to contain the vowel “ah” (spelled (a) in the International Phonetic Alphabet, or IPA) and vowel combinations that use it, such as “ow” and “ai.” These findings may indicate: origins of human language itself.

“In every country, you see an over-representation of ‘(a)’ in pain exclamations,” says Katarzyna Pisanski, senior author of the study who studies vocal communication at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). “It was a really strong, solid impact.” Pisanski and colleagues also found (a) a predominance of non-linguistic, often involuntary cries of pain, called vocalizations, uttered by people around the world. This means that words like “ah” more primitive sounds pain that humans probably evolved to do long before language or speech evolved.

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Maïa Ponsonnet, the lead author of the study, “was the first to notice the similarity betweencollar” and the French “Yes”When studying the Indigenous languages ​​of Australia. “This is a very naive observation,” says Ponsonnet, a linguist who also works at CNRS. “You shouldn’t draw any conclusions just by observing two languages.” So Ponsonnet and his colleagues searched dictionaries and databases of 131 world languages ​​to find interjections expressing pain and two other basic emotions, disgust and joy. The sample included dozens of language families from Asia, Australia, Latin America, Africa, and Europe.

Researchers found striking statistical similarities in pain exclamations across languages. In fact, these interjections were more similar across languages ​​than they were to other words of the same language. This effect – which is Negative applies to interjections expressing joy or disgust – specifically guided by a category of vowel vowels: (a) – similar vowels that often combine with others to form sounds such as “ai” and “ow”.

“It’s not often that a hypothesis is tested on such a large scale and emerges so clearly,” says Mark Dingemanse, a linguist at Radboud University in the Netherlands who also studies interjections.

This model shows that the words we humans use for pain are not as arbitrary as many other words. Instead, they are likely shaped by some common factors. Could these similarities be due to primitive, non-linguistic sounds that are automatically emitted from us humans when we are hurt? Since research on this topic was insufficient, Ponsonnet joined forces with Pisanski, who studies the evolution of vocal communication in mammals, to conduct another experiment. Researchers recruited 166 English, Japanese, Spanish, Turkish or Mandarin speakers to produce sounds they would make when experiencing pain, disgust or joy.

This time, the team found that the vocalizations for each emotion contained similar vowels in these five languages. The most common vowel for disgust was (ə) (pronounced like “uh”); for joy (i) (pronounced “ee”); and for the pain it was now familiar (a).

The overrepresentation of (a) in both basic vocalizations and exclamations for pain suggests that these two types of expressions may be related, Pisanski says. It is possible to have words like “ah” and “collarIt is shaped by the involuntary sounds we produce to signal pain or distress to each other.

The results in terms of disgust and joy tell a different story. Pisanski argues that although the voicing of these emotions is similar around the world, their interjections are much more diverse, perhaps because these emotions carry more cultural dimensions than pain. “I think no matter where you are from, pain is pain,” he says. “This is a biological experience.”

Our shared biology has an impact on many aspects of language. Researchers are constantly discovering cases of symbolism, or sound iconicity, where the inherent nature of a word has a connection with its meaning. These cases run counter to decades of language theory that regards language as fundamentally arbitrary (meaning, for example, that there is nothing in the structure or sounds of the word “bird” that would make someone think of an actual bird).

Yet iconicity is often to do It shows up everywhere in human language. Sign languages, long ignored by many linguists, use a lot of symbolism: “bird” in American Sign Language is formed by using fingers and thumbs to imitate the opening and closing of a bird’s beak. And in spoken languages, the term onomatopoeia refers to words that directly imitate sounds, such as “bang” or “splat.” Many bird species, such as the cuckoo and chickadee, are given names that reflect their calls.

But these connections between form and meaning can be so abstract that they are almost invisible until they are uncovered by researchers. For example, there is a classic:bouba-kiki” effectPeople around the world are more likely to associate the silly word “bouba” with a round shape and the word “kiki” with a spiked shape.

“That’s the beautiful thing about the iconicity and symbolism of sound; Because somehow we are all one feeling “On this issue,” says Aleksandra Ćwiek, a linguist at the Leibniz Center for General Linguistics in Germany. “It is surprising to see that people agree on this issue,” in an article published last week. Journal of the American Acoustical SocietyĆwiek and colleagues showed that people associate the vibrating “R” sound with roughness and the “L” sound with softness.

“Learning that unrelated languages ​​do things in similar ways reveals our common humanity,” says Dingemanse, who found in 2013 that “Ha?” and similar words in other languages ​​are universal in speech. “No matter how different languages ​​are – which is fascinating – they also unite us.”