How ambiguity in language can lead to unique taboos
Every year, more than a billion people around the world celebrate the
Chinese New Year and do unobtrusive linguistic dances with good luck. They can be imagined as a set of holiday rituals reminiscent of courtship. To attract good luck in their lives, they can decorate houses and doors with paper clippings of happy words or phrases. People who need to cut their hair tend to do it before the New Year, because the word “hair” (fa) sounds like the word “prosperity” - and who needs to cut off prosperity, even if you just need to trim it? The holiday menu often contains fish, because its name (s) sounds like the word “surplus”; Fet Choi algae, since in Cantonese it sounds like “rich”; oranges, because in certain regions their name sounds like “luck”.
English-speaking [
and Russian-speaking ] readers are able to appreciate a good play on words, and playing
around with homophones (words that sound the same, but having different meanings) is one of the techniques for creating good advertising. But Chinese traditions are building a wordplay to a new level - one that is deeply rooted in the roots of culture, in which success is persistently achieved with the help of positive words and deeds, and push away failure, eliminating the negative. The number “four” is stained by homophony with the word “death” - many Chinese will never buy a house with an address containing 4. Fish and bats are often found in graphic design because they sound like the words “abundance” and “luck” . Traditions of giving gifts are full of homophonic taboos; You can give apples, because they sound like “peace”, but not pears, because their name is like “separation.” The reason why certain objects or numbers are considered happy or unhappy is often explained as a matter of course because of similarly sounding words.
Good luck on the hook: flags in the form of fish at the New Year's temple fair in Beijing. Pisces is a symbol of wealth, because the word "fish" (u) sounds like abundance.But why is homophony so deeply woven into Chinese traditions, and not related to Western ones? Ambiguity and homophony are found in all languages, and very often, although the people speaking them are not even aware of this. In 1978,
psycholinguist Bruce Britton went over English texts and estimated - quite conservatively - that at least 32% of English words have more than one meaning. Among the 100 most common words, 93% have more than one meaning, and some have up to 30 meanings. Linguist and blogger Joff Pallam caught this detail by asking: “What do holes, posts, battery poles, army camps, blog articles, earrings pins, trading stations, paper mail, billboards, billing, bailouts and appointments have in common?” diplomats? ”English readers can take a few seconds to understand what unites all these seemingly strange neighbors to the word post [
in English means masts, supports, piles, poles, poles, terminals, mail and postal stations, writing to blog as well as in rus com - position and military items. As another example of unexpectedly different meanings of the same word, consider rack. In Russian, the analogue can be a “key” / approx. trans. ].
The British have a positive attitude to homophony - sometimes even fun, and therefore do not try to clarify the specific meaning of the word, even when the context leaves several possibilities. In one study, led by Victor Ferreira, people were asked to describe objects in some scenes that were simultaneously attended by a baseball bat and a bat [
in English this is one word, bat / approx. trans. ] - while people ambiguously described both the one and the other with the same word bat, sometimes even in 63% of cases.
But the Chinese, apparently, have much more sensitivity to ambiguities. Psycholinguists Michael Yip and Eiling Yi shared with me their impression that the Chinese are more likely to attempt to explain the specific meaning of an ambiguous word, even if it is clear from the context. For example, Yi argues that the Chinese can say something like "I need to renew the mortgage contract, so I will be in the bank in the afternoon — not in a glass jar, but in a financial bank." Such sensitivity to ambiguities, if it can be considered a common feature of the Chinese, is uniquely intertwined with an increased value of homophony in Chinese culture.
The links between language, mind, and culture are, for the most part, a lot of research for scientists. But even today, dancing around ambiguity and success in Chinese culture hints at interesting questions: do different languages evoke a different subjective feeling among people speaking to them? Does the importance of certain concepts - good luck and bad luck - in a culture influence the language associated with it?
Pallam argues that languages do not try to avoid ambiguity - on the contrary, as he writes: “Languages adore a plurality of meanings. They lust her. They wallow around her like a dog on fresh grass. ” Steve Pyantadoshi, a psycholinguist from the University of Rochester, agrees. They and colleagues argued that ambiguity is not a mistake of the language, but a useful feature. It allows you to create a rich dictionary, reusing the most popular and easily pronounced heaps of sounds. Without ambiguity, we would have to create longer words that discriminate concepts, or be ingenious in creating a huge collection of sounds, and also be trained to pronounce and distinguish between them.
If all languages love ambiguity, then Chinese languages burn with passion to it. Directly comparing the number of ambiguities in different languages is difficult, since even in one language different dictionaries often disagree about the number of separate meanings assigned to a word. But Chinese homophony is rich anyway.
In English, as in many other languages, the basic units of values (
morphemes ) often consist of sequences of several syllables [
exactly as in Russian / approx. trans. ] - hippo, president, fastidious. But in languages like Cantonese or Mandarin, morphemes are almost always monosyllabic. These are not necessarily separate words, since most Chinese words are groups composed of two or more morphemes, each of which represents a separate symbol. But still, each syllable needs to be assigned the correct value so that the Chinese listener will catch the meaning being put into the group. Add to this the fact that Chinese languages use far fewer vowels and consonants than English, and you get an impressive amount of values squeezed into a narrow phonetic field.
Since different meanings in Cantonese and Mandarin are usually expressed in different characters, spelling (the way language turns speech into writing) is one of the useful ways of tracking the number of different meanings with the same pronunciation. Researchers Lee Hai Tang and Charles Perfetti reported that the Chinese text with 1.8 million characters per 4,500 characters has only 420 different syllables - so each character shares an average pronunciation with 11 other characters. In the Pyantadosi dataset, even if we take only monosyllabic English words that are more ambiguous than polysyllabic, the average number of homophones for each word will be slightly less than one.
Surprisingly, there is no reason to believe that Chinese ambiguity leads to a communication problem — experiments demonstrate that the Chinese exclude meaningless meanings with the same efficiency using the context, and also tonal variations help to recognize the meaning. But the form of the written system of the Chinese, in which different meanings of the same syllable are expressed by different symbols, does not make it easy for them to forget that they simply float in a sea of ambiguities.
Lucky Fruit: Since the word for orange sounds like the word "luck", decorations for the Chinese New Year often include citrus images.Polysemy often attracts attention when they create spelling problems. And although the many meanings of the word post [
or key ] could never bother you much, you probably spent a lot of time trying to discern the meanings of the words their, they're and there [
sounding like words with the meanings of "them", "they" and "There" / approx. trans. ] to make sure that your letter reflects the meaning you need. Imagine that you have to do this with every set of homophones you’ve come across, and you’ll understand what it means to write Chinese correctly. It is not surprising that among Chinese children reading, a lack of attention to homophones accurately predicts reading problems like
dyslexia .
All this polysemy directly influences the sensation of a language by a person who speaks Chinese, since polysemantic words activate more than one meaning in the mind. We know this from experiments using semantic instruction, in which participants are asked to determine whether the target word is real in the context of other words. People usually recognize the word more quickly if it is faced with another word related by meaning — that is, the word “nurse” will be recognized more quickly if it has the word “doctor” in front of it than if it had the word “table” in front of it. When people hear many-valued words, such as “bug,” even in a sentence that obviously uses only one meaning of it, they often respond faster to the word associated with its other meanings. For example, people recognize the words “ant” and “spy” better when they hear the word “bug” than if they heard the completely unrelated word “sew”.
Many meanings of the word arise in the mind for a short time - and very quickly those meanings that do not make sense in the context of this sentence are suppressed, almost always before they pass along the contour of conscious understanding. This allows conversation to go smoothly, even in languages such as Chinese, which is full of many meanings. But researchers have found that some words attract attention more than others. Among them are words that cause a strong emotional response, especially negative or forbidden words.
When these eye-catching words resonate in sound with other meanings, they are probably much more difficult to suppress. I recall that when I grew up in a bilingual Anglo-French environment, I was constantly constrained - and I heard classmates chuckle - when I gave an oral report on seals, marine mammals, whose French name phoque homophomically with the English word fuck, which definitely should not be used in classroom. And this word was surprisingly unpleasant to use, regardless of the clarity of its context. Aversion to certain homophones can be a universal quality; I noticed that although even in such words as bit [a
piece, small coin, habits, pop number, information unit, bit, mouthpiece, boring, etc. ] or fit [
fit, ready, competent, fit, prone, in good shape, fit, fit, mood, etc. ] several unrelated values are packed, the word shit has no censorship meaning. And although there are words that are very similar to certain emotionally charged words, they are often changed to synonyms (cock - rooster, ass - donkey).
The unbridled ambiguity of the Chinese leads to many phoque moments; the phonetic space is crowded, and the likelihood that a perfectly normal word will overlap in sound with a more emotionally sharp one, much more than in English. The cultural obsession with homophony is fueled by the compact nature of Chinese phonetic space.
In turn, culture influences what values will attract attention. Chinese tradition asserts that the words you utter can attract good luck — or failure — to your life, a tradition that concentrates as much as possible during New Year's celebrations, when all talk of death, illness or divorce is forbidden, and people shower each other with wishes of health, wealth and success. It is not surprising to find that words associated with luck — and especially failure — fall into the category of attention-grabbing words that the Chinese cannot easily ignore. And although no experiments have yet directly verified this, it would give a good explanation for why the Chinese bypass some completely ordinary words, and to others, based only on what emotionally bright words they resemble. Perhaps, as suggested by my Chinese colleague, Wei Tsai, it is hard for them to suppress the meanings of words associated with death or misfortune during the New Year celebrations, when everyone is eager to sound good luck wishes.
Polysemy creates a unique connection between the meaning and use of words. When one word has many meanings, the probability of calling all of them increases, which changes our perception of both the world and its meanings. If polysemy causes cultural associations, because of which people bypass certain words as a side just because they sound like “bad” - perhaps they can have a wider influence on the lexicon. Is it possible that cultural associations that form the linguistic behavior of people end up embedded in the language itself?
I asked researchers Ted Gibson and Steve Pyantadosi, whose work suggests that languages use polysemy for their own benefit, whether there is statistical evidence that languages repel polysemy from negatively charged words (or attract positively charged words). There is no such evidence yet. They agreed that this idea is reasonable and worthy of study. To test, psycholinguists will need to establish that emotionally unpleasant words (such as shit or rape) have fewer homophones than is expected based on indicators such as the number of syllables or the frequency of use of their constituent sounds. And, perhaps, the words that evoke strong positive emotions (rich or free) have more than the number of individual meanings put by them.
If such a result is found, he will present a new method of thinking about how the language is formed under the influence of cultural values. In Chinese, one can expect to find a reflection of Chinese traditions associated with luck, in which certain homophones pass by because of their accidental association with failure and adversity, while others support it because of their accidental connection with luck and prosperity. The Chinese language, with its abundance of ambiguity, offers a particularly fertile ground for testing this hypothesis.
We are infinitely fascinated by the interrelation of language and culture — how culture promotes its values and point of view on the world into language, and how language in turn forms the thoughts of speakers. But most of the talk about the connections of language and culture comes down to a very limited set of questions. For example: what can be said about Japanese culture, in the language of which there is a special word ijirashi [ijirashii], which means observing a person who worthily overcomes an obstacle? Is it difficult for people who speak a language in which blue and green are in one word to distinguish these two colors? These questions focus on how languages use words to describe reality, and how words that are given to us, as native speakers, shape our view of reality.
But the Chinese are hinting at closer ties between language and culture. Perhaps languages that pack a lot of meanings into small phonetic spaces increase the sensitivity of their speakers to ambiguity, and with it, the cultural importance of playing words and puns; perhaps cultural associations give an emotional tinge to special cases of multiple meanings, changing the language patterns used by people, and, possibly, as a result, the lexical landscapes of the languages as a whole.
Will good luck and homophones give us the door to this unmarked territory of reason? If yes, then I, as a psycholinguist, regard this as a rare good fortune.
Julia Sedivi taught linguistics and psychology at Brown University and the University of Calgary. She is the author of the books “Sold by the language: how advertisers talk to you and what it says about you”, and also “Language in the mind: an introduction to psycholinguistics” [ Language in Mind: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics]