【科学美国人精读】在不同的语言中，我们是如何表达爱的？

原文译文

Emotional Words Such as “Love” Mean Different Things in Different Languages.

像“爱”这样的情感词汇在不同的语言中有不同的含义。

An analysis of more than 2,000 languages reveals differences in the way feelings are conceptualized among cultures.

一项对2000多种语言的分析揭示了不同文化之间情感概念化的不同方式。

1. Humans boast a rich trove of words to express the way we feel. Some are not easily translatable between languages: Germans use “Weltschmerz” to refer to a feeling of melancholy caused by the state of the world. And the indigenous Baining people of Papua New Guinea say “awumbuk” to describe a social hangover that leaves people unmotivated and listless for days after the departure of overnight guests. Other terms seem rather common—“fear,” for example, translates to “takot” in Tagalog and “ótti” in Icelandic. These similarities and differences raise a question: Does the way we experience emotions cross cultural boundaries?

人类拥有丰富的词汇来表达自己的感受。有些词很难在不同语言之间进行翻译：德国人用“Weltschmerz”来指代因世界现状而起的忧郁情绪。巴布亚新几内亚的土著巴宁人用“awumbuk”来形容一种社交宿醉，这种宿醉会让人们在客人离开后几天都毫无动力、无精打采。其他术语似乎相当普遍——例如，“恐惧”在塔加洛语中译为“takot”，在冰岛语中译为“otti”。这些相似性和差异性引出了一个问题，即我们体验情感的方式是否跨越了文化的界限?

2. Scientists have long questioned whether human emotions share universal roots or vary across cultures. Early evidence suggested that, in the same way that primary colors give rise to all of the other hues, there was a core set of primary emotions from which all other feelings arose. In the 1970s, for instance, researchers reported that people in an isolated cultural group in Papua New Guinea were able to correctly identify emotional expressions in photographed Western faces at rates higher than chance. “This was largely taken as evidence that people around the world could understand emotions in the same way,” says Kristen Lindquist, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

长期以来，科学家们一直在追问人类的情感是具有一致的根源，还是因文化而异。早期的证据表明，就像原色产生所有其他色调一样，有一组核心的基本情绪，所有其他的感觉都是从这些情绪中产生的。例如，在20世纪70年代，研究人员报告说，在巴布亚新几内亚一个与世隔绝的文化群体中，人们能够正确识别照片中西方人脸上的表情的几率比随机的要高。北卡罗莱纳大学教堂山分校(University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)心理学和神经科学副教授克里斯汀林德奎斯特(Kristen Lindquist)表示:“这在很大程度上证明，世界各地的人都能用同样的方式理解情感。”

3. But more recent studies have challenged this idea. Work from a variety of fields—psychology, neuroscience and anthropology—has provided evidence that the way people express and experience emotions may be greatly influenced by our cultural upbringing. Many of these studies have limitations, however. Most have either looked only at comparisons between two cultures or focused on big, industrialized countries, says Joshua Jackson, a doctoral student in psychology at Chapel Hill. “We haven’t really had the power to test [the universality of emotion] on an appropriate scale.”

但最近的研究对这一观点提出了挑战。心理学、神经科学和人类学等多个领域的研究表明，人们表达和体验情感的方式可能受到文化的极大影响。然而，这些研究中的许多都有局限性。教堂山学院(Chapel Hill)心理学博士生乔舒亚·杰克逊(Joshua Jackson)说，大多数人要么只看两种文化之间的比较，要么只关注工业化大国。“我们还没有能力在适当的范围内测试(情绪的普遍性)。”

4. To explore the question of common emotions, Jackson, Lindquist and their colleagues teamed up with researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, in one of the largest studies of cross-cultural emotional expression to date. Their work, which was published today in Science, drew on vocabulary from 2,474 languages. It revealed a great deal of variability in the way emotions are verbally expressed—as well as some underlying commonalities. “Psychologists have been debating whether emotions are universal or variable across cultures for a long time,” Jackson says. “I think what this paper shows is that both sides have some merit.”

为了探索共同情感的问题，杰克森、林德奎斯特和他们的同事与德国耶拿市马克斯·普朗克人类历史科学研究所的研究人员合作，进行了迄今为止规模最大的跨文化情感表达研究。他们的研究成果今天发表在《科学》杂志上，研究涉及2474种语言的词汇。它揭示了情绪口头表达方式的大量可变性，以及一些潜在的共性。杰克逊说:“长期以来，心理学家一直在争论，情感是普遍存在的，还是在不同文化中有所变化的。”“我认为这篇论文表明，两种观点都有其可取之处。”

5. To examine variability in emotional expression, the researchers used computational tools to create a massive database of colexifications, instances where a single word has multiple meanings. Examples include “ruka,” which means both hand and arm in Russian, and “funny,” which means both odd and humorous in English. Previous investigations of non-emotional words have demonstrated that colexified ones tend to have common properties—words that describe “sea” and “water” are more likely to be paired than those for “sun” and “water”—suggesting that speakers of a language perceive similarities in them.

为了研究情绪表达的可变性，研究人员使用计算工具创建了一个庞大的共化数据库，其中一个词有多个含义。例如“ruka”在俄语中是手和胳膊的意思，“funny”在英语中是奇怪和幽默的意思。先前对非情绪化词汇的研究表明，共物化词汇往往有共同的属性——描述“海”和“水”的词汇比描述“太阳”和“水”的词汇更有可能配对——这表明人们在这些词语中找到了其相似之处。

6. The team then used its database to generate networks of colexified words among 20 language families (groups of languages that share ancestral roots) to compare emotion-associated vocabulary worldwide. Doing so revealed significant differences in how emotions were conceptualized across cultures—three times more variation than in terms used to describe color. For example, in some languages, the words for “surprise” tended be grouped with those for fear, while in others, the same concept was paired with more pleasant states, such as happiness. Through further analysis, the researchers also found that this diversity was partially dependent on the geographical proximity of language families—the closer they were, the more commonalities they were likely to share. “That suggests the extent to which cultures were likely to have historical contact, either via trade or migration or conquest allowed these cultures to interact and perhaps transmit and borrow emotion concepts from one another,” Lindquist says.

然后，研究小组利用其数据库，在20个语言家族(同源的语言群)中生成共形词网络，以比较世界各地与情感相关的词汇。这样做揭示了情绪在不同文化中被概念化的显著差异——用来描述情绪的词汇比用来描述颜色的词汇多三倍。例如，在一些语言中，表示“惊讶”的词往往与表示恐惧的词放在一起，而在另一些语言中，这些词语却与一些描述愉快的词语放在一起，如幸福。通过进一步的分析，研究人员还发现，这种多样性在一定程度上依赖于语言家庭的地理邻近性——他们之间的距离越近，他们可能共享的共性就越多。林德奎斯特说:“这表明，无论是通过贸易、移民还是征服，这些文化都可能在一定程度上具有历史联系，这使得这些文化能够相互影响，或许还能相互传播和借鉴情感概念。”

7. On the other hand, the researchers also found some underlying similarities. Language families tended to differentiate emotions based on their valence (how pleasant or unpleasant they were) and activation (the level of excitement they elicited). For instance, words that expressed joy were unlikely to be grouped together with those for regret. There were exceptions, however: some Austronesian languages paired the concept of love, a typically positive emotion, with pity, a typically negative one.

另一方面，研究人员也发现了一些潜在的相似性。语言家族倾向于根据情感的效价(高兴或不高兴的程度)和活化(兴奋的程度)来区分情感。例如，表达喜悦的词不太可能与表示遗憾的词放在一起。然而，也有例外:一些南岛语族的语言将爱(一种典型的积极情感)与怜悯(一种典型的消极情感)这一概念结合在一起。

8. “This is an important study,” says William Croft, a professor of linguistics at the University of New Mexico, who wasn’t involved in the work. “It's probably the first time an analysis of the meanings of words has been done at this scale.” One of the novel things about this project is that the findings show both universal and culture-specific patterns, Crofts adds. He points out, however, that because some of these families cover a large number of languages across a wide geographical area, it will be important to further examine the underlying cultural factors.

“这是一项重要的研究，”新墨西哥大学(University of New Mexico)语言学教授威廉克罗夫特(William Croft)说，他没有参加此次研究。“这可能是首次对词汇意义进行如此大规模的分析。克罗夫茨补充说，这个项目的新奇之处在于，研究结果既显示了普遍的模式，也显示了特定文化的模式。然而，他指出，由于这些语系中有一些涵盖了跨越广阔地理区域的大量语言，因此，进一步研究潜在的文化因素将是重要的。

9. Another limitation of the study lies in the imperfect nature of translations, says Asifa Majid, a professor of psychology at the University of York in England, who penned an accompanying commentary. This is especially the case when it comes to words for emotion, which can be difficult to express in words—linguists may only obtain approximate translations of such terms while documenting word lists out in the field. Nevertheless, these findings raise a fascinating question about cross-cultural variation in human emotion, Majid adds. “Where we find variation, is it only in language or is it reflecting something deeper about how people experience emotions, too?”

英国约克大学(University of York)心理学教授阿西法马吉德(Asifa Majid)写了一篇附带的评论说，这项研究的另一个局限在于翻译的不完善。当涉及到表达情感的词汇时尤其如此，因为这些词汇很难用语言表达出来——语言学家们可能只能在实地记录词汇表时获得这些词汇的近似翻译。然而，马吉德补充道，这些发现提出了一个关于人类情感跨文化差异的有趣问题。“我们发现差异的地方，是仅仅在语言上，还是它也反映了人们如何体验情感的更深层次的东西?”

精读解析

篇章结构

P1：人类表达情绪的词汇的相似性和差异性引出一个问题：我们体验情感的方式是否跨越了文化的界限。

P2—P3：关于情感是否具有一致根源的讨论：有人认为世界各地的人都能用同样的方式理解情感，但是最近的研究表明人们表达和体验情感的方式可能受到文化的极大影响。

P4—P7：杰克森等人关于文化情感表达的研究：研究结论认为情感是普遍存在的，还是在不同文化中有所变化的这两种观点都有可取之处；研究方式：建立共化数据库；生成共形词汇，比较与情感相关的词汇；研究发现：情绪在不同文化中被概念化具有显著差异，同时也有一些共性。

P8—P9：关于研究的评价：研究规模巨大，结果具有新奇之处，但是海族要进一步的文化因素分析；研究有其局限性：翻译不够完善。

重点单词

translatable/trns'letbl/ adj. 可译的,可转移的

【例句】

If most things are translatable, is it possible to keep the knowledge but not the language?

如果大多数内容都是可译的，那我们有没有可能保留这些知识而不是这门语言？

melancholy/'melnkl/ n. 忧郁, 悲哀adj. 忧郁的, 悲伤的

【例句】

Many thinkers contend that melancholy is necessary in gaining wisdom.

许多学者反映，长智商的必要条件之一是忧郁。

indigenous /n'ddns/ adj. 土生土长的；生来的, 固有的

【例句】

It wanted to strengthen international cooperation to help indigenous people.

旨在加强国际合作，帮助土著居民。

hangover /'hv/ n. 宿醉；遗物；残留物

【例句】

I had one hell of a hangover the next morning.

第二天早上宿醉让我难受死了。

unmotivated /n'mutiveitid/ adj. 动机不明的

【例句】

And so students often feel so lonely, unhappy, unmotivated and unable to concentrate on study.

所以，学生经常感到孤单，不开心，没有动力，不能集中精力到学习上。

photograph/'ftgrɑf/n. 照片, 相片vt. & vi. (给…)拍照

【例句】

The photograph should be retouched.

这张照片应加以修饰。

neuroscience/'njursans/ n. 神经系统科学（指神经病学、 神经化学等）

【例句】

But this is a kind of general problem in neuroscience.

但这问题在神经科学中 几乎普遍存在。

anthropology/nθr'pld/ n. 人类学

【例句】

Social anthropology examines family relationships in detail.

社会人类学深入探讨家庭关系

variability/verblt/ n. 变化性;易变;变化的倾向

【例句】

That's a part of an ongoing variability study but the results still a long way off.

这只是持续存在的可变性研究的一部分，但是离结果还很远。

colexify 同化

colexification n. 同化

proximity/prk'smt/ n. 接近, 附近

【例句】

He looked around the proximity for his lost dog.

他环顾四周，寻找他丢失的狗。

geographical /d'grfk()l/ adj. 地理学的,地理的

【例句】

Socrates represents a new era, geographically as well as temporally.

无论就时间或空间而言，苏格拉底都代表了一个新的时代。

valence /'vel()ns/ n. (化合)价,原子价 【例句】 The atoms have 4 valence electrons and they form 4 bonds so all the electrons are perfectly well used. 另一方面，玻璃的结构。

重点句子

Nonetheless, last year she auditioned for On Site Opera’s seasonal production of “Amahl and the Night Visitors”, a Christmas staple by Gian Carlo Menotti, because she heard that chorus members would be paid and she needed the money.

这个句子，主干是：last year she auditioned for On Site Opera’s seasonal production of “Amahl and the Night Visitors”, because she heard that chorus members would be paid and she needed the money. 后面的a Christmas staple by Gian Carlo Menotti是“Amahl and the Night Visitors”的同位语，说明“Amahl and the Night Visitors”的信息.

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