シャドーイング練習: The surprising pattern behind color names around the world - 動画で英語スピーキングを学ぶ

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If I showed you this paint chip and asked you to tell me what color it is, what would you say?

How about this one, and this one?

You probably said blue, purple, and brown, but if your native language is Wobe from Côte d 'Ivoire,

you probably would have used one word for all three.

That's because not all languages have the same number of basic color categories.

In English we have 11, Russian has 12, but some languages like Wobbe only have three

and researchers have found that if a language only has three or four basic colors

They can usually predict what those will be So how do they do it?

As you would expect different languages have different words for colors

But what interests researchers isn't those simple translations.

It's the question of which colors get names at all

Because as much as we think of colors in categories, the truth is that color is a spectrum.

It's not obvious why we should have a basic color term for this color, but not this one.

And until the 1960s, it was widely believed by anthropologists that cultures would just choose from the spectrum randomly.

But in 1969, two

Berkeley researchers, Paul Kay and Brent Berlin, published a book challenging that assumption.

They had asked 20 people who spoke different languages to look at these 330 color chips

and categorize each of them by their basic color term.

And they found hints of a universal pattern.

If a language had six basic color words, they were always for black or dark, white or light, red, green, yellow, and blue.

If it had four terms, they were for black, white, red, and then either green or yellow.

If it had only three, they were always for black, white, and red.

It's suggested that as languages develop, they create color names in a certain order first black and white, then red, then green and yellow,

then blue, then others like brown, purple, pink, orange, and gray.

The theory was revolutionary.

They weren't the first researchers interested in the question of how we name colors.

In 1858, William Gladstone, who would later become a four -term British Prime Minister, published a book on the ancient

Greek works of Homer.

He was struck by the fact that there weren't many colors at all in the text,

and when there were, Homer would use the same word for, quote, colors which, according to us, are essentially different.

He used the same word for purple to describe blood, a dark cloud, a wave,

and a rainbow, and he referred to the sea as wine -looking.

Gladstone didn't find any references to blue or orange at all.

Some researchers took this and other ancient writings to wrongly speculate that earlier societies were colorblind.

Later in the 19th century, an anthropologist named W .H .R.

Rivers went on an expedition to Papua New Guinea, where he found that some tribes only had words for red,

white, and black, while others had additional words for blue and green.

An expedition to investigate the cultures on a remote group of islands in the Torres Straits between Australia and New Guinea.

His brief was to investigate the mental characteristics of the islanders." He claims

that the number of color terms in a population was related to their,

quote, "...intellectual and cultural development." And he used his findings to claim that Papuans were less physically evolved than Europeans.

Berlin and Kay didn't make those racist claims, but their color hierarchy attracted a lot of criticism.

For one thing, critics pointed out that the study used a small sample size — 20 people,

all of whom were bilingual English speakers, not monolingual native speakers.

And almost all of the languages were from industrialized societies, hardly the best portrait of the entire world.

But it also had to do with defining what a basic color term is.

In the Yele language in Papua New Guinea, for example, there are only basic color terms for black, white, and red.

But there's a broad vocabulary of everyday objects, like the sky, ashes, and tree sap,

that are used as color comparisons that cover almost all English color words.

There are also languages like Hanuno 'o, from the Philippines, where a word can communicate both color and a physical feeling.

They have four basic terms to describe color, but they're on a spectrum of light vs. dark, strength vs. weakness, and wetness vs. dryness.

Those kinds of languages don't fit neatly into a color chip identification test.

But by the late 1970s, Berlin and Kay had a response for the critics.

They called it the World Color Survey.

They conducted the same labeling test on over 2 ,600 native speakers of 110 unwritten languages from non -industrialized societies.

They found that with some tweaks, the color hierarchy still checked out.

83 % of the languages fit into the hierarchy.

And when they averaged the center point of where each speaker labeled each of their language's colors, they wound up with a sort of heat map.

Those clusters matched pretty closely to the English speaker's averages, which are labeled here.

Here's how Paul Kaye puts it.

It just turns out that most languages make cuts in the same place.

Some languages make fewer cuts than others.

So, these color stages are widespread throughout the world, but why?

Why would a word for red come before a word for blue?

Some have speculated that the stages correspond to the salience of the color in the natural environment.

Red is in blood and in dirt.

Blue on the other hand was fairly scarce before manufacturing.

Recently, cognitive science researchers have explored this question by running computer simulations of how language evolves through conversations between people.

The simulations presented artificial agents with multiple colors at a time, and through a series of simple negotiations,

those agents developed shared labels for the different colors.

And the order in which those labels emerged?

First, reddish tones, then green, and yellow, then blue, then orange.

It matched the original stages pretty closely.

And it suggests that there's something about the colors themselves that leads to this hierarchy.

Red is fundamentally more distinct than the other colors.

So what does all this mean?

Why does it matter?

Well, it tells us that despite our many differences across cultures and societies,

there is something universal about how humans try to make sense of the world.

Thank you.

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このレッスンの語彙とスピーキングのポイント

このスピーキングレッスンは、動画「The surprising pattern behind color names around the world」を教材にしています。繰り返し出てくる語は次のとおりです：color, language, word, blue, term。この動画には、シャドーイング用の文が66文、単語が1058語あります。音声の長さは6:22です。話す速さは1分あたり約166語で、日常会話に近い自然なペースです。英語の頻出3,000語に含まれる単語は79%だけなので、語彙は難しめです。

この動画の重要語彙

動画に出てくる覚えておきたい単語15語を、発音と意味つきで紹介します。

単語	発音	意味
researcher 名詞	/ˈɹiˌsɝ.t͡ʃɚ/	研究員, 研究者
label 名詞	/ˈleɪ.bəl/	荷札, 貼り札
hierarchy 名詞	/ˈhaɪ.ə.ɹɑː(ɹ).ki/	階層, 序列
purple 名詞	/ˈpɝ.pl̩/	紫
spectrum 名詞	/ˈspɛktɹəm/	スペクトル, 分光
universal 形容詞	/ˌjunəˈvɜɹs(ə)l/	宇宙の
investigate 動詞	/ɪnˈvɛs.tə.ɡeɪt/	調べる, 調査する
expedition 名詞	/ɛkspəˈdɪʃən/	遠征
critic 名詞	/ˈkɹɪt.ɪk/	批評家, 評論家
simulation 名詞	/ˌsɪm.jəˈleɪ.ʃn̩/	真似, 模擬
tone 名詞	/ˈtəʊn/	トーン
cloud 名詞	/ˈklaʊ̯d/	雲, 雲霞
gray 形容詞	/ɡɹeɪ/	灰色, 鼠色
refer 動詞	/ɹɪˈfɜː/	問い合わせる
racist 名詞	/ˈɹeɪ.sɪst/	人種差別主義者, レイシスト

動画に出てくる句動詞

単語	意味
check out 動詞	試験する, 検査する
point out 動詞	指す, 指し示す

この動画の文法

話し手がよく使っている文型を、動画の実際の表現とともに紹介します。

文型	動画での表現
現在完了形 have/has + 過去分詞 — 過去の出来事が今も関係している	have found · have speculated · have explored
受動態 be + 過去分詞 — 誰がするかより、何が起きるかに焦点を当てる	was struck · are labeled
関係詞節 who / which + 節 — 人や物について情報を加える	people who spoke · averages, which are

注意したい発音

話し手はdidn't, weren't, don'tなど、短縮形や弱形を7回使っています。聞こえたとおりの短い形で発音しましょう。

「sh」と「zh」の音: expedition /ɛkspəˈdɪʃən/, simulation /ˌsɪm.jəˈleɪ.ʃn̩/, essentially /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/, translation /tɹænzˈleɪʃən/, artificial /ˌɑː.tɪˈfɪʃ.əl/
長い単語（アクセントの位置に注意）: hierarchy /ˈhaɪ.ə.ɹɑː(ɹ).ki/, universal /ˌjunəˈvɜɹs(ə)l/, investigate /ɪnˈvɛs.tə.ɡeɪt/, expedition /ɛkspəˈdɪʃən/, essentially /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/

日本語話者が苦手な音：

/r/ と /l/ の区別 — /l/ は舌先を歯茎につけ、/r/ はどこにもつけない: universal /ˌjunəˈvɜɹs(ə)l/, translation /tɹænzˈleɪʃən/, explore /ɪkˈsploɹ/, revolutionary /ˌɹɛvəˈluʃənɛɹi/, randomly /ˈɹændm̩li/
/v/ — /b/ にならないように、上の歯を下唇に当てる: universal /ˌjunəˈvɜɹs(ə)l/, investigate /ɪnˈvɛs.tə.ɡeɪt/, evolve /ɪˈvɑlv/, everyday /ˈɛvɹiˌdeɪ/, revolutionary /ˌɹɛvəˈluʃənɛɹi/
/f/ — 「フ」ではなく、上の歯と下唇で出す: refer /ɹɪˈfɜː/, define /dɪˈfaɪn/, fewer /ˈfjuː.ɚ/, physically /ˈfɪz.ɪ.kli/, artificial /ˌɑː.tɪˈfɪʃ.əl/

この動画での練習方法

まず声を出さずに動画を最後まで聞き、知らない単語をメモします。
まず0.75倍速で一文ずつシャドーイングし、慣れてきたら通常の速度に戻します。
自分の声を録音して元の音声と比べます。researcher, label, hierarchyなどの単語に特に注意しましょう。

シャドーイングとは？英語上達に効果的な理由

シャドーイング（Shadowing）は、もともとプロの通訳者養成プログラムで開発された言語学習法で、多言語習得者として知られるDr. Alexander Arguelles によって広く普及されました。方法はシンプルですが非常に効果的：ネイティブスピーカーの英語を聞きながら、1〜2秒の遅延で声に出してすぐに繰り返す——まるで「影（shadow）」のように話者を追いかけます。文法ドリルや受動的なリスニングと異なり、シャドーイングは脳と口の筋肉が同時にリアルタイムで英語を処理・再現することを強制します。研究により、発音精度、抑揚、リズム、連音、リスニング力、そして会話の流暢さが大幅に向上することが確認されています。IELTSスピーキング対策や自然な英語コミュニケーションを目指す方に特におすすめです。

シャドーイングのやり方: ステップ別の完全ガイドを読む →

シャドーイング練習: The surprising pattern behind color names around the world - 動画で英語スピーキングを学ぶ

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