Практика Shadowing: The surprising pattern behind color names around the world - Изучайте разговорный английский по видео

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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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Лексика и советы по произношению к этому уроку

Этот урок разговорной практики построен на видео «The surprising pattern behind color names around the world». Чаще всего повторяются слова: color, language, word, blue, term. В этом видео 66 предложений и 1058 слов для шедоуинга. Речь длится 6:22. Говорящий говорит в естественном темпе, около 166 слов в минуту, близком к повседневной речи. Только 79% слов входят в 3000 самых частых слов английского языка, поэтому лексика сложная.

Ключевая лексика этого видео

15 слов из видео, которые стоит выучить, с произношением и значением:

Слово	Произношение	Значение
researcher существительное	/ˈɹiˌsɝ.t͡ʃɚ/	иссле́дователь, иссле́довательница
label существительное	/ˈleɪ.bəl/	ярлы́к, этике́тка
hierarchy существительное	/ˈhaɪ.ə.ɹɑː(ɹ).ki/	иера́рхия
purple существительное	/ˈpɝ.pl̩/	пурпу́рный, пурпу́ровый
chip существительное	/t͡ʃɪp/	ще́пка, лучи́на
spectrum существительное	/ˈspɛktɹəm/	спектр, диапазо́н
universal прилагательное	/ˌjunəˈvɜɹs(ə)l/	вселе́нский, косми́ческий
investigate глагол	/ɪnˈvɛs.tə.ɡeɪt/	иссле́довать, рассле́довать
expedition существительное	/ɛkspəˈdɪʃən/	экспеди́ция
critic существительное	/ˈkɹɪt.ɪk/	кри́тик
simulation существительное	/ˌsɪm.jəˈleɪ.ʃn̩/	симуля́ция
evolve глагол	/ɪˈvɑlv/	развива́ться, разви́ться
tone существительное	/ˈtəʊn/	тон
everyday прилагательное	/ˈɛvɹiˌdeɪ/	повседне́вный, ежедне́вный
cloud существительное	/ˈklaʊ̯d/	о́блако, ту́ча

Фразовые глаголы, которые вы услышите

Слово	Значение
check out глагол	проверя́ть, прове́рить
point out глагол	ука́зывать, указа́ть
turn out глагол	ока́зываться, оказа́ться

Грамматика в этом видео

Конструкции, которые говорящий использует чаще всего, с точными словами из видео:

Конструкция	В видео
Present Perfect have/has + причастие прошедшего времени — прошлое действие, важное сейчас	have found · have speculated · have explored
Пассивный залог be + причастие прошедшего времени — важно, что происходит, а не кто это делает	was struck · are labeled
Придаточные определительные who / which + предложение — уточнение о человеке или предмете	people who spoke · averages, which are

Произношение, на которое стоит обратить внимание

Говорящий использует 7 сокращённых и редуцированных форм, например didn't, weren't, don't. Произносите их коротко, так, как слышите.

Звуки «sh» и «zh»: expedition /ɛkspəˈdɪʃən/, simulation /ˌsɪm.jəˈleɪ.ʃn̩/, essentially /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/, translation /tɹænzˈleɪʃən/, artificial /ˌɑː.tɪˈfɪʃ.əl/
Длинные слова — следите за ударением: hierarchy /ˈhaɪ.ə.ɹɑː(ɹ).ki/, universal /ˌjunəˈvɜɹs(ə)l/, investigate /ɪnˈvɛs.tə.ɡeɪt/, expedition /ɛkspəˈdɪʃən/, essentially /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/

Звуки, трудные для русскоязычных:

/w/ — губы округлены, это не /v/: weakness /ˈwik.nɪs/, widespread /ˌwaɪdˈspɹɛd/, bilingual /baɪˈlɪŋ.ɡwəl/, monolingual /ˌmɒ.nəʊˈlɪŋ.ɡwəl/, tweak /twiːk/
/h/ — лёгкий выдох, а не русское «х»: hierarchy /ˈhaɪ.ə.ɹɑː(ɹ).ki/, hint /hɪnt/
Звонкие согласные в конце слова — не оглушайте их: evolve /ɪˈvɑlv/, cloud /ˈklaʊ̯d/, widespread /ˌwaɪdˈspɹɛd/, cognitive /ˈkɑɡ.nɪ.tɪv/, emerge /ɪˈmɝd͡ʒ/

Как заниматься с этим видео

Прослушайте всё видео один раз молча и выпишите незнакомые слова.
Начните со скорости 0,75×, повторяйте предложение за предложением и вернитесь к обычной скорости, когда станет легко.
Запишите себя и сравните с оригиналом, обращая внимание на такие слова, как researcher, label, hierarchy.

Что такое техника Shadowing?

Shadowing — это научно обоснованная техника изучения языка, изначально разработанная для подготовки профессиональных переводчиков и популяризированная полиглотом доктором Александром Аргуэльесом. Метод прост, но эффективен: вы слушаете аудио на английском от носителей языка и немедленно повторяете вслух — как тень, следующая за говорящим с задержкой в 1–2 секунды. В отличие от пассивного прослушивания или грамматических упражнений, Shadowing заставляет мозг и мышцы рта одновременно обрабатывать и воспроизводить реальные речевые паттерны. Исследования показывают, что это значительно улучшает точность произношения, интонацию, ритм, связную речь, понимание на слух и беглость речи — что делает его одним из самых эффективных методов для подготовки к IELTS Speaking и реального общения на английском.

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Практика Shadowing: The surprising pattern behind color names around the world - Изучайте разговорный английский по видео

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