跟读练习: The surprising pattern behind color names around the world - 通过视频学习英语口语

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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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本课的词汇与口语要点

这节口语课以视频“The surprising pattern behind color names around the world”为素材。视频中反复出现的词有：color, language, word, blue, term。这段视频共有 66 个句子、1058 个单词可供跟读。讲话部分时长为 6:22。说话人语速自然，每分钟约 166 个词，接近日常对话。只有 79% 的单词属于英语最常用的 3,000 词，词汇难度较高。

视频中的重点词汇

视频中 15 个值得学习的单词，附发音和释义：

单词	发音	释义
researcher 名词	/ˈɹiˌsɝ.t͡ʃɚ/	研究員 /研究员, 研究者
label 名词	/ˈleɪ.bəl/	標籤 /标签, 簽條 /签条
hierarchy 名词	/ˈhaɪ.ə.ɹɑː(ɹ).ki/	等級制度 /等级制度, 階層 /阶层
purple 名词	/ˈpɝ.pl̩/	紫色
chip 名词	/t͡ʃɪp/	筹码
spectrum 名词	/ˈspɛktɹəm/	範圍 /范围, 光譜 /光谱
universal 形容词	/ˌjunəˈvɜɹs(ə)l/	宇宙的
investigate 动词	/ɪnˈvɛs.tə.ɡeɪt/	調查 /调查
expedition 名词	/ɛkspəˈdɪʃən/	遠征
critic 名词	/ˈkɹɪt.ɪk/	批評家 /批评家, 評論家 /评论家
simulation 名词	/ˌsɪm.jəˈleɪ.ʃn̩/	模擬 /模拟
tone 名词	/ˈtəʊn/	全音
everyday 形容词	/ˈɛvɹiˌdeɪ/	日常的
cloud 名词	/ˈklaʊ̯d/	йүн, 雲 /云
gray 形容词	/ɡɹeɪ/	灰色

视频中出现的短语动词

单词	释义
check out 动词	退房
point out 动词	指, 指出
turn out 动词	原來 /原来

视频中的语法

说话人最常用的结构，并附上视频中的原话：

结构	视频中的用法
现在完成时 have/has + 过去分词 — 过去发生但与现在仍有关联的事	have found · have speculated · have explored
被动语态 be + 过去分词 — 强调发生了什么，而不是谁做的	was struck · are labeled
定语从句 who / which + 从句 — 补充说明人或事物	people who spoke · averages, which are

需要注意的发音

说话人用了 7 次缩略和弱读形式，例如 didn't, weren't, don't。请按听到的简短形式来说。

“sh” 和 “zh” 音: expedition /ɛkspəˈdɪʃən/, simulation /ˌsɪm.jəˈleɪ.ʃn̩/, essentially /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/, translation /tɹænzˈleɪʃən/, artificial /ˌɑː.tɪˈfɪʃ.əl/
长单词——注意重音位置: hierarchy /ˈhaɪ.ə.ɹɑː(ɹ).ki/, universal /ˌjunəˈvɜɹs(ə)l/, investigate /ɪnˈvɛs.tə.ɡeɪt/, expedition /ɛkspəˈdɪʃən/, essentially /ɪˈsɛnʃəli/

中文母语者容易读错的音：

/v/ — 不要读成 /w/，上齿轻触下唇: universal /ˌjunəˈvɜɹs(ə)l/, investigate /ɪnˈvɛs.tə.ɡeɪt/, evolve /ɪˈvɑlv/, everyday /ˈɛvɹiˌdeɪ/, revolutionary /ˌɹɛvəˈluʃənɛɹi/
词尾辅音 — 要读清楚，后面不要加元音: chip /t͡ʃɪp/, investigate /ɪnˈvɛs.tə.ɡeɪt/, critic /ˈkɹɪt.ɪk/, evolve /ɪˈvɑlv/, cloud /ˈklaʊ̯d/
/r/ 和 /l/ 的区别: universal /ˌjunəˈvɜɹs(ə)l/, translation /tɹænzˈleɪʃən/, explore /ɪkˈsploɹ/, revolutionary /ˌɹɛvəˈluʃənɛɹi/, randomly /ˈɹændm̩li/

如何用这段视频练习

先完整听一遍视频，不要开口，记下不认识的单词。
先用 0.75 倍速逐句跟读，熟练之后再回到正常速度。
录下自己的声音并与原声对比，特别注意 researcher, label, hierarchy 这类单词。

什么是跟读法？

跟读法 (Shadowing) 是一种有科学依据的语言学习技巧，最初开发用于专业口译员的培训，并由多语言者Alexander Arguelles博士普及。这个方法简单而强大：您在听英语母语原声的同时立即大声重复——就像是一个延迟1-2秒紧跟说话者的影子。与被动听力或语法练习不同，跟读法强迫您的大脑和口腔肌肉同时处理并模仿真实的讲话模式。研究表明它能显着提高发音准确性，语调，节奏，连读，听力理解和口语流利度——使其成为雅思口语备考和真实英语交流最有效的方法之一。

影子跟读法: 阅读完整分步指南 →

跟读练习: The surprising pattern behind color names around the world - 通过视频学习英语口语

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