Every language and culture has curse words(脏话). What gives a curse word its power is partly its meaning and partly its sound. "In English, for example, curse words tend to contain a high percentage of plosive sounds—including P, T and K, "said Ryan McKay, a psychologist at University of London.
Dr. McKay teamed up with his colleague Shiri Lev-Ari to learn whether this familiar pattern went beyond English. They wondered whether it might even represent what's called sound symbolism. Sound symbolism is when a word sounds like what it means.
The researchers first asked fluent speakers of Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Korean and Russian to list the most vulgar(粗俗的) words they could think of. Once they'd made a list of each language's most frequently used curse words, the researchers compared these with neutral words from the same language. In these languages, they didn't find the plosive sounds that seem common in English curse words. "Instead, we found that the vulgar words were defined by what they lacked: the approximant sounds that include letters I, L, R, W and Y, "Dr. Lev-Ari said.
Next, the scientists invited 215 native speakers of six languages: Arabic, Chinese, Finnish, French, German and Spanish. The participants listened to pairs of words in a language they didn't speak, and guessed which word in each pair was offensive. In reality, all the words were invented. For example, the researchers started with the Albanian word "zog," for "bird, "and created the pair of fake words "yog" and "tsog."Participants were more likely to guess that words without approximants, such as "tsog," were curses.
Finally, the researchers combed through the dictionary for English curse words and their cleaned-up versions. Once again, the clean versions included more of the sounds I, L, R, W and Y.
A 20th-century linguistic(语言学的)principle claimed that the sounds of words were arbitrary: Any word could have any meaning. With curse words, though, as in other cases of sound symbolism, "the sounds themselves seem to carry meaning, "said Lev-Ari." That's a new thing, "said linguist Benjamin Bergen." Curse words across languages, unrelated to each other, may pattern similarly. "He also pointed out, to make sure the pattern of approximants missing from curses isn't an accident, it would be nice to find it in an even larger sample of languages.
