2 years ago
Psychologists studied speakers of languages from Hindi to Hungarian to find out why obscenities sound the way they do
This quote is by the main character in the sci-fi novel The Widening Gyre by Michael R. Johnston. Writers like Johnston who invent alien profanity rely on their intuitions about what sounds offensive here on Earth. We wanted to explore whether there are universal sound patterns in profanity. So we designed a series of studies involving speakers of different languages and found surprising patterns in how swear words sound across the world.
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