进入查看：2022-2023学年英语周报七年级第24期答案及试题

 

African penguins (Spheniscus demersus) bear the unfortunate nickname “jackass penguins” because they communicate through honking, donkey-like sounds. Laugh at them if you like, but a new study suggests that their jackass language act actually follows the same basic rules as ours.

In the study published in the journal Biology Letters, researchers recorded nearly 600 vocalizations (发声) from 28 adult male penguins living in Italian zoos. (Males tend to vocalize a lot during the mating period, which is why the researchers turned to this population.) The scientists knew from previous research that African penguins bonk using three distinct types of sound, similar to human syllables (音节), when greeting one another, mating, or defending territory. But the researchers wanted to know whether those “syllables” followed two common linguistic (语言学的) rules.

One of those rules, called Zipf’s law in short, was proposed in 1945 by the linguist George Zipf. The law states that the more frequently a word is used in any language, the shorter it tends to be (think of words like “the,” “to” and “of” in English). Previous studies have analyzed more than 1,000 world languages for evidence of Zipf’s 1aw and the rule holds up in all of them.