-
Some languages resist the
introduction of new words. Others, like English,
seem to welcome them.
Robert MacNeil
looks at the history of English and
comes to the conclusion that its tolerance for
change represents deeply rooted ideas
of freedom.
有些语言拒绝引入新词。另一些语言，如英语，则似乎欢迎新词的引入。罗伯特·麦
克尼尔回顾英语的历史，得出结论说，英语对变化的包容性体现了根深蒂固的自由思想。
The Glorious Messiness of English
Robert MacNeil
1
The
story
of
our
English
language
is
typically
one
of
massive
stealing
from
other
languages.
That
is why
English
today
has
an
estimated
vocabulary
of
over
one
million
words,
while other major languages have far
fewer.
英语中绚丽多彩的杂乱无章现象
罗伯特·麦克尼尔
我们的英语的历史是典型的大量窃取其它语言的历史。
正因为如此，
今日英语的词汇
量据估计超过一
百万，而其它主要语言的词汇量都要小得多。
2
French, for
example,
has
only
about
75,000 words,
and that
includes
English
expressions
like snack bar
and hit parade. The French, however, do not like
borrowing foreign words because
they
think it corrupts their language. The government
tries to ban words from English and declares
that Walkman is not desirable; so they
invent a word, balladeur, which French kids are
supposed to
say instead -- but they
don't.
例如，
法语只有约
75,000
个单词，
其中还包括像
snack bar
（
快餐店）
和
hit parade
（流
行唱片目录
）
这样的英语词汇。
但法国人不喜欢借用外来词，
因为他们认为这样会损害法语
的纯洁性。法国政府试图逐出英语词汇，宣称<
/p>
Walkman
（随身听）一词有伤大雅，因此他
们造了个新词
balladeur
让法国儿童用——可
他们就是不用。
3
Walkman is fascinating because it isn't
even English. Strictly speaking, it was invented
by
the
Japanese
manufacturers who
put
two simple
English
words
together to
name
their
product.
That doesn't bother
us, but it does bother the French. Such is the
glorious messiness of English.
That
happy
tolerance,
that willingness
to
accept words from
anywhere,
explains
the
richness
of
English and why it has become, to a
very real extent, the first truly global language.
Wal
kman
一词非常耐人寻味，因为这个词连英语也不是。严格地说，该词是由日本
制造商发明的，
他们把两个简单的英语单词拼在一起来命名他们的产品
。
这事儿我们不介意，
法国人却耿耿于怀。
由此可见英语中绚丽多彩的杂乱无章现象。
这种乐意包容的精神，
< br>这种
不管源自何方来者不拒的精神，
恰好解释了英语为什
么会这么丰富，
解释了英语缘何在很大
程度上第一个成了真正的
国际语言。
4
How did the language of a
small island off the coast of Europe become the
language of the
planet -- more widely
spoken and written than any other has ever been?
The history of English is
present in
the first words a child
learns about
identity (I, me, you); possession (mine, yours);
the
body
(eye,
nose,
mouth); size
(tall,
short);
and
necessities
(food, water). These words
all
come
from
Old
English
or
Anglo-Saxon
English,
the
core
of
our
language.
Usually
short
and
direct,
these are words we
still use today for the things that really matter
to us.
欧洲沿海一个弹丸小岛的语言何以会成为地球上的通用语言，
比历史
上任何一种其他
语言都更为广泛地
被口头和书面使用？英语的历史体现在孩子最先学会用来表示身份（
I,
me,
you
）
、所属关系（
mine,
yours
）
、身体部位（
eye,
nose,
mouth
）
、大小高矮（
tall,
short
）
，
以及生活必需品（
food, water
）的词汇当中。这些词都来自英语的核心部
分古英语或盎格鲁
－萨克逊英语。
这些词通常简短明了，
我们今天仍然用这些词来表示对我们真正至关重要的
事物。
5
Great
speakers
often
use
Old
English
to
arouse
our
emotions.
For
example,
during
World
War
II,
Winston
Churchill
made
this
speech,
stirring
the
courage
of
his
people
against
Hitler's
armies positioned
to cross the English Channel:
the
landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and
in the streets, we shall fight in the hills. We
shall never surrender.
伟大的演说家常常用古英语来激发我们的情感。例如，在二战
期间，
温斯顿·
丘吉尔作了如下的演讲
来激励国民的勇气以抵抗屯兵英吉利海峡准备渡海作
战的希特勒的军队：
“我们要战斗在海滩上，我们要战斗在着陆场上，我们要战斗在田野和
街巷，我
们要战斗在群山中。我们决不投降。
”
6
V
irtually
every
one
of
those
words came
from
Old
English,
except
the
last
--
surrender,
which came from
Norman French. Churchill could have said,
it
is
one
of
the
lovely
--
and
powerful
--
opportunities
of
English
that
a
writer can
mix,
for
effect,
different words from different
backgrounds. Y
et there is something
direct to the heart that speaks
to us
from the earliest words in our language.
这段文
字中几乎每个词都来自古英语，只有最后一个词——
surrender
是个例外，来
自诺曼法语。丘吉尔原本可以说：
“<
/p>
We shall never give in,
”但这正是英
语迷人之处和活力所
在，
作家为了加强效果可以糅合来自不同背
景的不同词汇。
而演说中使用古英语词汇具有直
接拨动心弦的效
果。
7
When
Julius
Caesar
invaded
Britain
in
55
B.C.,
English
did
not
exist.
The
Celts,
who
inhabited the
land, spoke
languages that survive today mainly as Welsh.
Where those languages
came from is
still a mystery, but there is a theory.
尤利乌
斯·凯撒在公元前
55
年入侵不列颠时，英语尚不存在。当时不
列颠的居民凯
尔特人使用的那些语言流传下来主要成了威尔士语。这些语言的起源至今仍
是个不解之谜，
但有一种理论试图解开这个谜。
8
Two
centuries ago an English judge in India noticed
that several words in Sanskrit closely
resembled
some
words
in
Greek
and
Latin.
A
systematic
study
revealed
that
many
modern
languages
descended
from
a common
parent
language,
lost
to
us
because
nothing
was written
down.
两个世
纪前，
在印度当法官的一位英国人注意到，
梵文中有一些词与希
腊语、
拉丁语
中的一些词极为相似。
系
统的研究显示，
许多现代语言起源于一个共同的母语，
但由于没
有
文字记载，该母语已经失传。
9
Identifying
similar
words,
linguists
have come
up with
what
they
call
an
Indo-European
parent language, spoken until 3500 to
2000 B.C. These people had common words for snow,
bee
and
wolf
but
no word
for sea.
So
some
scholars
assume
they
lived
somewhere
in
north-central
Europe, where
it was cold. Traveling east, some established the
languages of India and Pakistan,
and others drifted west
toward the gentler climates of Europe. Some who
made the earliest move
westward became
known as the Celts, whom Caesar's armies found in
Britain.
语言学家找出了相似的词，
提出这些语言的源头是他们称之为印欧母
语的语言，
这种
语言使用于公元前
35
00
年至公元前
2000
年。
这些人使用同样的词表达
“雪”
“
蜜蜂”
、
和
“狼”
，
但没有表示“海”的词。因此有些学者认为，他们生活在寒冷的中北欧
某个地区。一些人向
东迁徙形成了印度和巴基斯坦的各种语言，
有些人则向西漂泊，
来到欧洲气候较为温暖的地
区。最早西移的
一些人后来被称作凯尔特人，亦即凯撒的军队在不列颠发现的民族。
10
New
words came with the Germanic tribes
--
the Angles, the Saxons, etc. -- that slipped
across
the
North
Sea
to
settle
in
Britain
in
the
5th century
.
Together
they
formed what we
call
Anglo-Saxon society.
新的词汇随日尔曼部落——盎格鲁
、
萨克逊等部落——而来，
他们在
5<
/p>
世纪的时候越
过北海定居在不列颠。他们共同形成了我们称之为盎
格鲁－萨克逊的社会。
11
The
Anglo-Saxons
passed
on
to
us
their
farming
vocabulary,
including
sheep,
ox,
earth,
wood, field
and
work.
They
must
have
also
enjoyed
themselves
because
they
gave
us
the word
laughter.
盎格鲁
－萨克逊人将他们的农耕词汇留传给我们，
包括
sheep,
ox, earth, wood, field
和
work
等。他们的日子一定过得很开心，因为他们留传给我们
laug
hter
一词。
12
The
next
big
influence
on
English
was
Christianity.
It
enriched
the
Anglo-Saxon
vocabulary
with
some
400
to
500
words
from
Greek
and
Latin,
including
angel,
disciple
and
martyr.
下一个对英语产生重大影响的是基
督教。
基督教以
400
至
500
个希腊语、
拉丁语词汇
丰富了盎格鲁－萨克逊词汇，如
angel
（天使）
, disciple
（门徒）
和
martyr
（殉难者）等。
13
Then
into
this
relatively
peaceful
land
came
the
V
ikings
from
Scandinavia.
They
also
brought to English many
words that begin with sk, like sky and skirt. But
Old Norse and English
both
survived,
and
so
you can
rear
a
child
(English)
or raise
a child
(Norse).
Other such
pairs
survive:
wish
and
want,
craft
and
skill,
hide
and
skin.
Each
such
addition
gave
English
more
richness, more variety.
接着北欧海盗从斯堪的纳维亚来到
了这块相对和平的土地。
他们也给英语带来了许多
以
sk
开头的词汇，如
sky
和
skirt
。但古斯堪的纳维亚语和英语同时留传下来，因此你可以
说
r
ear a child
（英语）
，也可以说
< br>raise a child
（斯堪的纳维亚语）
。其他
留传下来的这类同义
词组有：
wish
和
want
，
craft
和
skill
，
hide
和
skin
。每一个类似的词的增添都使英语更加
丰富，更加多样化。
14
Another flood of new vocabulary
occurred in 1066, when the Normans conquered
England.
The country now had three
languages: French for the nobles, Latin for the
churches and English
for the common
people. With three languages competing, there were
sometimes different terms for
the same
thing. For example, Anglo-Saxons had the word
kingly, but after the Normans, royal and
sovereign
entered
the
language
as
alternatives.
The
extraordinary
thing was
that
French
did
not
replace English. Over
three centuries English gradually swallowed
French, and by the end of the
15th
century what had developed was a modified, greatly
enriched language
-- Middle English --
with about
10,000
另一次新词的大量涌入发生在
1066
年，
诺曼人征服英国的时候。这时英国三种语言
并用：贵族使用法语，教会使用拉丁语，平民
使用英语。由于三种语言相互竞争，有时同一
事物就出现了不同的名称。
例如，
盎格鲁－萨克逊语有
kingly
一词，
但诺曼人入侵后，
royal
和
sovereign
作为替代词进入了英语。不同寻常的是，法语没有取代英语。三个多世纪后，
英语逐渐吞并了法语，到
15
世纪末，发展成为一种经过改进，
大大丰富了的拥有一万多个
“借来”的法语词汇的语言——中古英语。
< br>
15
Around
1476
William
Caxton
set
up
a
printing
press
in
England
and
started
a
communications revolution. Printing
brought into English the wealth of new thinking
that sprang
from the European
Renaissance. Translations of Greek and Roman
classics were poured onto the
printed
page, and with them thousands of Latin words like
capsule and habitual, and Greek words
like
catastrophe
and
thermometer.
Today
we
still
borrow
from
Latin
and
Greek
to
name
new
inventions, like video, television and
cyberspace.
大约在
1476
年，威廉·卡克斯顿在英国
制造了一台印刷机，由此掀起了一场信息传
播技术的革命。
印刷
术把欧洲文艺复兴运动中涌现的大量新思想传入英国。
希腊罗马经典著
< br>作的译文纷纷印成书册，
成千上万的拉丁词，
如
capsule
（密封小容器；
航天舱）
和
habitual
（惯常的）
，希腊词，如
catastrophe
（大灾难）
和
thermometer
（温度计）等也随之涌入。
今天我们仍借用拉丁、希腊语命名新的发明创
造，如
video,
television
和
cyberspace
（虚拟
空间）等。
16
As settlers landed in North America and
established the United States, English found
itself
with two sources -- American and
British. Scholars in Britain worried that the
language was out of
control,
and some wanted
to
set
up
an
academy to
decide which
words were
proper
and which
were not. Fortunately their idea has
never been put into practice.
随着移民在北美登陆并建立美国，
英语出现了两个源头——美式英语和英式英语。
英
国的学者担心英语会失控，
有人想成立一个有权威的学会，
< br>决定哪些词汇合适，
哪些词汇不
合适。幸运的是，他们的
设想从未付诸实施。
17
That tolerance for change also
represents deeply rooted ideas of freedom. Danish
scholar
Otto Jespersen wrote in 1905,
had not been for centuries great
respecters of the liberties of each individual and
if everybody had
not been free to
strike out new paths for himself.
这种对变化的包容态度也体现了根
深蒂固的自由精神。丹麦学者奥托·叶斯柏森在
1905
年写道
：
“如果不是多少世纪以来英国人一向崇尚个人自由，如果不是人人都能自由地
为自己开拓新的道路，英语就不会成为今天的英语。
”
< br>
18
I like that idea. Consider
that the same cultural soil producing the English
language also
nourished the great
principles of freedom and rights of man in the
modern world. The first shoots
sprang
up
in
England,
and
they
grew
stronger
in
America.
The
English-speaking
peoples
have
defeated all efforts to build fences
around their language.
我喜欢这一观点。
想想吧，
孕育英语的文化土壤也同样为现今的世界培育了伟大的自
由精神及人权准
则。
最初的根芽在英国萌发，
接着在美国生长壮大。
英语国家的人民挫败了
种种意欲建立语言保护的企图。