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 劍橋雅思4閱讀Test2原文+譯文：語言的消失

  Lost for words

  Many minority languages are on the danger list

  語言的消失

  ——許多少數民族語言瀕臨滅絕

  In the Native American Navajo nation, which sprawls across four states in the American south-west, the native language is dying. Most of its speakers are middle-aged or elderly. Although many students take classes in Navajo, the schools are run in English. Street signs, supermarket goods and even their own newspaper are all in English. Not surprisingly, linguists doubt that any native speakers of Navajo will remain in a hundred years’ time.

  對于居住在美國西南部四州的那瓦霍人來講，他們的語言正在遭遇滅頂之災。大多數說那瓦霍語的人要么是中年人，要么就是垂垂老者。盡管有許多學生都在學習該門語言，可是學校卻是用英文授課的。路牌、超市商品說明、甚至報紙全部是英文的。因此語言學家懷疑在百年之后還會不會有人會說這門語言也就不足為奇了。

  Navajo is far from alone. Half the world’s 6,800 languages are likely to vanish within two generations — that’s one language lost every ten days. Never before has the planet’s linguistic diversity shrunk at such a pace. ‘At the moment, we are heading for about three or four languages dominating the world,’ says Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading. ‘It’s a mass extinction, and whether we will ever rebound from the loss is difficult to know.’

  那瓦霍語決不是惟一會有此厄運的語言。再經歷兩代人的時間，全球6,800種語言當中的半數就有可能從世界上徹底消失——這就相當于平均每十天就有一種語言消失。地球上語言的多樣性從未以如此驚人的速度降低過。“現在，我們面臨的將是兩三種語言支配整個世界。”雷丁大學的進化生物學家Marl Pagel說，“這就是(語言的)大規模滅絕，而且我們很難知道能否從這種語言滅絕當中恢復過來。”

  Isolation breeds linguistic diversity: as a result, the world is peppered with languages spoken by only a few people. Only 250 languages have more than a million speakers, and at least 3,000 have fewer than 2,500. It is not necessarily these small languages that are about to disappear. Navajo is considered endangered despite having 150,000 speakers. What makes a language endangered is not just the number of speakers, but how old they are. If it is spoken by children it is relatively safe. The critically endangered languages are those that are only spoken by the elderly, according to Michael Krauss, director of the Alassk Native Language Center, in Fairbanks.

  封閉產生了語言的多樣性。結果整個世界就布滿了只有幾個人說的語言。只有250種語言擁有超過100萬的使用者，而至少有3,000種語言使用者不足2,500人。那些行將消失的小語種并非命該如此。盡管仍有15萬人在使用那瓦霍語，但這種語言還是上了瀕危名單。判斷一種語言是否瀕危的標準不是使用者的數量，而是使用者的年齡。如果一種語言是孩子們在使用，就會相對安全些。用費爾班克斯Alassk語言中心的主任Micheal Krauss的話說就是，真正面臨滅絕之災的是那些只有老年人才懂得說的語言。

  Why do people reject the language of their parents? It begins with a crisis of confidence, when a small community finds itself alongside a larger, wealthier society, says Nicholas Ostler, of Britain’s Foundation for Endangered Languages, in Bath. ‘People lose faith in their culture,’ he says. ‘When the next generation reaches their teens, they might not want to be induced into the old traditions.’

  可人們為什么拒絕說他們父母的語言呢?這一切都始于一場信任危機。BATH英國瀕危語言基金會成員Nicholas Ostler說：“當一個小規模社會發現自己與一個大規模，更富有的社會并肩而存的時候，其成員就會對自己的文化喪失信心。當這個社會的下一代進人青春期的時候，他們很可能不會接受(包括語言在內的)傳統事物。”

  The change is not always voluntary. Quite often, governments try to kill off a minority language by banning its use in public or discouraging its use in schools, all to promote national unity. The former US policy of running Indian reservation schools in English, for example, effectively put languages such as Navajo on the danger list. But Salikoko Mufwene, who chairs the Linguistics department at the University of Chicago, argues that the deadliest weapon is not government policy but economic globalisation. ‘Native Americans have not lost pride in their language, but they have had to adapt to socio-economic pressures,’ he says. ‘They cannot refuse to speak English if most commercial activity is in English.’ But are languages worth saving? At the very least, there is a loss of data for the study of languages and their evolution, which relies on comparisons between languages, both living and dead. When an unwritten and unrecorded language disappears, it is lost to science.

  這種轉變往往不是自發的。為了加強國家凝聚力，政府通常會通過在公共場合禁用，以及在學校中不提倡使用的方法，消滅少數民族語言。例如，以前美國政府在印地安保留地學校推行英語授課政策，這事實上就是將那瓦霍語等少數語言推上了瀕危名單。但是芝加哥大學語言學系系主任Salikoko Mufwene認為，最致命的原因并不是政府政策，而是經濟的全球化。他說，“美國印地安人并沒有失去對他們自己語言的信心，但是他們不得不去適應社會經濟壓力。如果大多數生意都是用英語來談的，他們就不能拒絕說英語，但是，瀕危語言就真的值得去挽救嗎?至少，對于語言及其進化研究來講，(不去挽救)就會導致資料的缺失，因為該研究正是基于對現存的和過去的語言的比較而進行的。當一門既無文字記錄也無錄音考證的語言消失時，對于科學(研究)來講，它也就不存在了。

  Language is also intimately bound up with culture, so it may be difficult to preserve one without the other. ‘If a person shifts from Navajo to English, they lose something,’ Mufwene says. ‘Moreover, the loss of diversity may also deprive us of different ways of looking at the world,’ says Pagel. There is mounting evidence that learning a language produces physiological changes in the brain. ‘Your brain and mine are different from the brain of someone who speaks French, for instance,’ Pagel says, and this could affect our thoughts and perceptions. ‘The patterns and connections we make among various concepts may be structured by the linguistic habits of our community.’

  語言與文化也有千絲萬縷的聯系，因此要想單純保存語言而不保留文化是非常困難的。“如果一個本來說那瓦霍語的人現在要改說英語，那么他準得失去點東西。”Mufwene說道，Pagel也評價道，“而且，語言多樣性的喪失也使我們無法以多種方式來看待這個世界。”越來越多的證據表明，學習一門語言可以為大腦帶來生理上的變化。“比如說，你我的大腦與說法語人的大腦就十分不同，”Page說，這是會影響我們的思維和看法的。“我們針對不同的概念建立了不同的模式和聯系，這很可能就是由我們社會的語言習慣構筑而成的。”

  So despite linguists’ best efforts, many languages will disappear over the next century. But a growing interest in cultural identity may prevent the direst predictions from coming true. ‘The key to fostering diversity is for people to learn their ancestral tongue, as well as the dominant language,’ says Doug Whalen, founder and president of the Endangered Language Fund in New Haven, Connecticut. ‘Most of these languages will not survive without a large degree of bilingualism,’ he says. In New Zealand, classes for children have slowed the erosion of Maori and rekindled interest in the language. A similar approach in Hawaii has produced about 8,000 new speakers of Polynesian languages in the past few years. In California, ‘apprentice’ programmes have provided life support to several indigenous languages. Volunteer ‘apprentices’ pair up with one of the last living speakers of a Native American tongue to learn a traditional skill such as basket weaving, with instruction exclusively in the endangered language. After about 300 hours of training they are generally sufficiently fluent to transmit the language to the next generation. But Mufwene says that preventing a language dying out is not the same as giving it new life by using it every day. ‘Preserving a language is more like preserving fruits in a jar,’ he says.

  所以，盡管語言學家已經竭盡全力，但是許多語言到了下個世紀還是會消失。但是，一種對文化認同感越來越多的關注，也許會阻止最駭人的預言成為現實。“保持語言多樣性的關鍵在于，讓人們接受主流語言的同時，也去學習他們祖先的語言。”康那狄格州紐黑文市瀕危語言基金會主席Doug Whalen說道，“如果不實行雙語制度，大多數瀕危語言都無法生存下去。”在新西蘭，為孩子們開設的課程明顯減輕了毛利語所受的損害，并且重新燃起了人們對該語言的興趣。在夏威夷，一種相似的方式使波利尼西亞語的使用者在過去數年中增長了8,000人。在加利福尼亞州，“學徒”計劃使得數種土著語言得以生存。“學徒”志愿者與某種印地安語的最后一些使用者中的一位組成小組，學習如編織籃子這樣的傳統工藝，當然交流全部都是用印地安語。通常，經過300個小時的訓練后，他們就可以流利地說了，其流利程度足以將這種語言傳給他們的子女。但是Mufwene指出，避免語言消失并不等同于通過每天的使用賦予其新的生命。他指出，“保存語言更像用罐子保存水果。”

  However, preservation can bring a language back from the dead. There are examples of languages that have survived in written form and then been revived by later generations. But a written form is essential for this, so the mere possibility of revival has led many speakers of endangered languages to develop systems of writing where none existed before.

  然而，通過保存的確可以使一門語言起死回生。已經有例子表明，有些語言通過文字記錄被保存了下來，而且還在后代中得以復興。當然，文字記錄是這其中的關鍵。因此，單單是這種語言復興的可能性，就使得很多說瀕危語言的人試圖去創造本來并不存在的文字系統。

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