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We always hear that texting is a scourge.
人們總說短信的出現是一種災難。
The idea is that texting spells the decline and fall of any kind of serious literacy, or at least writing ability,
這么說的原因是短信降低了人們的讀寫能力，或者至少是書面表達能力，
among young people in the United States and now the whole world today.
這個問題影響著美國青年人，今天也變成了全球問題。
The fact of the matter is that it just isn't true, and it's easy to think that it is true,
事實上，這個說法是錯誤的，而且人們很容易信以為真，
but in order to see it in another way, in order to see that actually texting is a miraculous thing,
但是為了換一個角度來看待它，為了將短信看作是實際上不可思議的，
not just energetic, but a miraculous thing,
而且不只是充滿活力的事，也是不可思議的事，
a kind of emergent complexity that we're seeing happening right now,
是一個我們正在經歷的一個緊迫而復雜事情，
we have to pull the camera back for a bit and look at what language really is,
我們就得回過頭好好想想語言究竟是怎么一回事，
in which case, one thing that we see is that texting is not writing at all.
這么看的話，我們可以說，短信其實根本就不是書面文字表達。
What do I mean by that? Basically, if we think about language,
為什么這么說呢？從根本上說，如果我們想到語言，
language has existed for perhaps 150,000 years, at least 80,000 years,
語言已經存在了大概15萬年，至少也有8萬年了，
and what it arose as is speech. People talked.
首先出現的是語音。人們彼此交談。
That's what we're probably genetically specified for. That's how we use language most.
這個大概就是出于我們人類的本能。大多數情況下，這就是我們如何使用語言的。
Writing is something that came along much later, and as we saw in the last talk,
文字是在這之后很晚才產生的，正如我們在上一個演講所看到的，
there's a little bit of controversy as to exactly when that happened, but according to traditional estimates,
對于文字是何時出現的還是有些小小的爭議，但是根據傳統估算，
if humanity had existed for 24 hours, then writing only came along at about 11:07 p.m.
如果人類文明存在了24個小時，那么文字是在晚上11點07分時產生的。
That's how much of a latterly thing writing is.
大家可見文字是最近才出現的。
So first there's speech, and then writing comes along as a kind of artifice.
所以首先是語音，然后文字作為一種技巧出現了。
