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Recording Two
錄音 2
Last week I attended a research workshop on an island in the South Pacific.
上周，我參加了南太平洋一個島嶼上的一個研討會。
Thirty people were present and all except me came from the island, called Makelua, in the nation of Vanuatu.
共有30人出席，除我以外，都來自瓦努阿圖國一個名叫馬基魯瓦的島。
They live in 16 different communities and speak 16 distinct languages. In many cases, you could stand at the edge of one village and see the outskirts of the next community.
他們生活在16個不同的社區，說16種不同的語言。在很多情況下，你可以站在一個村莊的邊緣，看到下一個社區的郊區。
Yet the residents of each village speak a completely different language.
然而每個村莊的居民說著完全不同的語言。
According to recent work by my colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, this island, just 100 kilometers long and 20 kilometers wide, is home to speakers of perhaps 40 different indigenous languages.
根據我在馬克斯普朗克人類歷史科學研究所(Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History)的同事們最近的研究，這個只有100公里長、20公里寬的島嶼上生活著的人講著大約40種不同土著語言。
Why so many? We could ask the same question of the entire globe. People don't speak one universal language, or even a handful.
為什么那么多？我們可以向全世界提出同樣的問題。人們沒有說一種通用的語言，甚至不同的幾種都沒有。
Instead, today our species collectively speaks over 7, 000 distinct languages, and these languages are not spread randomly across the planet.
相反，今天我們人類共同使用超過7000種不同的語言，而這些語言并不是隨機分布在地球上的。
For example, far more languages are found in tropical regions than in the mild zones. The tropical island of New Guinea is home to over 900 languages.
例如，在熱帶地區發現的語言比在溫帶多得多。熱帶島嶼新幾內亞有900多種語言。
Russia, 20 times larger, has 105 indigenous languages. Even within the tropics, language diversity varies widely.
俄羅斯國土面積要大20倍，有105種本土語言。即使在熱帶地區，語言的多樣性也有很大的差異。
For example, the 250, 000 people who live on Vanuatu's 80 islands speak 110 different languages, but in Bangladesh, a population 600 times greater speaks only 41 languages.
例如，生活在瓦努阿圖80個島嶼上的25萬人講110種不同的語言，但在孟加拉國，人口是瓦努阿圖的600多倍，只講41種語言。
How come humans speak so many languages? And why are they so unevenly spread across the planet?
為什么人類會說這么多語言？為什么它們在地球上分布得如此不均勻？
As it turns out, we have few clear answers to these fundamental questions about how humanity communicates.
事實證明，對于人類如何溝通的這些基本問題，我們幾乎沒有明確的答案。
Most people can easily brainstorm possible answers to these intriguing questions.
對于這些有趣的問題，大多數人都能很容易地想出可能的答案。
They hypothesize that language diversity must be about history, cultural differences, mountains or oceans dividing populations.
他們假設，語言多樣性一定與歷史、文化差異、山脈或海洋分隔人口有關。
But when our diverse team of researchers from six different disciplines and eight different countries began to review what was known, we were shocked that only a dozen previous studies had been done, including one we ourselves completed on language diversity in the Pacific.
但是，當我們由來自6個不同學科和8個不同國家的多樣化研究人員組成的團隊開始回顧已知的情況時，我們感到震驚的是，此前已經完成的研究只有12項，其中包括我們自己完成的一項關于太平洋地區語言多樣性的研究。
These prior efforts all examined the degree to which different environmental, social and geographic variables correlated with the number of languages found in a given location.
這些先前的研究都審查了不同的環境、社會和地理變量與某一地點所發現的語言數目之間的關系。
The results varied a lot from one study to another, and no clear patterns emerged.
不同的研究結果有很大的差異，沒有清晰的模式出現。
The studies also ran up against many methodological challenges, the biggest of which centered on the old statistical saying—correlation does not equal causation.
這些研究還遇到了許多方法論上的挑戰，其中最大的挑戰集中在舊的統計說法上——相關性并不等于因果關系。
19. What does the speaker say about the island of Makelua?
19. 關于馬基盧阿島，講者說了什么？
20. What do we learn from the talk about languages in the world?
20. 我們從關于世界語言的演講中學到了什么？
21. What have the diversed team of researchers found about the previous studies on language diversity?
21. 這個由不同研究人員組成的團隊在之前的語言多樣性研究中發現了什么？
