評論
打印
Books & arts
來源于《圖書和藝術》版塊
Johnson
約翰遜語言專欄
Big and basic
大而基礎
Why widely spoken languages have simpler grammar
為何廣泛使用的語言語法更簡單
Stalin spoke Russian as a second language. The Georgian dictator of the Soviet Union had a noticeable accent and is said to have mumbled his case-endings. The tale indicates two things. One is that learning new languages is hard, even with a great deal of exposure. (Stalin started learning Russian at around ten and spoke it all his adult life.) The other is that languages are more complex than they need to be. Not having mastered all Russian’s finer points didn’t keep Stalin from ruling the Soviet Union with a murderously effective iron hand.
俄語是斯大林的第二語言。這位前蘇聯的格魯吉亞獨裁者口音很重，據說他的格尾口齒不清。這個故事說明了兩件問題。一個是學習新語言是困難的，即使有大量的接觸。(斯大林十歲左右開始學習俄語，成年后一直說俄語。) 另一個原因是語言實際比所需復雜得多。雖然斯大林沒有掌握所有俄語的細微之處，但這并沒有阻止他以鐵腕統治蘇聯。
Russian really is hard for learners, and a casual comparison might serve the conclusion that big, prestigious languages like Russian are complex. Just look, after all, at their rich, technical vocabularies, and the complex industrial societies that they serve.
俄語對學習者來說真的很難，隨便比較一下就會得出這樣的結論：像俄語這樣有名的大語種是復雜的。畢竟，只要看看他們豐富的技術詞匯，以及他們所服務的復雜工業社會就知道了。
But linguists who have compared languages systematically are struck by the opposite conclusion. They tend to find that “big” languages—spoken by large numbers over a big land area—are actually simpler than small, isolated ones. This is largely because linguists, unlike laypeople, focus on grammar, not vocabulary. Consider Berik, spoken in a few villages in eastern Papua. It may not have a word for “supernova”, but it drips with complex rules: a mandatory verb ending tells what time of day the action occurred, and another indicates the size of the direct object. Of course these things can be said in English, but Berik requires them. Remote societies may be materially simple; “primitive”, their languages are not.
但是，對不同語言進行系統比較的語言學家卻得出了相反的結論。他們傾向于發現，“大”語言——在一大片土地上被大量使用的語言——實際上比小的、孤立的語言更簡單。這在很大程度上是因為語言學家與外行人不同，他們關注的是語法，而不是詞匯。想想巴布亞東部的幾個村莊說的柏雷克語吧。它可能沒有“超新星”這個詞，但它有著復雜的規則：強制動詞的結尾表示動作發生的時間，另一個表示直接對象的大小。當然，這些事情本可以用英語說，但柏雷克語要求不能如此。偏遠的社會可能物質上很簡單；“原始的”，但他們的語言不是。
Systematically so: a study in 2010 of thousands of tongues found that smaller languages have more Berik-style grammatical bits and pieces attached to words. By contrast, bigger ones tend to be like English or Mandarin, in which words change their form little if at all. No one knows why, but a likely culprit is the very scale and ubiquity of such widely travelled languages.
語言系統是這樣的：2010年對數千種語言進行的一項研究發現，較小的語言在單詞上有更多柏雷克風格的語法碎片。相比之下，更大的語言如英語或普通話，單詞的形式幾乎沒有變化。沒有人知道原因，但一個可能的罪魁禍首是如此廣泛傳播的語言的規模和普遍性。
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