English as she was spoke
Mother Tongue: The English Language=《布萊森英文簡史》北京:中國人民大學出版社，2013
第一章舉了些各地方可怕的英文例子，類似幾年前北京在檢討市內各地的招牌之翻譯的慘狀。
我的問題是翻譯者讀不懂那些可怕的英文，所以中文就”錯誤”了。
The Mother Tongue (ISBN 0-380-71543-0) is a book by Bill Bryson which compiles the history and origins of the English language and the language's various quirks. It is subtitled English And How It Got That Way. The book discusses the Indo-European origins of English, the growing status of English as a global language, the complex etymology of English words, the dialects of English, spelling reform, prescriptive grammar, and more minor topics including swearing. Bryson's account is a popularization of the subject; accordingly, it has been criticised for its inaccuracies, perpetuation of several urban myths, including an uncritical account of the number of words Eskimos have for snow. It has also been described as out-dated.
This book has also been published in Great Britain by Penguin Books under the title Mother Tongue: The English Language (ISBN 0-14-014305-X).
Bryson has since followed up this work with Made in America.
See also
External links
- The Mother Tongue on Google Books (preview)
mother tongue
- 音節
- móther tóngue
((the ［one's］ 〜))
1 ＝mother language.
2 母国語, 自国語.Gray Matter
Are We Really Monolingual?
By MICHAEL ERARD
Does the average American really speak fewer languages than everyone else?
《中 英對照讀新聞》Nymphs and classics help Europe bridge its language divide 希臘女神和古典文學協助歐洲跨越語言鴻溝 ◎俞智敏If you thought that English is the language of the 21st century, think again. In Europe, the future could be Latin. 假如你認為英語是21世紀的語言，最好再重新想想。在歐洲，拉丁文恐怕才是未來的語言。In the EU, languages are big political business. Each member state fights fiercely for its national tongue, with EU texts routinely translated into all 23 of the bloc’s official languages. 在歐盟，語言可是重要的政治問題。所有會員國都拚命爭取其國家語言的地位，歐盟文件通常都會翻譯成23個會員國的官方語言。But trouble starts when there is only room to use one word from one language - such as when creating an internet domain name. 但如果只有空間使用一種語言的一個字詞，例如創造網域名稱時，問題就出現了。English, the EU’s most widespread language, might seem to have the advantage in such questions. But other member states fear that too much English use would cement it as the EU’s unofficial working tongue, a politically impossible position. 歐盟最普遍的語言英語似乎在這類問題上佔有優勢。但其他會員國擔心，太常使用英語會鞏固英語被視為歐盟非官方工作語言的地位，這在政治上可站不住 腳。"English has become the lingua franca, but we are not allowed to say so," one EU linguist commented.「英語早已變成了通用語言，但我們不被允許這麼說」，一位歐盟語言學者表示。 The EU’s solution has been to find a politically neutral language in the only place it could realistically look： European history. 歐盟的解決辦法是要找出一種政治上中立的語言，而歐盟實際上唯一能尋找的地方就是：歐洲歷史。With Latin at the root of many of the technical, scientific, religious and legal terms in Europe, Virgil’s language is perfectly placed to become the EU’s virtual language. 拉丁文是歐洲許多技術、科學、宗教及法律術語的根源，因此古羅馬詩人維吉爾所使用的語言恰好可做為歐盟的虛擬語言。新聞辭典
tongue：名詞，指語言、方言。如My mother tongue is Hakka.（我的母語是客家語。）
cement：動詞，原指用水泥接合，本文指鞏固、加強，如
Our object is to further cement trade relations.（我們的目標是要進一步加強貿易關係。）
lingua franca：名詞，通常為單數，原為義大利文，意指法蘭克語，現多指結合數種不同語言、以利不同語言族群之間溝通的混合語或通用語，如The international business community sees English as a lingua franca.（國際商務社群視英語為通用語言。）
翻譯評論
nymph 可指希臘或羅馬神話 此文指後者
n.- Greek & Roman Mythology. Any of numerous minor deities represented as beautiful maidens inhabiting and sometimes personifying features of nature such as trees, waters, and mountains.
- A girl, especially a beautiful one.
- The larval form of certain insects, such as silverfish and grasshoppers, usually resembling the adult form but smaller and lacking fully developed wings. Also called nympha.
[Middle English nimphe, from Old French, from Latin nympha, from Greek numphē.]
nymphal nymph'al (nĭm'fəl) adj.lingua franca
n., pl. lingua fran·cas (-kəz) also linguae fran·cae (frăng'kē, frăn'sē).
- A medium of communication between peoples of different languages.
- A mixture of Italian with Provençal, French, Spanish, Arabic, Greek, and Turkish, formerly spoken on the eastern Mediterranean coast.
[Italian : lingua, language + franca, Frankish (that is, European).]
Reader Response | 30.07.2009
The future of Esperanto looks bright according to our readers
Esperantists keep the dream alive
Learning
any language improves one's career, as probably one can get more
informed, get more skills in one's own language and so on. But reaching a
deep knowledge of Esperanto is not as time consuming as for national
languages, so the development of relationships to others in the same
professional field is easier and more productive. I speak to my children
only in Esperanto. They are six and four years old and bilingual in
Portuguese and Esperanto. Our aim, for my Esperanto-speaking wife and
me, is to give them some resources to easily learn more languages, but
especially to become open-minded to cultural diversity in the world.
That is commonly overridden by the international use of English.
Esperanto is a sort of "linguistic handshaking", as some writer brightly
defined it. - James R. Piton, Brazil
Certainly
Esperanto has a bright future. It's a pity that only a few people know
that Esperanto has become a living language. During a short period of
121 years Esperanto is now in the top 100 languages, out of 6,800
worldwide, according to the CIA World factbook. It is the 17th most used
language in Wikipedia, and a language choice of Google, Skype, Firefox
and Facebook. Native Esperanto speakers, who have used the language from
birth, include World Chess Champion Susan Polger, Ulrich Brandenberg
the new German Ambassador to NATO and Nobel Laureate Daniel Bovet. - Brian Barker, Great Britain
Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Creator of Esperanto, Ludwik Zamenhof, hoped to create a universal language
English-speaking
countries are rich and privileged, but they are increasingly
dissatisfied that they are pitifully monolingual. The US, the UK and
Australia all bemoan this fact and try to find solutions, but solutions
are hard to find when the language of choice is so ill-defined, language
teachers are much too scarce and time is short in our overcrowded
curriculum. Esperanto faces a renaissance, not for any greatly
idealistic reason, but for the practical reason that all primary school
teachers can be equipped to teach it, at the time when children can best
learn a second language. While learning Esperanto, the children can
make meaningful contact with any of over a hundred cultures, giving them
a second working language and a broad intercultural perspective by the
end of primary school. They then enter middle school with the
confidence, skills and perspective to choose, and succeed in, a third
language in high school. By serving our own children well, giving them
an achievable language goal in the 140 or so hours available for
second-language instruction in primary school, Esperanto will become a
normal part of English-speaking childhood. Whether the children and
their primary teachers will choose to use the language they share to
further the cause of international social justice remains to be seen. - Penelope Vos, Australia
Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: The 89th International Esperanto Conference was held in Beijing in 2004
I
do think that Esperanto can make communication much easier and fairer
than English. I think people will in the end realise that Esperanto has
many advantages and that English is too hard to spell, to pronounce, to
learn as a second language. But people are often stubborn and reject
Esperanto without having a good look at it. Therefore it will still be
quite a while before everyone uses Esperanto. - Nicole Else, Australia
Regardless
of whether Esperanto ever becomes the dominant lingua franca, it will
have its niche and its adherents. Thoughtful mother tongue speakers of
English are now wondering whether our lack of foreign language skills
leads to political arrogance. And if it turns out that multilingualism
promotes problem solving skills, then our ignorance of foreign languages
will put us at a disadvantage. Students find Esperanto encouraging
because they can quickly see the progress they are making. Personally I
used Esperanto to brush up on my German by translating Hermann Hesse's
"Demian" into Esperanto. - Detlef Karthaus, Canada
The
dream of increased equality has spread Esperanto in Europe in the past
and is spreading it in countries like Nepal and Togo today. The American
dream is spreading English throughout the world - and the American
nightmare makes it unlikely and undesirable for English to take over
completely. All such dreams mutate through time, and people dream much
less than they did before of English or Esperanto as the universal first
language. Slowly, but inevitably, the focus turns on the question of
language, not as a means of communication, but as a means of expression.
- Jens Stengaard Larsen, Denmark
Of course Esperanto has a
future. It has more than 120 years of existence. Why should it stop?
People get married with that common language and children speak it as
their mother tongue. Adventure goes on and won't stop just because
Esperanto is an extraordinary and simple experience and can be taught
everywhere. - Roy, FranceMost of the world languages are spoken by small groups of people with a tendency to disappear. Many other languages, including Esperanto, have a long term future. As long as the media keeps telling the general public that Esperanto is not widespread, the general public will not bother to learn the language. We have to work very hard to let people know that Esperanto is a living language spoken in most countries. Right now I am planning a visit to Beijing, China, and my stay will be much easier and more rewarding because there will be many Esperanto-speakers ready to help me. Most of the time it is very difficult to understand and be understood by people that studied English for ten years. There are no communication problems with people that have studied Esperanto during a tenth of that time. When they spoke English to me, it was because they wanted to sell me something. When they spoke Esperanto to me, it was because they wanted to be my friends. - Enrique, Argentina
*****
The days of English as the world’s second language may (slowly) be ending
The future of English
Dec 16th 2010 | from PRINT EDITION
The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel. By Nicholas Ostler. Walker & Company; 368 pages; $28. Allen Lane; £20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk
部分共通語隨貿易路線傳佈，但這是為了方便，所以常隨情勢改變。腓尼基語曾是迦太基帝國的語言，但羅馬摧毀迦太基之後，便縮減為當地方言。相反地，希臘語不但熬過羅馬興衰，更在東地中海擔任了超過1000年的共通語。
英語以共通語的角色四處擴散，但並未被當成母語。全球有超過10億人說英語，但只有3.3億人以英語為第一語言，而且這群人並未四處散佈。英語的未來並非掌握在核心英語國家手中，其他國家會一直學英語嗎？
Ostler提出了兩項會限制英語散佈的因素，也就是當代國家主義和科技。現今，任何有自信的國家都不會讓外國語言成為官方語言。Ostler認為 英語會失去共通語地位，但原因不是其他語言取而代之。目前沒有語言擁有足夠的跨地域性，也只剩非洲還有可能受外人影響其語言選擇。他相信英語不會有後繼 者，因為科技會滿足需求。
Ostler承認，翻譯軟體已經發展了50年，但還是讓人失望。不過，半個世紀在語言史中不過是短短一瞬。如果Ostler的看法沒錯，未來的世代可能會視英語為書法或拉丁文，有聲望也有傳統，但越來越不重要。
ENGLISH is the most successful language in the history of the world. It is spoken on every continent, is learnt as a second language by schoolchildren and is the vehicle of science, global business and popular culture. Many think it will spread without end. But Nicholas Ostler, a scholar of the rise and fall of languages, makes a surprising prediction in his latest book: the days of English as the world’s lingua-franca may be numbered.
Conquest, trade and religion were the biggest forces behind the spread of earlier lingua-francas (the author uses a hyphen to distinguish the phrase from Lingua Franca, an Italian-based trade language used during the Renaissance). A linguist of astonishing voracity, Mr Ostler plunges happily into his tales from ancient history.
The Achaemenid emperors, vanquishers of the Babylonians in 539BC, spoke Persian as their native language, but pragmatically adopted Aramaic as the world’s first “interlingua”. Official long-distance communications were written in Aramaic, sent across the empire and then translated from Aramaic upon arrival. Persian itself would serve as a lingua-franca not at the time of the empire’s greatest heights but roughly from 1000AD to 1800. The Turkic conquerors of Central Asia, Anatolia and the Middle East, though they adopted Islam and worshipped in Arabic, often kept Persian as the language of the court and of literature. Persian was also the court language of Turkic-ruled Mughal India when the British East India Company arrived.
Some lingua-francas have ridden trade routes, but these are tongues of convenience that change quickly with circumstances. Phoenician spread from its home in modern Lebanon along the northern coast of Africa, where (pronounced in Latin as Punic) it became the language of the Carthaginian empire. But Rome’s destruction of Carthage in 146BC reduced it to a dwindling local vernacular. Greek, by contrast, planted deeper roots, surviving not only Rome’s rise but also its fall, to serve as the lingua-franca of the eastern Mediterranean for over 1,000 years.
What does all this, then, have to do with English? Often very little. It seems sometimes that Mr Ostler, fascinated by ancient uses of language, wanted to write a different sort of book but was persuaded by his publisher to play up the English angle. The core arguments about the future of English come in two chapters at the end of the book. But the predictions are striking.
English is expanding as a lingua-franca but not as a mother tongue. More than 1 billion people speak English worldwide but only about 330m of them as a first language, and this population is not spreading. The future of English is in the hands of countries outside the core Anglophone group. Will they always learn English?
Mr Ostler suggests that two new factors—modern nationalism and technology—will check the spread of English. The pragmatism of the Achaemenids and Mughals is striking because no confident modern nation would today make a foreign language official. Several of Britain’s ex-colonies once did so but only because English was a neutral language among competing native tongues. English has been rejected in other ex-colonies, such as Sri Lanka and Tanzania, where Anglophone elites gave way to Sinhala- and Swahili-speaking nationalists. In 1990 the Netherlands considered but rejected on nationalist grounds making English the sole language of university education.
English will fade as a lingua-franca, Mr Ostler argues, but not because some other language will take its place. No pretender is pan-regional enough, and only Africa’s linguistic situation may be sufficiently fluid to have its future choices influenced by outsiders. Rather, English will have no successor because none will be needed. Technology, Mr Ostler believes, will fill the need.
This argument relies on huge advances in computer translation and speech recognition. Mr Ostler acknowledges that so far such software is a disappointment even after 50 years of intense research, and an explosion in the power of computers. But half a century, though aeons in computer time, is an instant in the sweep of language history. Mr Ostler is surely right about the nationalist limits to the spread of English as a mother-tongue. If he is right about the technology too, future generations will come to see English as something like calligraphy or Latin: prestigious and traditional, but increasingly dispensable.
科技取代溝通？英語失去共通地位 作者：經濟學人
英語是史上最成功的語言，它是各地學生要學的第二語言，也是科學、全球商務和流行文化的載體。許多人相信，英語會無止境地擴張散布，但Nicholas Ostler認為，英語無法永遠擔任全球共通語的角色。
早期共通語散播與征服、貿易和宗教有關。波斯語約在西元1000到1800年間才成為共通語，土耳其征服者崇尚阿拉伯語，但在文學和法庭上通常還是使用波斯語。部分共通語隨貿易路線傳佈，但這是為了方便，所以常隨情勢改變。腓尼基語曾是迦太基帝國的語言，但羅馬摧毀迦太基之後，便縮減為當地方言。相反地，希臘語不但熬過羅馬興衰，更在東地中海擔任了超過1000年的共通語。
英語以共通語的角色四處擴散，但並未被當成母語。全球有超過10億人說英語，但只有3.3億人以英語為第一語言，而且這群人並未四處散佈。英語的未來並非掌握在核心英語國家手中，其他國家會一直學英語嗎？
Ostler提出了兩項會限制英語散佈的因素，也就是當代國家主義和科技。現今，任何有自信的國家都不會讓外國語言成為官方語言。Ostler認為 英語會失去共通語地位，但原因不是其他語言取而代之。目前沒有語言擁有足夠的跨地域性，也只剩非洲還有可能受外人影響其語言選擇。他相信英語不會有後繼 者，因為科技會滿足需求。
Ostler承認，翻譯軟體已經發展了50年，但還是讓人失望。不過，半個世紀在語言史中不過是短短一瞬。如果Ostler的看法沒錯，未來的世代可能會視英語為書法或拉丁文，有聲望也有傳統，但越來越不重要。
Conquest, trade and religion were the biggest forces behind the spread of earlier lingua-francas (the author uses a hyphen to distinguish the phrase from Lingua Franca, an Italian-based trade language used during the Renaissance). A linguist of astonishing voracity, Mr Ostler plunges happily into his tales from ancient history.
The Achaemenid emperors, vanquishers of the Babylonians in 539BC, spoke Persian as their native language, but pragmatically adopted Aramaic as the world’s first “interlingua”. Official long-distance communications were written in Aramaic, sent across the empire and then translated from Aramaic upon arrival. Persian itself would serve as a lingua-franca not at the time of the empire’s greatest heights but roughly from 1000AD to 1800. The Turkic conquerors of Central Asia, Anatolia and the Middle East, though they adopted Islam and worshipped in Arabic, often kept Persian as the language of the court and of literature. Persian was also the court language of Turkic-ruled Mughal India when the British East India Company arrived.
Some lingua-francas have ridden trade routes, but these are tongues of convenience that change quickly with circumstances. Phoenician spread from its home in modern Lebanon along the northern coast of Africa, where (pronounced in Latin as Punic) it became the language of the Carthaginian empire. But Rome’s destruction of Carthage in 146BC reduced it to a dwindling local vernacular. Greek, by contrast, planted deeper roots, surviving not only Rome’s rise but also its fall, to serve as the lingua-franca of the eastern Mediterranean for over 1,000 years.
What does all this, then, have to do with English? Often very little. It seems sometimes that Mr Ostler, fascinated by ancient uses of language, wanted to write a different sort of book but was persuaded by his publisher to play up the English angle. The core arguments about the future of English come in two chapters at the end of the book. But the predictions are striking.
English is expanding as a lingua-franca but not as a mother tongue. More than 1 billion people speak English worldwide but only about 330m of them as a first language, and this population is not spreading. The future of English is in the hands of countries outside the core Anglophone group. Will they always learn English?
Mr Ostler suggests that two new factors—modern nationalism and technology—will check the spread of English. The pragmatism of the Achaemenids and Mughals is striking because no confident modern nation would today make a foreign language official. Several of Britain’s ex-colonies once did so but only because English was a neutral language among competing native tongues. English has been rejected in other ex-colonies, such as Sri Lanka and Tanzania, where Anglophone elites gave way to Sinhala- and Swahili-speaking nationalists. In 1990 the Netherlands considered but rejected on nationalist grounds making English the sole language of university education.
English will fade as a lingua-franca, Mr Ostler argues, but not because some other language will take its place. No pretender is pan-regional enough, and only Africa’s linguistic situation may be sufficiently fluid to have its future choices influenced by outsiders. Rather, English will have no successor because none will be needed. Technology, Mr Ostler believes, will fill the need.
This argument relies on huge advances in computer translation and speech recognition. Mr Ostler acknowledges that so far such software is a disappointment even after 50 years of intense research, and an explosion in the power of computers. But half a century, though aeons in computer time, is an instant in the sweep of language history. Mr Ostler is surely right about the nationalist limits to the spread of English as a mother-tongue. If he is right about the technology too, future generations will come to see English as something like calligraphy or Latin: prestigious and traditional, but increasingly dispensable.
from PRINT EDITION | Books and Arts
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