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 剑桥雅思4阅读Test2原文+译文：语言的消失

  Lost for words

  Many minority languages are on the danger list

  语言的消失

  ——许多少数民族语言濒临灭绝

  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.

  对于居住在美国西南部四州的那瓦霍人来讲，他们的语言正在遭遇灭顶之灾。大多数说那瓦霍语的人要么是中年人，要么就是垂垂老者。尽管有许多学生都在学习该门语言，可是学校却是用英文授课的。路牌、超市商品说明、甚至报纸全部是英文的。因此语言学家怀疑在百年之后还会不会有人会说这门语言也就不足为奇了。

  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.’

  那瓦霍语决不是惟一会有此厄运的语言。再经历两代人的时间，全球6,800种语言当中的半数就有可能从世界上彻底消失——这就相当于平均每十天就有一种语言消失。地球上语言的多样性从未以如此惊人的速度降低过。“现在，我们面临的将是两三种语言支配整个世界。”雷丁大学的进化生物学家Marl Pagel说，“这就是(语言的)大规模灭绝，而且我们很难知道能否从这种语言灭绝当中恢复过来。”

  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.

  封闭产生了语言的多样性。结果整个世界就布满了只有几个人说的语言。只有250种语言拥有超过100万的使用者，而至少有3,000种语言使用者不足2,500人。那些行将消失的小语种并非命该如此。尽管仍有15万人在使用那瓦霍语，但这种语言还是上了濒危名单。判断一种语言是否濒危的标准不是使用者的数量，而是使用者的年龄。如果一种语言是孩子们在使用，就会相对安全些。用费尔班克斯Alassk语言中心的主任Micheal Krauss的话说就是，真正面临灭绝之灾的是那些只有老年人才懂得说的语言。

  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.’

  可人们为什么拒绝说他们父母的语言呢?这一切都始于一场信任危机。BATH英国濒危语言基金会成员Nicholas Ostler说：“当一个小规模社会发现自己与一个大规模，更富有的社会并肩而存的时候，其成员就会对自己的文化丧失信心。当这个社会的下一代进人青春期的时候，他们很可能不会接受(包括语言在内的)传统事物。”

  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.

  这种转变往往不是自发的。为了加强国家凝聚力，政府通常会通过在公共场合禁用，以及在学校中不提倡使用的方法，消灭少数民族语言。例如，以前美国政府在印地安保留地学校推行英语授课政策，这事实上就是将那瓦霍语等少数语言推上了濒危名单。但是芝加哥大学语言学系系主任Salikoko Mufwene认为，最致命的原因并不是政府政策，而是经济的全球化。他说，“美国印地安人并没有失去对他们自己语言的信心，但是他们不得不去适应社会经济压力。如果大多数生意都是用英语来谈的，他们就不能拒绝说英语，但是，濒危语言就真的值得去挽救吗?至少，对于语言及其进化研究来讲，(不去挽救)就会导致资料的缺失，因为该研究正是基于对现存的和过去的语言的比较而进行的。当一门既无文字记录也无录音考证的语言消失时，对于科学(研究)来讲，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.’

  语言与文化也有千丝万缕的联系，因此要想单纯保存语言而不保留文化是非常困难的。“如果一个本来说那瓦霍语的人现在要改说英语，那么他准得失去点东西。”Mufwene说道，Pagel也评价道，“而且，语言多样性的丧失也使我们无法以多种方式来看待这个世界。”越来越多的证据表明，学习一门语言可以为大脑带来生理上的变化。“比如说，你我的大脑与说法语人的大脑就十分不同，”Page说，这是会影响我们的思维和看法的。“我们针对不同的概念建立了不同的模式和联系，这很可能就是由我们社会的语言习惯构筑而成的。”

  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，尽管语言学家已经竭尽全力，但是许多语言到了下个世纪还是会消失。但是，一种对文化认同感越来越多的关注，也许会阻止最骇人的预言成为现实。“保持语言多样性的关键在于，让人们接受主流语言的同时，也去学习他们祖先的语言。”康那狄格州纽黑文市濒危语言基金会主席Doug Whalen说道，“如果不实行双语制度，大多数濒危语言都无法生存下去。”在新西兰，为孩子们开设的课程明显减轻了毛利语所受的损害，并且重新燃起了人们对该语言的兴趣。在夏威夷，一种相似的方式使波利尼西亚语的使用者在过去数年中增长了8,000人。在加利福尼亚州，“学徒”计划使得数种土著语言得以生存。“学徒”志愿者与某种印地安语的最后一些使用者中的一位组成小组，学习如编织篮子这样的传统工艺，当然交流全部都是用印地安语。通常，经过300个小时的训练后，他们就可以流利地说了，其流利程度足以将这种语言传给他们的子女。但是Mufwene指出，避免语言消失并不等同于通过每天的使用赋予其新的生命。他指出，“保存语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，通过保存的确可以使一门语言起死回生。已经有例子表明，有些语言通过文字记录被保存了下来，而且还在后代中得以复兴。当然，文字记录是这其中的关键。因此，单单是这种语言复兴的可能性，就使得很多说濒危语言的人试图去创造本来并不存在的文字系统。

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