2019年经济学人 约翰逊语言专栏--词汇战争(2)（在线收听）

Aavik’s efforts mostly predated independence. Other language reformers have begun their work only after they had a state at their disposal. The new republic of Turkey, under Kemal Ataturk, had lost many of the Ottoman empire’s provinces; its pride was wounded and its population now far more Turkish. Ataturk decreed a switch from the Arabic to the Latin alphabet and, in an extraordinary purge, sought to get rid of Arabic and Persian borrowings, replacing them with new coinages. One scholar calls this a “catastrophic success”: modern Turks need special training to read the Turkish of a hundred years ago.

阿维克的努力大多早于独立之前。其他语言改革家只有在有了自己的国家后才开始工作。凯末尔·阿塔图尔克领导下的新土耳其共和国失去了奥斯曼帝国的许多省份；新土耳其的自尊心受到了伤害，现在新土耳其的人口更多是土耳其人。阿塔图尔克下令将阿拉伯语改为拉丁字母，并进行了一次非同寻常的清洗，试图摆脱阿拉伯语和波斯语的借用，以新词代之。一位学者称这是一个“灾难性的成功”：现代土耳其人需要特殊的训练来阅读一百年前的土耳其语。

Purist engineering has also been used to distance a language from an overly close relative. Standard Norwegian was once too similar to Danish for some Norwegians; hence the creation of “new Norwegian” (nynorsk), cobbled together from dialects and avoiding Danish echoes, which today is co-official alongside the older Dano-Norwegian (bokmal). Hindi and Urdu are close enough that some consider them a single language, but since Indian and Pakistani independence, new Hindi coinages and borrowings have tended to come from Sanskrit, Urdu ones from Arabic and Persian. The languages are growing apart.

纯粹主义工程学也被用来将一种语言与过于近亲语言隔离开。对一些挪威人来说，标准挪威语曾与丹麦语过于相似；因此创造了新的挪威语(nynorsk)，从方言中拼凑而成，避免了与丹麦语过于相似，如今，它与较老的挪威达诺语(bokmal)共同成为官方语言。印地语和乌尔都语非常接近，有些人认为它们是同一种语言，但自从印度和巴基斯坦独立以来，新的印地语新词和借用词往往来自梵语，乌尔都语来自阿拉伯语和波斯语。两种语言的距离越来越远。

In fact, places that accept foreign words with a live-and-let-live attitude are the exceptions. Centuries ago, English, which seems undogmatic, itself experienced the “inkhorn controversy”, in which some intellectuals freely coined words from Greek and Latin, such as “educate” and “ostracise”. (Some, such as “suppediate”, meaning “to supply”, never made it.) Aavik-like, purists fought back, coining terms like “witcraft” to replace borrowings like “reason”. Their attitude was exemplified by Sir John Cheke, who in 1557 wrote: “I am of the opinion that our tung should be written cleane and pure, vnmixt and vnmangled with borowing of other tunges.”

事实上，那些对外来词抱着和平共存态度的地方是例外。几个世纪以前，英语本身就经历了“墨水瓶之争”，一些知识分子自由地从希腊语和拉丁语中创造了“educate教育”和“ostracise排斥”等词汇。(有些词，如“suppediate”，意为“供应”，从未成功。) 与阿维克类似，纯粹主义者进行了反击，创造了“witcraft”这样的词汇来取代“reason理由”这样的借词。他们的态度在约翰·契克爵士身上得到了体现，他在1557年写道:“我认为我们的语言应该写得干净纯粹，不混杂其它外来语。”

Most of the inkhornisms survived. These days, English has become so robust that it is no longer the polluted but the polluter. That it now lacks a purist tendency of its own may be less because the British are naturally laissez-faire liberals than because English is the world’s top linguistic dog. It exports words around the globe, often to the alarm of nationalists overseas. They might take some comfort from the fact that English thrived after its controversial mangling. Objectively, borrowing does no harm. But then, such worries are rarely objective to begin with.

大多水墨水主义幸存了下来。如今，英语变得如此强大，以至于它不再是受污染的国家，而是污染者。它现在缺乏自己的纯粹主义倾向，与其说是因为英国人天生就是自由放任的自由主义者，不如说是因为英语是世界上最好的语言宠儿。它向全球输出词汇，常常引起海外民族主义者的警惕。客观地说，外来词没有害处。但是，这样的担忧很少是客观的。