2019年经济学人 约翰逊语言专栏--哪种语言最好?(1)（在线收听）

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Books and arts

来源于《图书与艺术》版块

Johnson

约翰逊语言专栏

First among equals

同侪之首

Which is the best language? You decide

哪种语言最好？你来决定

Maurice Druon of the French Academy once proposed that French should be made the principal legal language of the European Union. He argued that its logic and precision rendered it the judicial language par excellence. Others chortled. How very French of him!

法国科学院的莫里斯·德鲁昂曾提议，应使法语成为欧洲联盟的主要法律语言。他认为，法语的逻辑性和精确性使其成为最优秀的司法语言。其他人则一笑置之。他真是个地道的法国人！

The French are hardly alone in believing that their language is especially poetic, emotional, logical, precise, accessible or rich. But it turns out that the things people prize in their own languages can often be the same things foreign learners hate. Take the formal-informal distinction in words for “you”. German and French have du and tu for friends and family, and Sie and vous for unknown adults and formal speech. Natives of those languages miss that distinction when speaking English. Those whose languages (like English) don’t make it in the first place often resent having this choice forced on them in French or German.

并非只有法国人认为自己的语言特别富有诗意、情感丰富、逻辑严密、通俗易懂并且内容丰富。但事实证明，人们在母语中珍视的东西往往与外国学习者讨厌的东西是一样的。以“你”一词的正式和非正式区别为例。德国人和法国人对朋友和家人使用du和tu，用Sie和vous表示不知名的成年人和正式讲话。母语为德语和法语的人在讲英语时忽略了这一区别。那些母语(如英语)一开始就没有排在第一的人，往往在法语或德语中被迫做选择感到不满。

A dictum among linguists is that languages differ not in what they can express, but in what they must. Given the time and willingness to explain or coin basic terms, any language could be used to talk about anything. But they vary wildly in what they insist speakers say, with the tu-vous distinction just the tip of an iceberg. Washo, a native language of Nevada, has four past and three future tenses, depending on how distant an event is in time. Tariana, from Brazil, has “evidentiality”: speakers choose one of five verb-endings to show how they know what they aver to be true. Jarawara, also from Brazil, distinguishes “we (including you)” and “we (without you)”.

语言学家的一个格言是，语言的差异不在于它们能表达什么，而在于它们必须表达什么。只要有时间和意愿解释或创造基本术语，那么任何语言都可以用来谈论任何事情。但他们在坚持讲话人的用词方面有很大不同，而 tu-vous 之间的区别也只是冰山一角。Washo是内华达州的一种本土语言，有四种过去时态和三种将来时态，具体取决于事件发生的时间间隔。来自巴西的塔利亚娜有一个明显的特点：说话者从五个动词尾中选择一个来表明他们知道自己所断言的是正确的。同样来自巴西的查拉瓦拉将“我们(包括你)”和“我们(没有你)”区分开来。