经济学人下载:你说什么语言?

Each volunteer speaker of a language of interest is first tested with what is known as a Swadesh list. This is a set of 207 high-frequency, slow-to-change words such as parts of the body, colours and basic verbs like eat, drink, sleep and kill. The Swadesh list is intended to ascertain an individual’s fluency before he is taken on. Once he has been accepted, Dr Kaufman and his colleagues start chipping away at the language’s phonology (the sounds of which it is composed) and its syntax (how its meaning is changed by the order of words and phrases). This sort of analysis is the bread and butter of linguistics.

首先，要用称为斯瓦迪士核心词表的列表为一种目标研究语言的每位志愿者进行测试。这是一组207个高频、变化缓慢的词汇，如身体部位、颜色和诸如吃、喝、睡或杀等基本动词。斯瓦迪士核心词表旨在于录用志愿者前先确定他的语言流利程度。一旦他被录用，考夫曼博士及其同事就开始不断研究那种语言的音位学（即组成这个体系的各种发音）和句法（其词汇和短语的次序如何改变意思）。这种分析是语言学中非常重要而且基础的一部分。

Every so often, though, the researchers come across a bit of jam. The Mahongwe word manono, for example, means “I like” when spoken soft and flat, and “I don’t like” when the first syllable is a tad sharper in tone. Similarly, mbaza could be either “chest” or “council house”. In both cases, the two words are nearly indistinguishable to an English speaker, but yield starkly different patterns when run through a spectrograph. Manono is a particular linguistic oddity, since it uses only tone to differentiate an affirmative from a negative—a phenomenon the ELA has since discovered applies to all verbs in Mahongwe.

不过，研究者们偶尔也会碰上一点困难。例如，马宏威语词汇manono，当用温和平缓的语调发音时，意思为“我喜欢”，而当第一个音节发音稍微尖锐时，意思却是“我不喜欢”。与此类似，mbaza可以是“胸膛”，也可以是“廉租房”。在以上两个例子里，对于一个说英语的人，这两个词都几乎无法分辨，但通过声谱仪处理后却能形成明显不同的图案。从语言学角度上看，Manono这个词是个独特的怪胎，因为它只用声调来区分肯定和否定——濒危语言联盟已经发现这个现象适用于马宏威语中所有的动词。

Such niceties are interesting to experts. But the ELA is attempting to understand more than just the nuts and bolts of languages. It is collecting stories and other verbal material specific to the cultures of the participants. One volunteer, for example, wants to write a storybook for children in her language (Shughni), and also a recipe book. That means creating a written form of the language, which the researchers do using what is known as the International Phonetic Alphabet.

专家们会觉得这些细节相当有趣。但是濒危语言联盟尝试理解的不仅仅是语言的基本要素。它还在收集参与者所属文化特有的故事和其他口语素材。例如，一位志愿者想用其语言(舒格尼语)写一本儿童故事书和一本菜谱。这意味着要创造那种语言的书面语体，而研究者们正在使用被称为国际音标的符号体系来完成这件事。

Many of Dr Kaufman’s better finds, he says, have come from “hanging out at street corners with a clipboard on Roosevelt Avenue”—a street (pictured above) in the borough of Queens that he describes as the “epicentre of the epicentre” of linguistic New York. How long it will remain so is moot. The world’s languages, which number about 6,900, are reckoned to be dying out at the rate of one a fortnight. The reason is precisely the sort of cultural mixing that New York epitomises. The value of learning any particular language is increased by the number of people who already speak it. Conversely, the value of a minority language is diminished as people abandon it. To those languages that hath, in other words, shall be given. From those that hath not, shall the last speakers soon be taken away.

考夫曼博士说，许多更为精妙的发现都是他带着一块剪贴版在罗斯福大道上街角处闲逛所得来的——这条街（见上图）位于皇后区，他说那里是纽约语言学上“中心的中心”。这种现象会持续多久？不得而知。全世界的语言多达6900多种，估计每两周就有一种语言会消失。原因恰是纽约这种典型的文化交融。任何一种语言，使用的人数能越多，学习这种语言的价值就越高。相反，少数人使用的语言会遭到人们抛弃，其价值便会随之降低。换言之，价值更高的那些语言将会有更多的人学习之。而价值较低的语言，其最后一批使用者也将会很快消失。