经济学人下载:约翰逊语言专栏--词汇战争(1)

Johnson
约翰逊语言专栏

Wars of words
词汇战争

When language is the pursuit of politics by other means
当语言是政治别样的诉求

The museum that honours Johannes Aavik in Kuressaare, a small town on an Estonian island, may not seem impressive. Outside, the national flag is desultorily tangled in a tree. Inside the small building, an attendant jumps up in surprise to turn on the lights for the only visitor. Of the two rooms, just one is devoted to Johannes (the other deals with his brother Joosep, a musician).
纪念约翰内斯·阿维克的博物馆位于爱沙尼亚一个小岛上的小镇Kuressaare，可能看起来并没有一鸣惊人。屋外，国旗杂乱地缠绕在一棵树上。在这座小房子里，一位服务员吃惊地跳了起来，为唯一的客人开了灯。两个房间中，只有一个是纪念约翰内斯的(另一个纪念他的哥哥，音乐家约赛)。

Yet Aavik deserves his museum. Few people have ever coined more words that subsequently came to be used. Over the centuries Estonia was dominated by Danes, Germans, Swedes and Russians. It is estimated that a third of its vocabulary is borrowed. So in the early years of the 20th century, when Estonia was still part of the Russian empire—and then after it declared its independence in 1918—Aavik set about coining Estonian replacements for some of those borrowings. Some he took from rural dialects; others were created on the model of Finnish (which, unlike most European languages, is related to Estonian).
而阿维克值得拥有这个博物馆。很少有人创造出更多后来被使用的词汇。几个世纪以来，爱沙尼亚由丹麦人、德国人、瑞典人和俄罗斯人统治。据估计，有三分之一词汇属于外来借用语。因此，在20世纪初，当爱沙尼亚还是俄罗斯帝国的一部分时，以及1918年宣布独立后，亚维克航空公司开始用爱沙尼亚的货币来替代这些借款。他从农村方言中提取了一些；其他语言是根据芬兰语的模式创造的(与大多数欧洲语言不同，芬兰语与爱沙尼亚语有关)。

But quite a few, he simply made up. A modern scholar thinks he might have coined roim, “crime”, with the English word at the back of his mind. Aavik himself claimed that he merely sought short words that sounded beautiful and seemed Estonian, even though they were, at least at the moment he invented them, nonsense.
但数量相当多，他就这么创造出来了。一位现代学者认为，他可能在脑海中创造了“roim”(犯罪)这个英文单词。阿维克本人声称，他只是想找一些听起来很美、看起来像爱沙尼亚语的简短词汇，尽管至少在他发明这些词之前，这些词都毫无意义。

Aavik was part of a wave of linguistic purism that was then sweeping Europe. In the medieval period, Latin had been thought the only language worth writing. But gradually authors in France and Italy began to see their own tongues—descendants of Latin—as worthy of literature, too. The trend was boosted by Protestantism, which preached that everyone should have access to scripture in their own languages. The “vernaculars” became respectable.
阿维克是当时席卷欧洲的语言纯粹主义浪潮的一部分。在中世纪，拉丁语被认为是唯一值得书写的语言。但渐渐地，法国和意大利的作家也开始认为他们自己的语言——拉丁后裔——也有文学价值。这一趋势是由新教推动的，它鼓吹每个人都应该有机会阅读自己语言的圣经。“方言”变得受人尊敬。

Or some of them did. A few big languages, backed by states, gained kudos. Small, stateless ones were still belittled. Only Russian and German could be spoken at Aavik’s school. Little wonder that the atmosphere nurtured a nationalist.
或者他们中的一些人这样做了。一些由政府支持的大型语言赢得了赞誉。小型的、无国籍的公司仍然受到轻视。在阿维克的学校里，只能讲俄语和德语。难怪当时的气氛孕育了一个民族主义者。