经济学人40:语言,文化的工具

 　　Books and Arts; Book Review;Understanding language；Talk, talk；

　　文艺；书评；理解语言；不停地说；
　　Language: The Cultural Tool. By Daniel Everett.
　　《语言：文化的工具》，丹尼尔·埃弗雷特著。
　　For half a century an influential 1 group of Western linguists 3, led by Noam Chomsky, have argued that language is an innate 4 human faculty 5, the product of a “language organ” in the mind. Other prominent “innatists” include Steven Pinker, an evolutionary 6 psychologist and author of “The Language Instinct”, and Derek Bickerton, a linguist 2 at the University of Hawaii and developer of a “bioprogramme” theory of language. Innatists believe that all languages share fundamental features. And linguistic 7 innatism is part of a wider debate about just how much of human nature is wired into the brain.
　　半个世纪以来一个由乔姆斯基领导的西方语言学家的群体已经证实，语言是一种先天的能力，是大脑中“语言器官”的产物。另一个杰出的“先天派”包括进化心理学家、《语言本能》的作者——史蒂夫皮克和夏威夷大学的语言学家、“生物计划”语言理论的创始人——德里克贝克顿。“先天派”认为所有的语言都有共同的基本特点，并且语言天赋论是关于到底有多少人类本性被用于智力运作的宽泛讨论的一部分。
　　Daniel Everett, a linguist at Bentley University in Massachusetts, disagrees on both innatism and the fundamental similarity of languages. He spent years learning tiny languages in forbidding jungle villages, experiences he recounted in his 2008 memoir 8, “Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes”. (A former Christian 9 missionary 10 whose original goal was spreading the gospel, he fell away from his faith.) In his new book, “Language: The Cultural Tool”, Mr Everett moves away from narrow linguistic anthropology 11 to broad theory. He argues that language is not the product of a “language organ” but an extension of general intelligence.
　　丹尼尔 埃弗雷特，马萨诸塞州宾利大学的语言学家，对语言的天赋论和基本相似性都持有不同的看法。他在与世隔绝的小村庄里花费了数年的时间研究一些小语种，并在他2008年的自传《不要睡，有蛇！》里重新总结了这段经历。（一个曾经把传播福音作为最初目标的基督教传教士，后放弃了他的信仰。）在他的新书《语言：文化的工具》中，埃弗里特先生把狭隘的语言人类学从宽泛的理论中分离出来。他认为语言并不是语言器官的产物，而是一般智力的延伸。
　　Instead of unfolding in the same way in Paris and Papua New Guinea, languages are crafted by their speakers to meet their needs. He cites the Piraha, the Brazilian Amazonian group he has spent the longest time living with. There are no numbers beyond two in Piraha because, Mr Everett argues, they have no money, engage in little barter 12 trade, do not store food for the future and do not think about the distant past. This “living for the moment”, which the Piraha enjoy (they think Western life sounds dreadful), shapes their language.
　　相反地，以同样的方式在巴黎和巴布亚新几内亚展开，语言发言者精心制作以满足他们的需求。他用他在巴西亚马逊居住时间最长的种群皮尔哈举例，他证实在皮尔哈没有超过两位数的数字因为他们没有货币去进行小型货物交换贸易，不用为未来储存食物，也不用思考遥远的过去。这种皮尔哈人享受的“活在当下”的生活方式削弱了他们的语言。（他们认为西方人的生活听着很可怕）
　　That different cultures have different words is unsurprising. It is when these differences affect cognition (the Piraha cannot do maths, for example) that things get interesting. But Mr Everett's most controversial argument, and his biggest challenge to linguistic innatism, is about grammar.
　　不同的文化有不同的文字并不令人惊奇，但当这些不同之处影响到了认知能力时事情就变得有趣了。（举例来说，皮尔哈人不会数学。）但是埃弗里特最有争议的论据和对语言天赋论最大的挑战是关于语法的。
　　Mr Chomsky has argued that “recursion” is the key feature of all human language. This is the embedding 13 of smaller units inside bigger ones: a subordinate clause is a kind of recursion, embedding a sentence in a bigger one. Mr Everett says that the Piraha lack grammatical recursion, and that even if recursion is universal (Piraha use it in stories if not within sentences), this does not prove the existence of the language organ. Information is naturally organised with smaller bits nesting inside larger ones. That nearly all humans would find this linguistically 14 useful is little different than widely varying societies independently inventing the bow and arrow—it is simply useful, and no proof of an instinct. True instincts, like turtles making their way to the sea or ducklings bonding with their mothers, require no learning. Language does. Animals do not truly excel in their deployment 15 of basic instincts, whereas some humans clearly use language much better than others.
　　乔姆斯基已经证明“递归”是所有人类语言的关键特征。递归是让更小的单位嵌入更大的单位内部：一个从句是一种递归，把一个句子嵌入更大的句子中。埃弗里特说皮尔哈缺乏符合语法规则的递归，即使递归是普遍存在的（皮尔哈人把它用在没有长句子的故事中），也不能证明语言器官的存在。信息是用小字节嵌入更大的字节而自然组成的。几乎所有人都能发现这种语言学的用途和广泛变化的社会独立发明弓和箭是不同的，它是有用的而且没有本能的证明。真正的本能是不用证明的，就像海龟用它们的方式去海边和小鸭子总是跟着它们的妈妈一样。语言也是如此。动物们并不是真的擅长本能的调度，而有些人显然能比其他人更好的使用语言。
　　But Mr Everett, in trying to reach a popular audience while making an argument aimed at professional linguists, makes some awkward compromises. He cites a paper by other researchers claiming to have found that there are no features that are common to all languages, an argument that is crucial to his thesis. But he does not give enough detail for the reader. Later he even contradicts himself, saying that all languages have nouns and verbs.
　　但是当埃弗里特针对语言学家得出结论时，为了争取到受众的欢迎而做了一些笨拙的妥协。他援引其它研究者的论文，声称已经发现了没有所有语言共通的特征，作为他的论文中一个重要的论据。但他并没有向读者展示更多细节。不久后他甚至自相矛盾的说所有语言都是有动词和名词的。
　　He argues that differences between societies lead to profound differences between languages, but fails to drive the point home fully 16. The Wari' people use the word “hole” or “vagina” as the ordinary word for “wife”. Could this be denigrating 17 of women? Or, since the birth canal is the point of departure for human life, could it be a way of praising them? Mr Everett is not sure.Or take Banawá, another Amazonian language, in which the default gender 18 of an unknown person or mixed group of people is feminine, not masculine as in most languages. The Banawá also practise rigid 19 gender segregation 20, even whipping young girls bloody 21 after their first menstruation. Could the unusual gender-assignment of Banawá be a product of this gender-segregated Banawá society? “The only answer at present is, ‘Perhaps',” he writes. Even the lack of grammatical recursion in Pirah?, Mr Everett's key piece of evidence that it is culture that creates language, cannot tell the whole tale. Similar tribal 22 cultures have languages bristling 23 with recursion.
　　他认为，社会之间的差异导致不同语言之间的深刻分歧，却不能充分证明其原理。沃利人用“洞”、“阴道”这样的词汇作为“妻子”的代名词；难道这是对女人的玷污？或者，产道是人类生命的出发点，难道这是一种赞美他们的方式？埃弗里特并不能确定。或者用亚马逊地区的另一种语言巴纳沃来举例，在大部分语言中，一个不知名的人或者一个混合群体的默认性别是女性，而不是男性。巴纳沃人仍然坚持严格的性别隔离，甚至要在女孩们第一次来月经后把她们鞭打的鲜血淋漓。巴纳沃的这种特殊的性别对待难道是巴纳沃社会性别隔离的产物？“现在唯一的答案是‘也许吧'”，他写到。即使是缺乏语法递归的皮尔哈，埃弗里特证据的关键点仍然是文化创造了语言，但这不能断定整个叙述。类似的种族文化里存在着充满了递归式的语言。
　　Mr Everett thinks it possible that culture influences grammar, but he is not sure. He acknowledges that conjecture 24 about what causes linguistic differences has been a staple 25 of much irresponsible amateur linguistics 26. It is hard to work out where culture has affected 27 language, where language affects culture and cognition (a hot topic of psycholinguistic research), and where the differences are unrelated. Mr Everett has taken a shot across the innatists' bow, and an impressively modest and reasoned one given that Mr Chomsky once called him a charlatan 28. His case is not wholly proven, but it deserves a serious reading, and a response beyond name-calling.
　　埃弗里特认为文化影响语法是可能的，但他并不确定。他承认，关于引起语言差异原因的猜想已经成为多数不负责任的业余的语言学的主题。文化在哪影响了语言、语言在哪影响了文化和认知（心理语言学研究的一个热门话题）、差异在哪是无关联的都很难计算。埃弗里特提醒先天派，一个印象深刻的谦逊的合理的人是会考虑到乔姆斯基曾经笑话他是个骗子。他的情况并不能完全证明，但值得一读，还有超越了人身攻击的回应。