學(xué)券計(jì)劃 孩子與音樂 電子書
報(bào)紙的消亡 環(huán)境保護(hù) 帶薪請(qǐng)假制度
英語(yǔ)的消亡
導(dǎo)讀：怪異的短信語(yǔ)言是對(duì)語(yǔ)言的褻瀆還是創(chuàng)新？是年輕一代人墮落的標(biāo)志嗎？語(yǔ)言學(xué)家得出了與中學(xué)教師和語(yǔ)言保守主義者不同的結(jié)論。
In an experiment, the more adept children were at text messaging, the better they did in spelling and writing.
The most hotly contested controversy sparked by the text-messaging phenomenon of the past eight years is over truant letters. Textese(Text(手機(jī)短信)+ ese(用語(yǔ)))組成, a newly born dialect of English that subverts letters and numbers to produce ultra-concise words and sentiments, is horrifying language loyalists and pedagogues. And their fears are stoked by some staggering numbers: this year the world is on track to produce 2.3 trillion messages——a nearly 20 percent increase from 2007 and almost 150 percent from 2000. The accompanying revenue for telephone companies is growing nearly as fast——to an estimated $ 60 billion this year. In the English-speaking world, Britain alone generates well over 6 billion messages every month. People are communicating more and faster than ever, but some worry that, as textese drops consonants, vowels and punctuation and makes no distinction between letters and numbers, people will no longer know how we were really supposed to communicate. Will text messaging produce generations of illiterates? Could this——OMG(Oh my God)——be the death of English language?
Those raising the alarm aren't linguist. They are teachers who have had to red-pen some ridiculous practices in high-school papers and concerned citizens who believe it their moral duty to write grammar books. The latter can be quite prominent, like John Humphrys, a television broadcaster and household name in Britain, for whom texting is vandalism and Lynne Truss, author of Eats, Shoots and Leaves, who actually enjoys texting so much she never abbreviates. Britain, one of the first countries where texting became a national habit, has also produced some of the most bitter anti-texting vitriol, textese wrote John Sutherland in The Guardian, masks dyslexia. But linguists, if anyone is paying attention, have kept quiet on this score——until now. In a new book, Britain's most prolific linguist finally sets a few things straight.
David Crystal's Txtng: the Gr 8 Db8 (Oxford) makes two general points: that the language of texting is hardly as deviant as people think, and that texting actually makes young people better communicators, not worse. Crystal spells out the first point by marshalling real linguistic evidence. He breaks down the distinctive elements of texting language——pictograms, initialisms, or acronyms； contractions and others——and points out similar examples in linguistic practice from the ancient Egyptians to 20th century broadcasting. Shakespeare freely used elisions, novel syntax and several thousand made-up words (his own name was signed in six different ways)。 Even some common conventions are relatively novel: rules for using the oft-abused apostrophe were set only in the middle of the 19th century. The point is that tailored text predates the text message, so we might as well accept that ours is a language of vandals. Who even knows what p.m. stands for? (Post meridiem, Latin for after midday, first recorded by a lazy delinquent in 1666. )
Where the opponents see destruction, Crystal sees growth. He believes in the same theory of evolution for language as some evolutionary biologists do for life: change isn't gradual. Monumental developments interrupt periods of stagnation, always as a result of crucial external developments. The American Revolution had much greater consequences for the English language than texting has had thus far. The resulting differences between American and British English, Crystal says, are more pronounced than the differences between, say, the language of newspapers and text messages. (Interestingly, there are hardly any differences between American and Britain texting.)
As soon as linguists began to peer into the uproar over texting, researchers examined the effects of texting experimentally. The results disproved conventional wisdom: in one British experiment last year, children who texted——and who wielded plenty of abbreviations——scored higher on reading and vocabulary tests. In fact, the more adept they were at abbreviating, the better they did in spelling and writing. Far from being a means to getting around literacy, texting seems to give literacy a boost. The effect is similar to what happens when parents chat away to infants or read to toddlers: the more exposure children get to language, by whatever means, the more verbally skilled they become. Before you can write abbreviated forms effectively and play with them, you need to have a sense of how the sounds of your language relate to the letters, says Crystal. The same study also found the children with the highest scores to be the first to have gotten their own cell phones.
Which doesn't let the teenager who LOLS in a term paper off the hook——but that's not so much a question of language ability as of judgment. It, too, should go the way of all slang ever inappropriately used in a classroom——rebuked with a red pen, not seized upon as a symptom of generational decline. Even if electronic communication engenders its own kind of carelessness, it's no worse than the carelessness of academic jargon or journalistic shorthand. It certainly doesn't engender stupidity. One look at the winners of text-poetry contests in Britain proves that the force behind texting is a tendency for innovation, not linguistic laziness. Electronic communication, Crystal says, has introduced that kind of creative spirit into spelling once again. That heathen Shakespeare would have been onboard.
(Newsweek <<新聞周刊>>,August,2,2008)
實(shí)驗(yàn)表明，手機(jī)短信發(fā)得越是熟練的孩子，單詞拼寫和寫作能力就越強(qiáng)。在近8年中，由手機(jī)短信現(xiàn)象引起的激烈的爭(zhēng)論是關(guān)于不規(guī)范用語(yǔ)?！岸绦耪Z(yǔ)言”作為一種新興的表達(dá)方式，*了字母和數(shù)字，創(chuàng)造出極其簡(jiǎn)潔的詞匯和情緒表達(dá)方式，令語(yǔ)言的盡忠信守者和學(xué)究們惶恐不已。而一些大得驚人的數(shù)字又加劇了他們的惶恐：今年全世界發(fā)送的短信數(shù)量將達(dá)到2.3萬(wàn)億條，比2007年增加了將近20%，比2000年增加了近150%.隨之而來(lái)的電話公司的收入也以近乎同樣的速度增長(zhǎng)——今年預(yù)計(jì)達(dá)到600億美元。在說(shuō)英語(yǔ)的國(guó)家中，僅英國(guó)每月發(fā)送的短信就大大超過(guò)60億條。盡管人們之間的交流更多更快了，但有人擔(dān)心，隨著短信語(yǔ)言省略了輔音、元音和標(biāo)點(diǎn)，對(duì)字母和數(shù)字不加區(qū)別的使用，人們會(huì)忘記正常的交流方式。發(fā)短信會(huì)造就幾代文盲嗎？上帝啊(短信用語(yǔ)：OMG)——英語(yǔ)會(huì)就此消亡嗎？
提出警告的并非語(yǔ)言學(xué)家。他們中有不得不批改中學(xué)學(xué)生試卷中一些荒唐用法的老師，也有認(rèn)為自己有道德義務(wù)編寫語(yǔ)法書的憂慮的公民。后者包括相當(dāng)知名的人物，如英國(guó)家喻戶曉的電視主播約翰漢氟萊斯，他認(rèn)為短信是“對(duì)文化的惡意破壞行為”。還有《吃、射、走》一書的作者林恩特拉斯，她實(shí)際上非常喜歡發(fā)短信因而從不使用縮寫。英國(guó)是首批發(fā)短信已成國(guó)民習(xí)慣的國(guó)家之一，但這里也產(chǎn)生了針對(duì)短信行為的激烈尖刻的批評(píng)。約翰薩瑟蘭在《衛(wèi)報(bào)》上寫到：“發(fā)短信是針對(duì)誦讀困難的掩飾?！?但語(yǔ)言學(xué)家(如果當(dāng)中有誰(shuí)關(guān)注此事的話)卻至今對(duì)此保持沉默。英國(guó)高產(chǎn)的語(yǔ)言學(xué)家終在一本新著中澄清了幾件事。
戴維克里斯特爾所著的《發(fā)短信：大討論》(牛津大學(xué)出版社出版)中提出了兩大論點(diǎn)：一是短信語(yǔ)言并不像人們想的那樣離經(jīng)叛道，二是發(fā)短信實(shí)際上使年輕人交流得更好，而不是更差。克里斯特爾通過(guò)收集現(xiàn)實(shí)中語(yǔ)言例證清楚地闡述了第一點(diǎn)。他分析了短信語(yǔ)言的特殊要素——象形文字，詞首字母縮略或縮拼詞，縮略詞等。他還列舉自古埃及文字到20世紀(jì)廣播中都存在的類似語(yǔ)言應(yīng)用的例證。莎士比亞隨意使用的省音、新奇句法和數(shù)千個(gè)自造詞(他的名字便有6種不同的簽法)。即使是一些常見用法也是相對(duì)新奇的：常被濫用的省字號(hào)撇號(hào)的用法規(guī)則直到19世紀(jì)中葉才定型。重要的是規(guī)范過(guò)的語(yǔ)言先于短信的出現(xiàn)，所以我們也可以認(rèn)為我們的語(yǔ)言是恣意破壞文化者的語(yǔ)言。誰(shuí)知道p.m.代表什么呢？(Post meridiem，拉丁語(yǔ)“中午之后”，1666年由一位懶散的失職者首次記錄。)
反對(duì)者看到毀滅的地方，克里斯特爾則看到成長(zhǎng)。如同一些生物學(xué)家相信生物進(jìn)化論那樣，他相信語(yǔ)言同樣展現(xiàn)著進(jìn)化論：變化不是漸進(jìn)的。非常的變化會(huì)打破停滯期，其原因總在于重要的外部變化。美國(guó)獨(dú)立戰(zhàn)爭(zhēng)對(duì)英語(yǔ)的影響遠(yuǎn)遠(yuǎn)大于發(fā)短信迄今為止對(duì)英語(yǔ)的影響?？死锼固貭栒f(shuō)，結(jié)果美國(guó)英語(yǔ)和英國(guó)英語(yǔ)的差別比報(bào)紙語(yǔ)言與短信語(yǔ)言之間的差別還要顯著。(有趣的是，美國(guó)和英國(guó)的短信之間差別幾乎沒有。)
語(yǔ)言學(xué)家剛一開始關(guān)注關(guān)于短信的爭(zhēng)議，研究人員就通過(guò)實(shí)驗(yàn)來(lái)檢驗(yàn)發(fā)短信的影響。實(shí)驗(yàn)結(jié)果與傳統(tǒng)看法相悖：去年在英國(guó)舉行的一項(xiàng)實(shí)驗(yàn)表明，寫短信和大量使用縮寫的兒童在閱讀和詞匯考試中成績(jī)更好。實(shí)際上，他們使用縮寫越熟練，就越擅長(zhǎng)拼寫和寫作。寫短信遠(yuǎn)非避開識(shí)字的途徑，反而是為識(shí)字增添助力。其效果類似家長(zhǎng)對(duì)嬰兒叨叨咕咕，或者給剛會(huì)走路的孩子讀故事：無(wú)論以何種方式，孩子接觸語(yǔ)言越多，語(yǔ)言能力就越強(qiáng)。克里斯特爾說(shuō)：“在有效使用縮寫詞并巧妙對(duì)此加以運(yùn)用之前，你必須了解語(yǔ)言的聲音與字母之間的關(guān)系?！边@項(xiàng)研究還發(fā)現(xiàn)得分高的孩子先擁有他們自己的手機(jī)。
讓十幾歲的年輕人的學(xué)期論文不能輕松通過(guò)的原因與其說(shuō)是語(yǔ)言能力問(wèn)題，不如說(shuō)是判斷問(wèn)題。它也應(yīng)該像在課堂上使用不當(dāng)?shù)馁嫡Z(yǔ)一樣，以紅筆判錯(cuò)，但并不作為一代人墮落的表現(xiàn)。即使電子通訊產(chǎn)生一種特有的隨意，但并不比學(xué)術(shù)術(shù)語(yǔ)或新聞?dòng)谜Z(yǔ)的簡(jiǎn)略表達(dá)法所產(chǎn)生的隨意更糟糕。它肯定不會(huì)造成愚蠢。只要看看英國(guó)短信詩(shī)歌比賽的獲勝者就會(huì)明白，寫短信的驅(qū)動(dòng)力是創(chuàng)新的追求，而不是語(yǔ)言的惰性。克里斯特爾稱，電子通訊“已經(jīng)將創(chuàng)新精神再次引入到單詞拼寫中來(lái)”。如果離經(jīng)叛道的莎士比亞再世，他也會(huì)熱衷于短信語(yǔ)言。