标题: 2009年英语词汇将达一百万 [打印本页] 作者: hung 时间: 2009-9-16 16:09 标题: 2009年英语词汇将达一百万 Some events in 2009 may be more momentous, but surely not many: on April 29th the number of words in the English language will pass 1m. This astonishing fact prompts a host of frequently asked questions or, as wordsmiths call them, FAQs.
First, who says—or, in tabloid (this meaning coined in 1902) journalese (1882), who sez? The answer is the Global Language Monitor, a company based in Austin, Texas. It keeps an eye on the use of language, especially English, and tracks changes.
And by what authority does the Global Language Monitor say a new coinage is a genuine new word? None. Some countries, such as France and Spain, have academies that claim the right to regulate their national languages, and to repel invasive terms, usually from English. Neither England nor the United States attempts such an exercise in futility. English is a mongrel language that keeps its vitality by absorbing new words, uses and expressions. It promiscuously plunders other languages and delights in neologisms. It is the language of free traders and inventive entrepreneurs such as the staff of the Global Language Monitor.
So is it really a fact that English will have 1m words on the predicted date in April? Of course not. For a start, the global monitors explain that the actual date could be five days either side of April 29th. Then they say that English already has well over 1m words, if you accept the statement in the introduction to the Merriam-Webster dictionary that the language contains “many times” the 450,000 words it lists. Yet the Oxford dictionary lists only half as many.
Who’s right? How many words are there? That depends on what counts as a word. Should “write”, “writes”, “wrote”, “written” count as four words or one? If one, what about “be”, “am”, “are”, “is”, “was”, “were”? What about the numberless words with different meanings? Should “set” and “stock”, for instance, each count as one, though their meanings are manifold? And what of winespeak, computer drivel and other jargon?
Och aye, and whit aboot Scots? Yes, English gathers variants as it travels and, my, how it has travelled. Is the Scots “thrapple” just the same as the English “thropple” (throat)? Is the Australian “donkasaurus” (car engine) English or Australian or Greek?
Och aye, and whit aboot Scots?（译注：英语中一些地方口音的读写）是的，英语在往外传播的同时也聚合了各种变异，天啊，英语传播的范围可大了呢。苏格兰人说的“thrapple”跟英国人说的 “thropple”(喉咙)意思完全一样吗？澳大利亚人说的“donkasaurus” (汽车引擎)是英语呢，还是澳大利亚语，或者是希腊语？
Come to that, what about all the words that English picks up abroad? “Hobson-Jobson”, written in 1886, lists over 2,000 Anglo-Indian expressions. “Shampoo” and “bungalow” have certainly earned their place in the English dictionary, but what of the Hindi “dam”, the Indian coin once used in English phrases like “I don’t give a dam” but now consigned to history or misspelt, and so misunderstood, as “damn”? Or what of “roué”, a “French” word common enough in English but now almost unknown in French? List them all, you may say, along with jihad, tsunami, schadenfreude and béarnaise sauce. But the line must be drawn somewhere, so where?
谈到这点，英语从外国语言中捡来的那些单词又该怎么算？1886年出版的“Hobson-Jobson词典”列举了2000多个英国——印度词义。可以肯定地说，“Shampoo”（洗发水）和“bungalow”（平房）已经在英语词典里拥有它们自己的位置了，但是印度语的“dam”又如何呢？这个印度硬币曾经被用于英语短语中，如：“I don’t give a dam”。但是，现在人们认为这是过去人们对“damn”这个单词的错误拼写，或者是误解。roue（放荡者）一词在英语中是一个非常普通的“法语”单词，但是这个单词现在法语中几乎已经是不被人知了，那又该怎么算呢？你也许会说，把它们全部列进去，与jihad（圣战）、tsunami（海啸）、 schadenfreude（幸灾乐祸）以及béarnaise sauce（贝亚恩酱汁）一起列进去。但是，标准线必须划在某个地方，那么是哪个地方呢？
The global monitors would have the world believe that their lines are drawn scientifically: take the bulk of the best-known dictionaries, chuck in all the words in Shakespeare, Chaucer and the Bible, and then apply their proprietary algorithm, which trawls through the press, the internet and every other medium for new words. After that, apparently, the words must meet criteria about frequency of use in print and speech and their ability to stand the test of time. Words drop out of use as well as into it—Oxford lists 47,156 it considers obsolete—and most neologisms die almost as soon as they leave the lips of the rapper, valley girl or blogobore who utters them.
So, last question, is the 1m-word claim meaningless? Yes, largely. But English does indeed have lots of words, almost certainly more than any other tongue. That is the consequence of its evolution. Basically Germanic, it was expanded by the conquering Normans, who introduced French, and the medieval scholars and clergy, who used Latin. As the global language of the modern world, it now has lots of local variants—some recompense perhaps for the words it helps to obliterate as more and more languages become extinct.
