谈英文的书中谈中文
2024
前几天看中央CGTN电视台的报道。G20会议今年的主题是消灭贫穷与饥饿,中国人又在介绍经验哩!
可是事实是今年旱涝不断,玉米每斤不到6毛!灾年却米贱,百姓生活至为艰难,李克强先生说的每月一千块还不知何时实现,如何就脱贫了呢?火车上无聊,勉强填了首绝句:春来雨细强(勉强的强)插秧,大旱谁觉炎夏长?欠债复加棉米贱,升平四海只农伤。不满意,懒的再改了。就看一本喜爱的谈英文的有名的书,没想到书中有一段谈中文,不是一般的有趣,认为中文不像一种语言,更像是一群方言黑话,估计中文诗词比黑话都难懂。实在忍不住,翻译如下,但不知三个女人是闲话是不是姦?
(《说文解字里》“姦”有“窃”的意思,可能是闲聊的意思吧?):
—要欣赏英文这一系统简洁而奇妙的美,只需看看该死的困扰中文和日文的问题便可知晓。语言转换成文字有两种方式。一种是使用字母表,比如我们英文使用的,另一种是使用象形-表意文字系统,比如中国人使用的。
中文书写极其复杂。中文书写的基本单位是部首。表示“土”的部首是“土”,表示“小”的部首是“小”。所有的字都是由这些部首和其他212个边旁组成的。部首可以单独使用,也可以组合起来形成其他字。比如,“眼”和“水”组合成“泪”,“口”和“鸟”组合成“鸣”(歌唱)。两个“女人”组合成“奻”(nuan,争吵),三个女人一台戏是“姦”(闲话)。
由于每个字都需要自己的符号,所以中文字符极其复杂。汉字总共有约五万个,其中常用汉字四千左右。中文打字机非常庞大,大多数训练有素的打字员每分钟只能打出大约十个字。但是,即使是最复杂的中文打字机也只能处理可用字符中的一小部分。如果要把标准的西方打字机键盘扩展到包含所有中文字符,那么键盘的长度大约需要15英尺,宽度大约需要5英尺,是两个乒乓球台拼在一起的大小。
字典的复杂如同恶梦。没有字母表,如何合理的排列字词呢?答案是,在大多数字典中,语言会根据部首被分成214个任意组合的字群,但即便如此,你仍然必须在每个部分中随机查找,直到偶然发现你要找的字。
没有字母表的后果是巨大的。无法制作填字游戏,没有类似拼字游戏(Scrabble)的游戏,没有回文诗,没有字谜游戏,也没有摩尔斯电码。在电报时代,为了解决这个问题,中国人发明了一种系统,将语言中的每个字都分配了一个数字。例如,“人”是0086。这个过程同样繁琐不堪,但它的优点在于,一个不懂中文的美国人或法国人只需要查阅电报书,就能翻译出任何来自中国的电报。时至今日,在中国以及日本等其他使用表意文字书写系统的国家,仍然没有合理的文件组织系统。归档系统通常只存在于人们的脑海中。如果办公秘书突然死了,整个办公室就完全瘫痪了。
然而,中文书写在与其他语言相比时有一个巨大的优势:它可以在任何地方阅读。中文实际上并不是一种语言,而是一组关系松散的方言。福建人听不懂上海人的讲话,就像伦敦人听不懂华沙人或斯德哥尔摩人在说什么一样。有些地方的一种方言在非常广泛的区域内通用,但在中国的其他地区,特别是在遥远的南方,方言可能每隔两三英里就会发生变化。然而,尽管福建人无法与广东佬交谈,但他们可以阅读对方的报纸,因为书面语言到处都一样。表意文字在不同地区的发音不同,但读起来是一样的——就像1,2,3对我们和法国人来说意义相同,尽管我们看到的是“one,
two, three”,而他们看到的是“un, deux, trois”。
中文书写的另一个同样有用的优势是,人们可以像阅读昨天的报纸一样轻松地阅读2500年前的文学作品,尽管口语已经变得面目全非。如果孔子今天突然复活了,那么,除了几个学者之外,没有人理解他说毬啥,但如果他胡乱写条子曰诗云的子曰,中国人会像坐扶梯到了西单商场二楼读二楼购物指南一样轻松明白他的意思。咦!
注: 刚在曲阜体会孔子,全部的英文是:
To appreciate the wonderfully simplicity beauty of this system you
have only to look at the problems that
bedevil
the Chinese and Japanese languages. There are two ways of rendering
speech into writing. One is with an
alphabet,
such as we have, or a
pictographic-ideographic system,
such as the Chinese use.
Chinese writing is immensely
complicated.
The basic unit of the Chinese written
word is the
radical.
The
radical
for earth is 土 and for small is
小. All words
are formed from these and 212 other radicals.
Radicals can
stand alone or be combined to form other
words. Eye and water make
teardrop.Mouth
and bird make song.
Two women means quarrel and three women means gossip.
Since
every word requires its own symbol,
Chinese script is immensely complicated. It
possesses some 50,000
characters, of which about
4000 are
in common use. Chinese typewriters are enormous and most trained
typists cannot manage more than about ten words a minute. But even
the most complex Chinese typewriter can only manage a fraction of
the characters available. If a standard Western typewriter keyboard
were expanded to take in every Chinese ideography it would have to
be about fifteen feet long and five feet wide about the size
of
two Ping-Pong tables pushed together.
Dictionaries,
too, are something of nightmare. Without
an alphabet, how do you sensibly arrange the words? The answer is
that in most dictionaries the language is divided into 214
arbitrary
clusters based
on their
radicals,
but even then you must hunt randomly through each section until you
stumble across the spelling you seek.
The consequence of not
having an
alphabet are
enormous. There can be no
crossword puzzles,
no games like Scrabble, no
palindromes,
no
anagrams,
mo Morse
code.
In the age of telegraphy, to get around this last problem, the
Chinese devised a system in which each word in the language was
assigned a number.
Person, for instance, was 0086.
This process was equally cumbersome, but it did have the advantage
that an American or Frenchman who didn't konw a word of Chinese
could translate any telegram from China simply by looking in a
book. To this day in China, and other countries such as Japan where
the writing system is also
ideographic,
there is no logical system for organizing documents. Filing systems
often exists only in people's heads. If
the secretary dies, the whole office can fall apart.
However,
Chinese writing possesses
one great advantage over other languages: It can be read
everywhere.
Chinese is not really a language at all, but more a family of
loosely related dialects.
A person from Fukjian no more understand the speech of the people
of Shanghai than a Londoner can understand what
people saying in Warsaw or Stockholm. In some
places one dialect is spoken over a very wide area, but in other
parts of the country, particularly in the deep south, the dialects
can change every two or three miles. Yet although the person
from
Fujian couldn't
talk to anyone from
Canton,
he could read their newspapers because the written language is the
same everywhere. The ideographs are pronounced differently in
different areas but the read the same-rather in the way that 1,2,3
means the same to us as it does to a French person even though we
see it as ``one,two,three'' while they see it as
``un,deux,trois''.
An
equally useful advantage in written
Chinese is
that
people can read the literatutre of 2,500 years ago as easily as
yesterday's nespapers,
even though the spoken language has changed beyond recognition.
If
Confucius
were to come back to life today, no one apart from scholars would
understand what he was saying, but if he
scribbled a message people
could read it as easily as they could
shopping list.
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