| 双语新闻 Bilingual News | 双语对照阅读 分级系列阅读 智能辅助阅读 在线英语学习 |
|
| 双语新闻 Bilingual News | 双语对照阅读 分级系列阅读 智能辅助阅读 在线英语学习 |
| [英文] [中文] [双语对照] [双语交替] [] |
| KINGDOM OF CHARACTERSThe Language Revolution That Made China Modern By Jing Tsu | 《汉字王国——让中国走向现代的语言革命》（Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern）作者：石静远 |
| One summer’s evening in 1916, 27-year-old Zhou Houkun stepped up to a podium to unveil a marvelous invention: a new kind of Chinese typewriter. Zhou had recently returned home to Shanghai from M.I.T., where a chance encounter with an American Monotype machine had spurred him to create a Chinese version. But American typewriters, with their QWERTY keyboards, were designed for alphabetic languages like English; with just 26 letters, you could type anything from a shopping list to Shakespeare. The Chinese script is character-based, each character roughly equivalent to what we mean by an English word. Designing a relatively portable machine that could type 4,000 individual characters had been a monumental task, and people gathered in the July heat to hear Zhou speak. | 1916年夏天的一个晚上，27岁的周厚坤走上讲台，为一项了不起的发明揭幕：一种新型的中文打字机。周厚坤刚从麻省理工学院回到上海家中，他在读书时偶见一台美国的莫诺排铸机，这促使他制作了一个中文版。但是使用标准键盘的美国打字机是为像英语这样的字母语言设计的；它只有26个字母，你可以用它来键入任何东西，从购物清单到莎士比亚。中国的文字是基于汉字的，每个汉字大致相当于我们所说的一个英语单词。设计一台相对便携、能够输入4000个单独的汉字的机器是一项艰巨的任务，人们冒着7月的高温聚集在一起，听周厚坤讲话。 |
| But Zhou’s first message to his audience seemingly had nothing to do with typewriters. Instead, he pulled an American factory worker’s outfit over his suit. “I have one phrase to impart you with today,” he told the crowd. “Don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty.” The Chinese, he said, “shun all activities concerning industry and artisanship, which has made the learned inept at anything practical, and the peasants ignorant of real knowledge.” Instead, they celebrated the literati over honest laborers. And yet, in America, even President Roosevelt’s relatives were woodworkers. Zhou wore a uniform from his stint interning at an American factory, to emphasize that however “shabby and filthy these clothes may be, I don’t abandon them, because they bear the marks of a worker.” | 但周厚坤给观众的第一条信息似乎与打字机无关。相反，他在西装外面套上了一套美国工厂工人的服装。“今天我有一句话要告诉大家，”他对人群说。“不要害怕弄脏双手。”他说，中国人“回避一切与工业和工匠有关的活动，这使有学问的人不善于做实事，使农民没有真正的知识”。相反，中国人颂扬文人而非实在的劳动者。然而，在美国，甚至连罗斯福总统的亲戚都是木工。周厚坤穿着他在美国工厂实习时穿的制服强调，无论“这些衣服多么破旧肮脏，我都不会扔掉它们，因为它们带有工人的印记”。 |
| Zhou’s speech occurs about a quarter of the way through Jing Tsu’s rigorous and engaging new book, “Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern.” His opening lines may surprise. First, that startling reminder: China once admired America’s manufacturing prowess? And then why such a political cri de coeur from the inventor of a typewriter? But this is the key message of Tsu’s book: The story of how linguists, activists, librarians, scholars and ordinary citizens adapted Chinese writing to the modern world is the story of how China itself became modern. Following the history of the script helps explain China’s past, present — and future. “More than a century’s effort at learning how to standardize and transform its language into a modern technology has landed China here,” writes Tsu, a professor of East Asian languages and literature at Yale, “at the beginning — not the end — of becoming a standard setter, from artificial intelligence to quantum natural language processing, automation to machine translation.” | 周厚坤的演讲出现在石静远严谨而引人入胜的新书《汉字王国——让中国走向现代的语言革命》的四分之一处。他的开场白可能令人惊讶。首先，这是一个惊人的提醒：中国曾经羡慕美国的制造业实力？其次，为什么打字机的发明者会发出如此强烈的政治呼吁？但这是石静远这本书的关键信息：语言学家、活动人士、图书管理员、学者和普通公民如何使汉字书写适应现代世界的故事，也就是中国自身如何走向现代化的故事。追溯这种文字的历史有助于解释中国的过去、现在和未来。“一个多世纪以来，中国一直在努力学习如何将其语言标准化，并将其转化为一种现代技术，”耶鲁大学东亚语言和文学教授石静远写道，“从人工智能到量子自然语言处理，从自动化到机器翻译，这一切都处于成为标准制定者的起点——而非终点。” |
| Tsu’s book begins around the turn of the 20th century, when reformers challenged traditions like foot binding and the Chinese script. Western kings, missionaries and scholars had long sought to “unlock” the secrets of Chinese — or to fetishize it. Others saw China’s character-based script as “incompatible with logic and inhospitable to abstract thinking.” “The nature of the written language in itself is a great hindrance to the development of the sciences,” the philosopher Hegel wrote. With their “ad hoc efforts to retrofit Chinese characters” to typewriters and telegraphs, Chinese inventors sought to resolve the difficulties “that accompanied being late entrants in systems intended for a different kind of written language. But many wondered if the Chinese script itself was the problem.” | 石静远在本书开端讲述了20世纪初，改革者挑战缠足和汉字书写等传统的故事。长期以来，西方的国王、传教士和学者一直在努力“解开”汉字的秘密——或者深深沉迷其中。另一些人认为，中国汉字字符的书写“不合逻辑，也与抽象思维相抵触”。哲学家黑格尔写道：“这门书面语言的性质决定了它是科学发展的一大障碍。”中国的发明家们“无比努力地想要改造汉字”，让其适应打字机和电报，就是想解决“在为别的书面语言而设的系统中，作为后来者所面临的困难。但许多人质疑，问题可能并不在汉字本身”。 |
| This book tells the stories of those who decided otherwise. Tsu’s title, “Kingdom of Characters,” refers both to the literal characters that make script and the people who sought to save them. She does not sugarcoat their difficulties, introducing us to, for example, Wang Zhao, an exiled reformer who crossed China disguised as a monk, risking his life to introduce a new Chinese alphabet that he believed would unite the country under one common language. She tells the story of Count Pierre Henri Stanislas d’Escayrac de Lauture, a French adventurer, who, even after being mutilated in a Chinese jail, helped pioneer the development of Chinese telegraphy. And she writes of how, over 100 years later, Zhi Bingyi, branded a “reactionary academic authority” in the Cultural Revolution, helped discover how to “render Chinese into a language that computers can read — in the zeros and ones of binary code” — from a makeshift prison cell. (Lacking paper, he tested his hypotheses by writing on a teacup with a stolen pen.) | 本书讲述的正是那些不认同这一点的人的故事。石静远的书名叫《汉字王国》，它所指的既包括书写的汉字本身，也包括努力拯救汉字的人。（取character一词的“字”和“人物”两层意思。——译注）她没有粉饰这些人遇到的困难，向我们介绍了譬如王照这样的流亡改革家，他伪装成僧人行遍中国，冒着生命危险引入了一种新式汉语拼音，他相信这可以成为全国统一的共通语言。她讲述了法国探险家皮埃尔·亨利·斯坦尼斯拉斯·德·埃斯卡伊拉克·德·劳图尔伯爵的故事，哪怕在中国的牢狱里受伤致残，他依然帮助开拓了中国电报业的发展。她也写到在一百多年后的文化大革命中，被扣上“反动学术权威”帽子的支秉彝如何在一个临时的监狱牢房里，为发现将“汉字编码为电脑可读取的语言——即二进制代码中的零和一”的办法做出贡献。（因为没有纸，他用偷来的笔在茶杯上写字来验证假设。） |
| Each step of the way, these innovators had to ask questions like: How can the Chinese script be organized in a rational way? Could the language be written with an alphabet? And if so, which one? (Latin? Arabic? Cyrillic? Another symbolic script?) Could any alphabet account for the tones needed to differentiate among characters? Zhao Yuanren, a celebrated Chinese linguist, illustrated this difficulty. “Stone house poet Sir Shi was fond of lions and vowed to eat 10 lions,” the first line of a story reads in English. But merely Romanized, “without tone marks or indicators, however, it becomes a long string of monotonous gibberish: Shi shi shi shi shi shi, shi shi, shi shi shi shi.” | 在前进的每一步中，这些创新者都在问这样的问题：如何以合理的方式组织汉字？这种语言是否能用字母书写？如果能，该用哪种字母？（拉丁字母？阿拉伯字母？西里尔字母？还是另一种符号文字？）每一种字母都能区分出字符的声调吗？中国著名语言学家赵元任这样描述其中的困难。“石室诗士施氏，嗜狮，誓食十狮，”他在一篇故事中的首句话是这样写的。但如果用罗马字体书写，“不加声调或注音，这句话就会变成一串没有变化的胡言乱语：Shi shi shi shi shi shi, shi shi, shi shi shi shi.” |
| By examining these questions closely, Tsu helps the novice to Chinese understand both the underlying challenges and how they were conquered. (I sense Tsu is an excellent teacher.) This material could, in the wrong hands, become dry. But Tsu weaves linguistic analysis together with biographical and historical context — the ravages of imperialism, civil war, foreign invasions, diplomatic successes and disappointments. This approach not only adds background and meaning to the script debate, but also terrific color to what might have otherwise read like a textbook. | 通过仔细研究这些问题，石静远让汉语初学者得以了解他们可能面临的挑战，以及如何克服这些挑战。（我认为石静远是位优秀的老师。）如果是不专业的人，可能就会把这些素材写得枯燥无比。但石静远将语言解析与个人传记和历史背景——帝国主义的蹂躏、内战、外国入侵、外交的成功与失望——结合到了一起。这种手法不仅为汉字书写之争提供了背景深度和意义，也为本可能照本宣科的内容增添了丰富的色彩。 |
| In particular, Mao Zedong’s role in reshaping Chinese script shows how politics and language are often fused. Mao, Tsu notes, “went down in history as, among other things, the political figure who guided the Chinese language through its two greatest transformations in modern history.” With more than 90 percent of the population illiterate, Mao embraced the movement to reduce the number of strokes in more than 2,200 characters to render them easier to learn and write. (Taiwan, rejecting simplification, still sees itself as the guardian of traditional Chinese culture.) Mao also spurred the creation of Pinyin, a phonetic, Romanized Chinese alphabet designed as an auxiliary aid to learning Chinese script, rather than a replacement. Approved in 1958, Pinyin was reportedly learned by 50 million people in its first year alone, during a time of “idealism and hope.” And yet 1958 was also the first year of the Great Leap Forward, the experiment that saw millions die from famine — and Pinyin’s detractors persecuted. | 特别是对毛泽东在汉字重塑上所发挥作用的描写，展示了政治和语言经常交织在一起。石静远写道，在毛泽东“被载入史册的事迹中，包括他作为一位政治家，引领了中国近代史上最大的两次汉字改革”。当时中国90%以上的人口都是文盲，毛泽东发起了一项运动，减少了2200多个汉字的笔画，使它们更易于学习和书写。（拒绝汉字简化的台湾依然将自己视为中国传统文化的守护者。）毛泽东也推动了拼音的问世，这种带音标的中文罗马字母表被用来辅助学习汉字书写，但不是汉字的替代。据报道，拼音于1958年获批使用，仅在第一年就有5000万人学习，当时正是“理想主义与希望”的年代。然而，1958年也是大跃进开始的第一年，这场实验导致数以百万计人民死于饥荒——拼音的批评者也受到迫害。 |
| It’s no spoiler to reveal that in the end, the Chinese script did not die; instead, it flourished. As Tsu writes, “Every technology that has ever confronted the Chinese script, or challenged it, also had to bow before it.” Tsu herself is rarely present in the book, though in the introduction she explains how, after emigrating from Taiwan to America as a child, she found it difficult to give up Chinese. “It was not enough,” she adds, “to just master writing, reading comprehension and vocabulary. To think in English, I had to breathe and live a worldview that was expressed and constructed in that language.” Languages, as this book makes clear, convey worlds. The world of Chinese script, painted so vividly by Tsu, is one I’m now grateful to have glimpsed. | 结局是没有悬念的，汉字没有消亡；相反，它得到了蓬勃发展。正如石静远所写的，“每一种曾与汉字抵触，或是曾挑战汉字地位的科技，都不得不在它面前低头。”石静远本人很少在书中现身，但在序言中，她讲述了自己儿时从台湾移民到美国后，放弃汉语是多么困难。她还表示，“仅仅掌握写作、阅读理解和词汇是不够的。要用英语思考，我就必须在这种语言所表达和构建的世界观中呼吸和生活。”正如这本书所阐明的，语言传达了不同的世界。石静远生动描绘的汉字世界，正是我如今有幸窥见的世界。 |
OK阅读网 版权所有(C)2017 | 联系我们