问答题

Genghis Khan massacred the population of whole cities as he built his Mongol empire. But in 1227, when his son avenged his death by ordering the slaying of the Central Asian Tangut people, he destroyed a whole culture, as the local Tangut language was never again spoken. The world now loses a language every two weeks, a rate unprecedented in history. Of course, not all meet such a violent end. Two lively and accessible new books, Andrew Dalby"s Language in Danger and The Power of Babel by John McWhorter, map the intricate combination of politics, genocide, geography and economics that more typically conspire in their demise—and ask whether we are losing a testament to human creativity that rivals great works of art.
Linguists estimate that in 100 years fewer than half the world"s 6,000 languages will still be in use. Will this mean a more peaceful, communicative world or an arid linguistic desert, subject to the tyranny of the monoglot yoke In answering this question, Dalby and McWhorter take us on a fascinating and colorful spin through history, chronicling the rise of empires and crisscrossing the globe to take in the indigenous tribes of west Africa, Tasmania and the Amazon, tracking down itinerant healers in Bolivia, whale hunters off the coast of Germany, Russian immigrants in New York—in short, anyone who can cast light on the unique ways people communicate.
McWhorter likens linguistic change to Darwin"s theory of evolution, arguing that languages, like animals and plants, inevitably split into subvarieties, alter in response to environmental pressures and evolve new forms and useless features. In prose that is bold and compelling, he warns against seeing grammar as a repository of culture, arguing that it is more often formed by chance and convenience and does not reflect its speakers" world view any more than "a pattern of spilled milk reveals anything specific about the bottle it came from". His theory is slightly undermined by careless errors, a Latin sentence he has composed, on which his first chapter rests, has four mistakes in nine words. (Later, rather amazingly, he bungles the masculine and neuter forms of illa, the basic word for "that". )
Rather than disassociating languages from the people who speak them, Dalby takes on the difficult but equally rewarding challenge of drawing out the distinct consciousness expressed by each tongue. As Babel becomes homogenized, surviving languages have fewer new words and ideas to draw on. Without Greek there would be no "wine-dark sea". We would not "bury the hatchet" if American Indians hadn"t done it already.
Despite these differences, both authors agree that with each language we learn, our ability to comprehend the world is given fresh, new scope. The word for "world" in Yupik, an Eskimo-Aleut language of Alaska, encompasses weather, outdoors, awareness and sense, as compared with its European equivalents, which tend to refer to "people, a crowd, inhabitants", as in the French "du monde", a lot of people, or the classical Greek "he oikoumene", meaning the settled zone. Whereas in English we may simply say "he is chopping trees", Tuyuca speakers in the Amazon rain forest must change their suffixes to specify whether this was told to them, they saw it themselves, they heard the sound or they"re simply guessing.
Why are these languages disappearing Globalization is the modern equivalent of Genghis Khan, both authors argue. English is now competently spoken by about 1.8 billion people worldwide. Parents consider it the key to a more prosperous life. Fearing that without fluency in the languages of the cultures of "tall buildings" their children will be deprived of standardized education and the ability to reap the rewards of international trade, they allow their own tongues to die off with the elderly. Dalby and McWhorter rewrite the script on language change from nearly opposite but equally intelligent perspectives, agreeing on the most significant point, if our rich linguistic heritage is not preserved, even English speakers may find themselves uncomfortably lost for words. Explain the sentence "Globalization is the modern equivalent of Genghis Khan" from the last paragraph.