We always hear that texting is a scourge. The idea is that texting spells the decline and fall of any kind of serious literacy, or at least writing ability, among young people in the United States and now the whole world today. The fact of the matter is that it just isn't true, and it's easy to think that it is true, but in order to see it in another way, in order to see that actually texting is a miraculous thing, not just energetic, but a miraculous thing, a kind of emergent complexity that we're seeing happening right now, we have to pull the camera back for a bit and look at what language really is, in which case, one thing that we see is that texting is not writing at all. What do I mean by that?
人们总说短信的出现是一种灾难。 这么说的原因是短信降低了人们的读写能力, 或者至少是书面表达能力, 这个问题影响着美国青年人 今天也变成了全球问题。 事实上,这个说法是错误的, 而且人们很容易信以为真, 但是为了换一个角度来看待它, 为了将短信看作是实际上不可思议的, 而且不只是充满活力的事,也是不可思议的事, 是一个我们正在经历的 一个紧迫而复杂事情, 我们就得回过头 好好想想语言究竟是怎么一回事, 这么看的话,我们可以说 短信其实根本就不是书面文字表达。 为什么这么说呢?
Basically, if we think about language, language has existed for perhaps 150,000 years, at least 80,000 years, and what it arose as is speech. People talked. That's what we're probably genetically specified for. That's how we use language most. Writing is something that came along much later, and as we saw in the last talk, there's a little bit of controversy as to exactly when that happened, but according to traditional estimates, if humanity had existed for 24 hours, then writing only came along at about 11:07 p.m. That's how much of a latterly thing writing is. So first there's speech, and then writing comes along as a kind of artifice.
从根本上说,如果我们想到语言, 语言已经存在了大概15万年, 至少也有8万年了, 首先出现的是语音。人们彼此交谈。 这个大概就是出于我们人类的本能。 大多数情况下,这就是我们如何使用语言的。 文字是在这之后很晚才产生的, 正如我们在上一个演讲所看到的, 对于文字是何时出现的还是有些小小的争议, 但是根据传统估算, 如果人类文明存在了24个小时, 那么文字是在晚上11点07分时产生的。 大家可见文字是最近才出现的。 所以首先是语音,然后文字作为一种技巧 出现了。
Now don't get me wrong, writing has certain advantages. When you write, because it's a conscious process, because you can look backwards, you can do things with language that are much less likely if you're just talking. For example, imagine a passage from Edward Gibbon's "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:"
大家不要误会,文字写作确实有它自己的优势。 当你写字的时候,因为这是一个有意识的过程, 因为你可以回顾过去, 你可以用书面语言来完成一些说话时 不会表达的事情。 比如,让我们看看爱德华·吉本(英国历史学家)在 “罗马帝国衰亡史”一书中的一段(取自第二十四章),
"The whole engagement lasted above twelve hours, till the graduate retreat of the Persians was changed into a disorderly flight, of which the shameful example was given by the principal leaders and the Surenas himself."
“整个战争持续了至少12小时, 直到波斯人纷纷仓皇溃退, 其中表现最可耻的是 他们的指挥官们以及苏雷纳斯(最高统帅)本人。“
That's beautiful, but let's face it, nobody talks that way. Or at least, they shouldn't if they're interested in reproducing. That -- (Laughter) is not the way any human being speaks casually.
写的真的很美,但是,说实话,没人这么说话。 或者至少,如果真感兴趣的话也不该这样重复。 这- (笑声) 不是人们平常说话时候的样子。
Casual speech is something quite different. Linguists have actually shown that when we're speaking casually in an unmonitored way, we tend to speak in word packets of maybe seven to 10 words. You'll notice this if you ever have occasion to record yourself or a group of people talking. That's what speech is like. Speech is much looser. It's much more telegraphic. It's much less reflective -- very different from writing. So we naturally tend to think, because we see language written so often, that that's what language is, but actually what language is, is speech. They are two things.
日常对话是非常不同的。 语言学家实际上已经指出 当我们在轻松的对话时, 我们每句话会用大概 7到10个字。 你会注意到这点,如果你有机会录下来 自己或者一组人说话。 这就是语言对话的形式。 语言对话更松散。也更简洁得多。 和书面文字表达非常不同,它少了思考性。 所以因为我们经常看到写出来的语言, 我们就很自然地认为,那就是语言, 但实际上语言是言语对话。这是两个不同的事物。
Now of course, as history has gone by, it's been natural for there to be a certain amount of bleed between speech and writing. So, for example, in a distant era now, it was common when one gave a speech to basically talk like writing. So I mean the kind of speech that you see someone giving in an old movie where they clear their throat, and they go, "Ahem, ladies and gentlemen," and then they speak in a certain way which has nothing to do with casual speech. It's formal. It uses long sentences like this Gibbon one. It's basically talking like you write, and so, for example, we're thinking so much these days about Lincoln because of the movie. The Gettysburg Address was not the main meal of that event. For two hours before that, Edward Everett spoke on a topic that, frankly, cannot engage us today and barely did then. The point of it was to listen to him speaking like writing. Ordinary people stood and listened to that for two hours. It was perfectly natural. That's what people did then, speaking like writing.
当然,随着历史的演进, 在言语对话和书面文字表达之间有些交集 也是很自然的事情。 比如说,在以前一个遥远的时代, 当一个人作演讲,说起话来像在写作一样, 是很平常的事情。 我的意思是那种你在一部老电影里看到的演讲, 人们会清一下喉咙,然后说: “啊喝,女士们,先生们,” 然后,他们会用一种和现在说话完全不同的方式讲下去。 这种讲话很正式。它使用像刚才吉本式的长句子。 基本上,它就是书面表达式的讲话,再比如, 我们这些天因为一部电影(《林肯》2012年) 都在谈论林肯。 葛底斯堡演说并不是影片的重点。 在这之前的两个小时,爱德华·埃弗里特的演讲, 说实话,没有办法打动现在的我们 而且当时也效果甚微。 问题的关键是听他 书面表达式的演讲。 普通人得站着听两个小时。 这在当时是非常平常的事情。 这就是过去人们的演讲风格,正式得就像写作一样。
Well, if you can speak like writing, then logically it follows that you might want to also sometimes write like you speak. The problem was just that in the material, mechanical sense, that was harder back in the day for the simple reason that materials don't lend themselves to it. It's almost impossible to do that with your hand except in shorthand, and then communication is limited. On a manual typewriter it was very difficult, and even when we had electric typewriters, or then computer keyboards, the fact is that even if you can type easily enough to keep up with the pace of speech, more or less, you have to have somebody who can receive your message quickly.
那么,如果你可以说话像在写作, 很自然的你也许会想要 有时进行说话式的书面表达。 问题就在传输媒介上, 过去很难支持这种动手的表达活动, 原因就在传输媒介无法满足这个需求。 用手写基本上是不可能的, 除了速记外,但这又局限了交流。 用手写打印机也非常困难, 即使我们有了电子打印机, 或者电脑键盘,事实是 即便你可以轻松飞快的打字来跟得上说话的速度, 或多或少,你也需要你的谈话对象能 快速的看到你的信息。
Once you have things in your pocket that can receive that message, then you have the conditions that allow that we can write like we speak. And that's where texting comes in. And so, texting is very loose in its structure. No one thinks about capital letters or punctuation when one texts, but then again, do you think about those things when you talk? No, and so therefore why would you when you were texting?
一但你在口袋里有了能接受这个信息的装置, 你就有条件来 像说话一样打字了。 这时短信就出现了。 所以,短信在结构上非常松散。 没有人在写短信的时候在乎大写字母或者标点, 话说回来,你在说话的时候也会想到这些东西吗? 不, 那么为什么要在写短信的时候这样做呢?
What texting is, despite the fact that it involves the brute mechanics of something that we call writing, is fingered speech. That's what texting is. Now we can write the way we talk. And it's a very interesting thing, but nevertheless easy to think that still it represents some sort of decline. We see this general bagginess of the structure, the lack of concern with rules and the way that we're used to learning on the blackboard, and so we think that something has gone wrong. It's a very natural sense.
除了与用手操作的书面文字表达有关外, 短信其实就是一种“指语”。 这就是短信。 现在我们可以像说话一样打字。 这是非常有趣的事情, 尽管人们很容易认为短信的出现象征着一种倒退。 我们看到短信在结构上的松散, 缺乏一定的规则, 和我们习惯在黑板上学习的方式不同, 我们就想当然的认为出问题了。 这么想也很自然。
But the fact of the matter is that what is going on is a kind of emergent complexity. That's what we're seeing in this fingered speech. And in order to understand it, what we want to see is the way, in this new kind of language, there is new structure coming up.
但事实上,它其实是 自然而然产生的,并具有一定的复杂性。 这就是我们在这种“指语”上看到的。 为了更好的理解它,我们想要看到的是, 在这种新的“语言”中, 它其实是具有一种新的结构。
And so, for example, there is in texting a convention, which is LOL. Now LOL, we generally think of as meaning "laughing out loud." And of course, theoretically, it does, and if you look at older texts, then people used it to actually indicate laughing out loud. But if you text now, or if you are someone who is aware of the substrate of texting the way it's become, you'll notice that LOL does not mean laughing out loud anymore. It's evolved into something that is much subtler.
比如说,在短信里有这样一个习惯用语, 就是LOL。 我们通常认为LOL的意思是 “捧腹大笑”。 当然,从理论上看,它确实是这个意思, 如果我们看看过去的一些短信, 人们确实用它来表示笑的很开心。 但是对于现在的短信,或者 你很注意短信从根本上是怎么出现的, 你就会注意到LOL 不再意味着“捧腹大笑”了。 它已演变成某种更微妙的东西。
This is an actual text that was done by a non-male person of about 20 years old not too long ago.
这是一段真实的短信对话 它是由一个20出头的姑娘 在前不久写的。
"I love the font you're using, btw."
第一句:“顺便说一句,我喜欢你用的字体。”
Julie: "lol thanks gmail is being slow right now"
朱莉: "lol 谢谢 谷歌邮箱现在变得好慢"
Now if you think about it, that's not funny. No one's laughing. (Laughter) And yet, there it is, so you assume there's been some kind of hiccup.
如果大家想想看,这可不好笑。 也没有人在笑。(笑声) 但是,这个字(lol)却在那里, 你会认为这可能就是打错了。
Then Susan says "lol, I know," again more guffawing than we're used to when you're talking about these inconveniences.
然后苏珊说“lol,我知道,” 再一次,真让人“捧腹大笑”。 这可不是我们一般遇上这样麻烦事的态度。
So Julie says, "I just sent you an email."
朱莉接着说,“我刚给你发了封邮件。”
Susan: "lol, I see it."
苏珊:“lol,我收到了。”
Very funny people, if that's what LOL means.
非常有趣的两个人,如果这是LOL的真实意思的话。
This Julie says, "So what's up?"
朱莉说,“最近怎么样?”
Susan: "lol, I have to write a 10 page paper."
苏珊:“lol,我得写一篇10页的作文。”
She's not amused. Let's think about it. LOL is being used in a very particular way. It's a marker of empathy. It's a marker of accommodation. We linguists call things like that pragmatic particles. Any spoken language that's used by real people has them. If you happen to speak Japanese, think about that little word "ne" that you use at the end of a lot of sentences. If you listen to the way black youth today speak, think about the use of the word "yo." Whole dissertations could be written about it, and probably are being written about it. A pragmatic particle, that's what LOL has gradually become. It's a way of using the language between actual people.
这么看的话,她可不开心。 LOL是以一种特别的方式被使用的。 它代表着感同身受,代表着某种无奈妥协。 我们语言学家称之为“口头禅”。 任何口语都有这些词语。 如果你会说日语的话, 想想你在很多句子后面加上的那个“ne”字。 如果你听现在的年轻黑人说话, 想想这个词“yo”的使用。 这都够写学术论文的了, 说不定人们已经开始写了。 LOL已经逐渐演变成了一个口头禅。 这就是人们使用语言的一种方式。
Another example is "slash." Now, we can use slash in the way that we're used to, along the lines of, "We're going to have a party-slash-networking session." That's kind of like what we're at. Slash is used in a very different way in texting among young people today. It's used to change the scene.
另外一个例子是“slash.”(斜线符号) 看看这个句子,"我们要去一个派对 同时(slash)来扩展一下人脉" slash这里连接派对和扩展人脉两个活动。 我们通常这么使用这个字。 今天Slash这个字用在年轻人的短信里 却有非常不同的意思。 它被用来转换话题。
So for example, this Sally person says, "So I need to find people to chill with" and Jake says, "Haha" -- you could write a dissertation about "Haha" too, but we don't have time for that — "Haha so you're going by yourself? Why?"
比如说,这个萨莉说, “我想找个伴儿来陪我” 然后,杰克说,“哈哈” - 你也可以写一篇关于“哈哈”的论文,但是我们没有时间聊它了 - “哈哈,所以你自己去?为什么?”
Sally: "For this summer program at NYU."
萨莉说:”是今天夏天在纽约的项目。“
Jake: "Haha. Slash I'm watching this video with suns players trying to shoot with one eye."
杰克:”哈哈。Slash(对了),我正在看这个视频, 太阳队的球员正试着用一只眼投篮。“
The slash is interesting. I don't really even know what Jake is talking about after that, but you notice that he's changing the topic. Now that seems kind of mundane, but think about how in real life, if we're having a conversation and we want to change the topic, there are ways of doing it gracefully. You don't just zip right into it. You'll pat your thighs and look wistfully off into the distance, or you'll say something like, "Hmm, makes you think --" when it really didn't, but what you're really -- (Laughter) — what you're really trying to do is change the topic. You can't do that while you're texting, and so ways are developing of doing it within this medium. All spoken languages have what a linguist calls a new information marker -- or two, or three. Texting has developed one from this slash.
这个Slash在这里很有趣。 我都不知道杰克这之后到底在说些什么, 但是大家注意到他在转换话题。 这看上去很平常, 但是想想我们的现实生活, 如果我们在谈话中想转换话题, 有很多很好的方式。 你不会随便地单刀直入。 你会拍拍大腿然后若有所思的看着远方, 或者你会说,“嗯......”来假装你在思考着, 但实际上- (笑声) - 实际上你正在试图切换话题。 你没有办法在短信里这么做, 所以在这个交流媒介里产生了各种转换话题的方法。 任何口语都有语言学家称作的 一个或者两到三个的新信息标记词(话题转换词)。 短信用这个slash(斜线)作为一个新信息产生的标记。
So we have a whole battery of new constructions that are developing, and yet it's easy to think, well, something is still wrong. There's a lack of structure of some sort. It's not as sophisticated as the language of The Wall Street Journal. Well, the fact of the matter is, look at this person in 1956, and this is when texting doesn't exist, "I Love Lucy" is still on the air.
于是我们有了这些充满活力的新语言结构, 然而人们还是很容易的认为, 还是有问题。 它(短信)缺乏某种结构。 它不像华尔街日报上使用的语言 那么有深度。 实际上, 看看这个人在1956年写的, 那时短信还没有出现, “我爱露西”(美国50年代当红肥皂剧)还在热播。
"Many do not know the alphabet or multiplication table, cannot write grammatically -- "
“很多人都不会拼写字母或者背乘法口诀表,” 也不会按照语法写作-“
We've heard that sort of thing before, not just in 1956. 1917, Connecticut schoolteacher. 1917. This is the time when we all assume that everything somehow in terms of writing was perfect because the people on "Downton Abbey" are articulate, or something like that.
我们以前就听到这种抱怨, 并不仅仅在1956年。1917年,康涅狄格州的教师也这样。 1917年,这是我们都认为的 写文章没的说的时代, 因为“唐顿庄园”(当时英国的热播剧) 里的人物各个都伶牙俐齿的。
So, "From every college in the country goes up the cry, 'Our freshmen can't spell, can't punctuate.'"
然而,“整个国家里的每一所学院都应感到羞愧, 我们的新生不会拼写,也不会点标点。“
And so on. You can go even further back than this. It's the President of Harvard. It's 1871. There's no electricity. People have three names.
诸如此类的言论。我们还可以再往前看。 这是1871年的哈佛大学校长。 那个时代还没有电力。人们还都有三个名字。
"Bad spelling, incorrectness as well as inelegance of expression in writing."
”糟糕的拼写, 不正确以及毫不优美的书面表达。“
And he's talking about people who are otherwise well prepared for college studies.
他可是在说那些为了上大学 作了充分准备的人。
You can go even further back. 1841, some long-lost superintendent of schools is upset because of what he has for a long time "noted with regret the almost entire neglect of the original" blah blah blah blah blah.
我们再往前看。 1841年,一个久违的督学官非常失望, 因为他早已经注意到人们 “对文字本源的完全忽视”等等等等。
Or you can go all the way back to 63 A.D. -- (Laughter) -- and there's this poor man who doesn't like the way people are speaking Latin. As it happens, he was writing about what had become French. And so, there are always — (Laughter) (Applause) — there are always people worrying about these things and the planet somehow seems to keep spinning.
或者大家可以直接跳转回公元63年。 - (笑声) 有个可怜人不喜欢人们 说拉丁语的方式。 实际上,他正在控诉的是日后形成的法语。 所以,总有-(笑声)(掌声) - 总会有人为这些事情担心 但是地球似乎并没有因此停止旋转。
And so, the way I'm thinking of texting these days is that what we're seeing is a whole new way of writing that young people are developing, which they're using alongside their ordinary writing skills, and that means that they're able to do two things. Increasing evidence is that being bilingual is cognitively beneficial. That's also true of being bidialectal. That's certainly true of being bidialectal in terms of your writing. And so texting actually is evidence of a balancing act that young people are using today, not consciously, of course, but it's an expansion of their linguistic repertoire. It's very simple. If somebody from 1973 looked at what was on a dormitory message board in 1993, the slang would have changed a little bit since the era of "Love Story," but they would understand what was on that message board. Take that person from 1993 -- not that long ago, this is "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" -- those people. Take those people and they read a very typical text written by a 20-year-old today. Often they would have no idea what half of it meant because a whole new language has developed among our young people doing something as mundane as what it looks like to us when they're batting around on their little devices.
所以,我对当今的短信的看法是 我们正在经历一种由年轻人发展出的 新的书写方式, 同时他们也在使用他们正常的书面表达写作技巧, 这意味着他们可以两者兼修。 补充证据就是拥有双语能力 对认知的发展是有利的。 这在精通两种方言上同样适用。 如果你会用两种方言写作的话,这也是千真万确的。 所以短信实际上是一个平衡之举的佐证 当然,年轻人们是在无意识的这样使用短信的, 但这是他们语言能力的一种扩展。 非常简单。 如果一个1973年的人 看着1993年一个学生宿舍信息栏, 俚语等习惯用语 会跟“爱情故事”(70年代美国热播剧)时代有些不同, 但是他们会看明白那个信息栏上的内容。 我们让1993年的那个人-这可不算太久远, 那还是“比尔和泰德历险记”(1989年美国电影)时代, 我们让这些人读 现在20岁年轻人写的一段短信。 他们应该通常连一半的内容都猜不出来 因为我们的年轻人已经发展出了一种 新的语言,它是通过在孩子们的 小设备上的看似平常的敲敲打打 中演变出来的。
So in closing, if I could go into the future, if I could go into 2033, the first thing I would ask is whether David Simon had done a sequel to "The Wire." I would want to know. And — I really would ask that — and then I'd want to know actually what was going on on "Downton Abbey." That'd be the second thing. And then the third thing would be, please show me a sheaf of texts written by 16-year-old girls, because I would want to know where this language had developed since our times, and ideally I would then send them back to you and me now so we could examine this linguistic miracle happening right under our noses. Thank you very much.
总结一下,如果我可以穿越到未来, 如果我去到2033年, 我会问的第一个问题就是大卫·西蒙拍没拍 “火线”(美国HBO剧集)的续集。 我真的会问这个的 我还会想知道“唐顿庄园”到底发生了什么。 这是第二个问题。 第三个问题就是, 请给我一叠16岁姑娘们 写的短信, 因为我想知道这个语言 已经发展成什么样子了, 更好的就是我可以把这些短信发给现在的大家和我 我们就可以研究研究这个当下正在发生着的 语言奇迹。 非常感谢。
(Applause) Thank you. (Applause)
(掌声) 谢谢大家。 (掌声)