Mr Zheng Chao has written an English textbook, which is an introduction to contemporary linguistics. The assignment he gave us last class was to co-translate his textbook. Although this is suspected of being exploited by his mental work, we still translated with our heart, so let's just practice our translation ability. My task is 16 to 19, which is the preface and the first section of the second chapter. The following is the first draft of my translation. I hope you can give me your comments. Please point out what is not elegant enough. Thanks in advance!
A lady is considered to be in a bit of a bad state of mind. When the doctor asked her to classify some pictures, she put flowers, trees and dogs in the same category. "Because they are all around the house." She explained this.
Please try to analyze the woman's mental state.
Chapter II Linguistics as a Science
From the moment you begin to learn the second lesson of this course, you have become one of the explorers in the field of language research. To be a successful explorer, the first step is to read more books, think more and debate more.
You should read more books, because you must know what other explorers have studied in this field. In the process of reading, you should pay attention to the definition of terms, research questions, theoretical modules, arguments and examples.
You should think more, because you can't understand any problems without your own independent analysis and thinking. Otherwise, you will swing back and forth between different schools of thought like a swing. You can take a note, reorganize what you have learned from different angles, and organize your own views with strict logic.
You should debate more, because this is the best way for you to thoroughly understand the problem you are studying. Once you set foot in linguistics, you can't just be a listener; You may encounter problems, assumptions and arguments everywhere, and you must choose your own position. Therefore, debate is the best way to make progress.
In addition, even if you develop good habits of reading, thinking and debating, you are not a qualified researcher. You must master the scientific method. Here are some basic processes to be discussed.
2. 1 conjecture
In the understanding of the world, the ancient people know far less than us-people in the information age, but their confidence in judging things is not weaker than ours. Plato, the ancient Greek scholar we mentioned, discussed everything he noticed in the universe. He also devoted himself to the discussion of the origin of language. The answer he gave was that at some point in ancient times, a "legislator" gave everything a correct and natural name. In his book Craty Luce, he wrote: "When dialectologists stand next to legislators, they create language." We don't have to infer from this that Plato thinks that words are produced and distributed by the national mint just like money, but it is obvious that he thinks that language is the product of wisdom, and language belongs to the country and not to individuals.
1770, the Prussian Institute in Berlin held a paper contest with the theme "Can human beings develop languages independently?" . The final winner is J.G. Holder (1744-1803). His thesis "The Origin of Language" dwarfs other contestants' works with novel and poetic wording. He knows that poetry and music can have the emotional power of natural sounds, and he also points out in his article that even animals (except silent fish) can make, feel and communicate these sounds. Babies can make such natural sounds, such as crying, but these sounds will never develop into language. Babies learn languages from adults, not natural sounds. In this way, human beings have two different oral abilities: one is natural voice (rhythm, tone, intonation, etc. ) One is the language that carries emotions, and the other is the language that carries thoughts. He emphasized that language is not a direct gift from God, because he found that language was far from perfect from the beginning. His hypothesis is that God gave human beings the impulse to speak. With this impulse, human beings have developed language from simple to complex while developing their thinking ability.
Plato and Herder are both outstanding thinkers. Their views have influenced mankind for hundreds of years. But unfortunately, what they did has nothing to do with today's science. Plato's "legislator" and Herder's "God" cannot be proved or overthrown: they are either fictional or supernatural. Therefore, their ideas are not truth, but conjecture.
Scholars finally realized that such a theory could not be verified. Therefore, when 1886 was founded, the Linguistic Society of Paris explicitly prohibited the discussion on the origin of language, so as to shift the direction of academic activities of its members from traditional philosophical conjecture to practical scientific research.
Philosophers and scientists ask questions. They ask questions because they believe in the truth and hope to find it. Ancient philosophers asked many questions about the world, most of which were later answered by science. For different reasons, many of the rest are beyond the scope of scientific research. Some have only theological significance, such as "What language is spoken in the Garden of Eden?" Others are doomed to be fruitless, such as "What is the first sentence spoken in the first language in human history?" Such a problem, because people can't come up with any key evidence about this problem. Some famous philosophical thoughts are very logical but lack of science, because they either lack evidence or contain supernatural assumptions. So what is scientific research? Science attaches great importance to evidence, because with evidence, scientific research can be repeated and its conclusions can help explain and transform the world. When science brought great changes to Europe during the industrial revolution, people became more and more impatient with fruitless philosophical discussions and turned to the so-called "hard" science. Today, most linguists declare with this enthusiasm that they are also scientists.
This change to science does not mean that conjecture is despised, because conjecture is still as important to modern linguistics as it was in Plato's and Herder's times. In fact, the perfect answer to the mystery of nature is often the product of the brain activities of great scientists, as is the theory of relativity in physics and Goldbach conjecture in mathematics. However, in the eyes of scientists, genius's guess is just a hypothesis that needs to be verified by evidence. The evidence comes from scientific observation and reliable measurement and calculation. In science, no one is romantic and casual enough to assume an unprovable factor in his theory. Although any supernatural aspect of science seems to be denied, an aesthetic view is an exception, that is Galileo's argument that "nature is perfect". Scientists' guesses are often inspired by this argument. As Chomsky emphasized in 200 1, the task of scientists is to show this argument, "whether they study the law of motion, the structure of snowflakes, the formation and growth of flowers, or the most complex system we know-the human brain." In other words, if the universe is not as perfect as we think, then no phenomenon can be predicted, and all scientific laws become unfounded. Therefore, the harmony of the universe is considered as the basis of modern linguistics as a science.