Original link: https://yufree.cn/cn/2023/08/20/hybrid-lauguage/
I recently read an e-book published in Hong Kong. You said that this book is written in Cantonese. It contains a lot of vernacular and a lot of English. The target readers are definitely not mainlanders, and it is impossible for them to be native speakers of Chinese. Probably only locals can speak fluently. understand. Language is very important for the formation of national or cultural identity. The forums focused on Hong Kong independence are almost all in Cantonese, while the places where Taiwan independence is concentrated are promoting the so-called Taiwanese, which is actually Hokkien. In the process of forming the national identity of the United States, American English actually played a very important role. The independence of many colonies also had to rely on the division of language exchanges and the creation of their own unique culture to gradually achieve. In “Book of Rites The Doctrine of the Mean”, Kong Laoer, a lover of etiquette, mentioned the importance of the same text in the same track, and advocated to restore the phenomenon of broken rituals and music. But the funny thing is that it was Qin Shihuang who burned books and confuses scholars in the end to practice this. And in the general trend in history that the long-term must be united and the long-term must be divided, the very important driving force for the unity is cultural identity. Although many dynasties were established by foreign invasions, if they want to survive in this land, they must become Confucianism and Law. The inertia of system and culture is far greater than that of dynastic identity.
But this is the routine of the agricultural society. The actual effect of ethnic cultural identity in the industrial society is very poor, or everyone recognizes capital. At this time, if you want to generate a new cultural identity, you can only take the path of diversity. Therefore, I’m actually not worried about this one or the other, and the small circle is just moved by themselves, as long as they don’t want to return to the agricultural society and close the country, and want to create a new language to build national identity, and then national identity is a joke. To be honest, national identity will be a joke in the future. It is more likely that there will be native language cultural identities that are closer to the trend of globalization, such as Chinese, English, and Spanish. And identity does not mean that different languages are separated or opposed, but rather Conservatives who create opposing concepts are the big trouble. Confrontation is a trick for conservative politicians to gain fame. Ordinary people have no obligation to cooperate. If they have the time and energy, it is better to develop the economy and technology to improve the overall happiness of human life.
After all, language is a communication tool. Any language that has survived to this day must actively or passively accept the introduction of new elements and concepts. Many linguists use the appearance and disappearance of certain words to judge the phenomenon of cultural integration in history. For example, people in inland areas do not have words to describe marine life. The words describing marine life in their language are almost always native transliteration or free translation from people in coastal areas. The transliteration is very simple. It is to describe new things by analogy with what is already in your own vocabulary and add a modification. These two modes often coexist. From the perspective of comprehension and promotion, free translation is actually easier for local people to understand, but transliteration may be more accurate in terms of original expression.
The so-called Chinese-English hybrid phenomenon is actually a transliteration phenomenon. Because there is no existing vocabulary to describe it, it simply uses foreign words to refer to it. It should be noted here that if you can’t find an existing vocabulary, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t find it, or you don’t know it’s in your own vocabulary. At this time, using transliteration makes people feel uneducated. Of course, some people like to use transliteration to show that they are well-informed. This is actually a very childish and uneducated expression. When communicating with strangers, people who are really well-informed will be backward compatible to improve communication efficiency, rather than deliberately let the other party listen. Don’t know how to show superiority. The sense of superiority you want to show is more disgust than admiration in the eyes of the other party. If the other party likes this, then 80% of them are also uneducated people who will only follow blindly. This kind of person is not worth communicating with. The first priority of language is to convey information. If the other party cannot understand what you are saying, then there is no doubt that it must be your language problem.
I try to avoid mixing Chinese and English in my writing, but I have been abroad for a long time, and I can probably understand the phenomenon of Chinese and English mixing when foreign students communicate. In a big way, it is creating a new language, and in a small way, it is reducing the cost of communication. It is true that there are many daily expressions or professional vocabulary in English that both parties can understand and understand the specific meaning, but this is a chat between acquaintances, and dealing with strangers who share the same native language, so it is unnecessary to do so. I don’t think it is necessary to maintain the so-called purity of language, but simply discuss this issue from the perspective of communication efficiency. For example, in the Hong Kong book I mentioned at the beginning, it is common for Hong Kong people to communicate with each other, but from the perspective of other native Chinese speakers, the communication efficiency is very low, it is not as good as pure English or pure Chinese, and mixing is actually more restrictive spread of this form of communication. However, I have to admit that many former colonies have this kind of mixed language, which also has obvious colonial colors. For example, the vocabulary related to foreign trade technology is all foreign languages introduced by the suzerain country, and the daily communication is in the local indigenous language. However, I have not seen any colonial version of English that can become bigger and stronger, except for the United States, but Americans still have a high regard for the British or European way of life, after all, their ancestors are also there. When it comes to East Asia, the situation is reversed. In many regions, Europe and the United States are the ones that people look up to the most. This is actually unnecessary. If you want to get a fair deal, looking down and looking up are not as good as looking up and respecting each other. When you lose power, you kneel and lick it. It is impossible to get the respect of any opponent.
So what if you try to maintain language purity? An interesting example is the French-speaking area of Canada, because this French-speaking area was actually created by surrender. The proud French people could not defeat it militarily but resolutely defended the purity of their language. However, the French of its European suzerain is advancing with the times and accepting new words. The result is that the French now think that there is no language barrier when they arrive in Quebec, Canada, but they speak French hundreds of years ago, similar to the way we travel through The feeling of speaking classical Chinese in the Qing Dynasty is even better. People in French-speaking Canada now think that they are the heirs of French. Instead, they think that modern French has been polluted. Language must develop to have vitality. Creating new words to describe new things is the most direct evidence of the vitality of a language, and if you keep borrowing new words from other languages, it can only be said that this language has already become a reality. Abandoned by history.
What needs to be emphasized here is that English itself is the language with the most foreign words in the world. The mixed Chinese and English I am talking about may actually be a mixture of Chinese and French, Chinese and German, Chinese and Western, Chinese and Italian, and Chinese and Portuguese. Even native speakers of English in Shakespeare’s era can’t figure out what it means when they read it. I don’t even know what it is. When the British were tossing around the world, the sun never set, they actually encountered a large number of expressions that were not found in English, so a lot of English was actually either aboriginal transliteration, or transliteration or free translation of earlier European colonists. Part of the reason why the English we learn is difficult from a lexical point of view is that there are a lot of transliterations without root combinations. Another foreign language that is more mixed is Japanese. Modern technical vocabulary is almost all phonetic reading, and I don’t bother to practice reading at all. This also directly affects the Japanese English pronunciation that always has a Japanese style. In fact, it is a problem of phonetic reading. For example, if you express your gratitude by the pronunciation of three grams of oil, Lao Mei will also sound weird.
Chinese is actually not suitable for phonetic reading. On the one hand, the basic vocabulary is rich enough to arrange and combine concepts that do not exist. On the other hand, Chinese is written in the same language, but the pronunciation retains the differences between different regions, and the local dialects are spoken quickly. No one can understand anyone, and it is even more troublesome for you to adapt to the dialects of various places. For example, the word boycott comes from the English transliteration of boycott, which actually means boycott in Chinese. Even this word is the surname of a person who was collectively boycotted by the local residents because he refused to give tax cuts to his tenant farmers. Later, people used it to describe the same activities. Just use this surname to refer to. To put it bluntly, it is a word created by English encountering a phenomenon that did not exist before, but Chinese already had it. At this time, it is unnecessary to use phonetic pronunciation in the Chinese context, which is a manifestation of lack of culture. The other is bullying, which comes from the transliteration of bully. Many people think this translation is convincing and elegant, but Chinese already has words for bullying or bullying to describe this phenomenon. There is really no need to create new words to express existing concepts. There are also many transliterations that are indeed far away. For example, jazz comes from jazz. This word really has nothing to do with jazz half a dime, and it is very far from the actual music style. Of course, there are also many free translations but inaccurate things. For example, the economy we often talk about has a more grand original meaning. In reality, it is possible to use food or housekeeping in “Historical Records” to express the microeconomy, and then use finance to express the macroeconomy. Some of them were made by the first batch of translators, but they have spread. For example, milk in English is translated as milk, but it actually refers to the milk of all mammals, including human milk. Lu Xun wrote an article about the problem of the Milky Way and the Milky Way. . This kind of Chinese free translation is inherently inaccurate, but there is nothing wrong with practical transliteration. The premise is that the person you communicate with knows the difference, otherwise it is the same as not saying it.
However, there are indeed a large number of foreign words in Chinese, and many modern words are actually learned from Japan, which cannot be denied. In the past one or two hundred years, too many new things have appeared. In many cases, it is indeed too late for free translation or the spreading effect of free translation is not as good as that of transliteration. However, Chinese continues to create new words and new stalks, and many of them are also included in English dictionaries, such as Niubility. On the one hand, this shows that English is also continuing to collect new words and new things from other languages. On the other hand, Chinese does need more communication with the outside world, whether transliteration or free translation, to introduce some descriptions of new things, so that the language can have vitality. It is very likely that hundreds of years later, the language on Earth will be a hybrid language on a larger scale. At that time, our descriptions of new things are all consistent, but the descriptions of daily affairs still have the influence of our mother tongue. Such diversity is actually Not bad.
More broadly, our brain itself is a translation device. Even in the same language, there are ancient texts and modern texts. The evolutionary direction of human society is to continuously translate new discoveries to the brains of oneself or others. Even if it is also a modern language, we still need translation to understand some professional articles, which are all kinds of popular science works. When we are old, our brains are confused, and our pronunciation is not clear, we may still need a translator to express our needs. It may be an offspring, or it may be a brain-computer interface. In a broader sense, translation is directly explained to symbols. For example, when you see the Arabic numeral 1, you know what it means, when you see H2O, you know it is water, and when you see if in any programming language, you know it is a conditional judgment. Therefore, many professions can be interpreted as translations. Programmers translate needs to machines, salesmen translate product usage, scientists translate natural laws, artists translate emotions, athletes translate desire to win… All human needs need translation, and some also need translation. Highly professional translation. Of course, translation is just information communication and will not involve the next step of action, but as long as many things are communicated smoothly, it is not difficult to go through the assembly line later.
“Tao Te Ching” begins with the words “names can be named, but not names”. My translation is that concepts can be communicated, but the concepts understood by the two parties may be different. This is the source of many contradictions. Some things may always be cross-server chats with unclear or inaccurate translations. You think you express agreement, but the other side understands it as opposition. This requires a better translation. This translation needs to understand two different languages at the same time, and then knead these understandings into the language and pass them on to people who only know one language. Even so, the translation between people may be an unsolvable problem. It is difficult for one person to really enter the conscious world of another person. Many things cannot be clearly expressed in language. At this time, there is no need to confuse, unless The other party really understands you.
In other words, after everyone truly understands each other, the world may be more orderly, but it will not be as interesting as it is now.
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