On the Origin of Languages论语言的起源

It’s tempting to think that they have clear beginnings. They don’t.

人们往往认为语言有明确的诞生时间，实则不然。

In a church hewn out of a mountainside， just over a thousand years or so ago， a monk was struggling with a passage in Latin. He did what others like him had done， writing the tricky bits in his own language1 between the lines of text and at the edges. What makes these marginalia more than marginal is that they are considered the first words ever written in Spanish.

大约一千多年前，在一座从半山腰雕凿出来的修道院中，有位修士正在冥思苦读一篇拉丁语文章。同其他修士一样，他会用母语标注文中费解之处，或在行间，或在页边。这些文字存在的意义不只是用作旁注，因为它们被认为是西班牙语最早的文字记载。

The “Emilian glosses” were written at the monastery of Suso， which was founded by St Aemilianus （Millán， in Spanish） in the La Rioja region of Spain. Known as la cuna del castellano， “the cradle of Castilian”， it is a UNESCO world heritage site and a great tourist draw. In 1977 Spain celebrated 1，000 years of the Spanish language there.

上述“埃米利安努斯注释”诞生于西班牙拉里奥哈自治区的苏索修道院。该修道院由圣埃米利安努斯（西班牙语名为“米连”）建立，被称作“西班牙语的摇篮”，不仅是联合国教科文组织认定的世界文化遗产，也是热门的旅游景点。1977年，西班牙还在这座修道院庆祝了西班牙语诞生1000周年。

Everyone loves a superhero origin story. Spanish is now the world’s third-biggest language， with over 500 m speakers， and it all began with a monk scrawling on his homework. But as with the radioactive bite that put the Spider into Spider-Man， there is more than a little mythmaking going on here.

超级英雄的起源故事令所有人着迷。如今，西班牙语是世界第三大语言，使用人数超过五亿，而这一切都要从一位修士为功课做的潦草笔记说起。然而，就像蜘蛛释放的放射性物质成就了超级英雄蜘蛛侠一样，西班牙语的起源故事也有相当一部分是虚构的。

First， while “Castilian” and “Spanish” are synonymous for most Spanish-speakers2， philologists argue that what the anonymous monk wrote is closer to the Aragonese3 than to the Castilian variety of Romance4 . In any case， the Suso monk’s scribblings have been pipped by the discovery in nearby Burgos province of writings that may be two centuries older.

首先，尽管大多数说西语的人往往将“西班牙语”和“卡斯蒂利亚语”画等号，语言学家认为那位不知名修士写下的文字更接近罗曼语族的阿拉贡语而非卡斯蒂利亚语。不管怎样，有人在邻近拉里奥哈自治区的布尔戈斯省发现了一处字迹，可能比苏索修道院的修士笔记还早两百年，更接近语言的源头。

Even those are not the origin of Spanish. The very idea treats languages like a person， with a name， birth date and birthplace. But languages are not like an individual. They are much more like a species， gradually diverging from another over many years. It would be as accurate to describe such jottings as degenerate Latin as it is to call them early Spanish—but that would probably not draw as many tourists.

但即使是这些文字也不是西班牙语的源头。寻找语言渊源的想法是把语言当成了人，认为语言有名字、生日和出生地，但语言和人不同，它们更像是一个物种，从另一物种历经无数年分化而成。上述匆匆写下的注释既可以说是早期西班牙语，又可称为退化的拉丁语——两个说法都很准确，只是后者可能没法吸引如今日这般众多的游客。

Most accurate would be to call the monk’s prose an intermediate form： words like sieculos （centuries） in the text are almost perfectly halfway between Latin’s saecula and modern Spanish’s siglos. In its way， the church in which the glosses were written is a mirror of such evolution. It includes arches in Visigothic， Mozarabic （Moorish-influenced） and more recent styles， added as it was expanded. As many visitors to an ancient site find， it can be hard to date buildings in use for centuries. Little of the original remains; all is layers upon layers.

把那位修士的注释视作一种过渡形式最为准确：其中的单词sieculos（世纪）几乎完全介于拉丁文saecula与现代西班牙语siglos的中间。如此看来，产生这些注释的修道院就如同西班牙语演进的一面镜子。西班牙语在不断发展的过程中，吸收了西哥特语、莫扎拉布语（受摩尔文化影响的语言）以及更近代的语言风格。正如参观古迹的许多游客所看到的那样，很难对已使用数百年的建筑追根溯源，因为最初的建筑早已所剩无几，展现在游客面前的不过是厚重历史的层层堆叠。

The desire to create heroic origins of languages is an urge to impose order on chaos. Students of other European languages are offered Beowulf5 or La Chanson de Roland6 as the earliest exemplars of English or French， which gives the grand story a comprehensible beginning. But literature， by its nature， requires the language to exist before poems and epics could be written. Imagining that a piece of writing represents the beginning of a language is like thinking the first picture of a baby is the beginning of its life.

想为语言书写英雄史诗般的起源故事，恰恰反映了人们想于混乱中建立秩序的渴望。《贝奥武甫》和《罗兰之歌》分别作为最早的英语和法语范例，被教授给以其他欧洲语言为母语的学生，由此语言演变这条宏大的故事线有了一个易于理解的开端。然而，文学本质上依赖语言的存在，语言是诗歌和史诗写就的前提。将一份书面作品描绘成某种语言的开端，无异于将婴儿的第一张照片视作其生命的开始。

A better analogy is that the first written records of a language are like the first fossil traces of a distinct species. But even this should not be mistaken for the moment at which the species emerged. After all， the neat nodes on a palaeobiologist’s tree of life are just simplifications of a messy continuum.

将某种语言最早的文字记载类比作一个特定物种最早的化石痕迹似乎更为恰当。不过即便如此，人们也不应误以为这就是该物种起源的时间。毕竟，古生物学家绘出的生命之树上，那一个个排列整齐的节点只是对混乱复杂的历史进程的简化。

The urge to put dates on the founding of languages seems universal. Google “Basque Europe’s oldest language” to see how many people think this language （which evolved gradually from some now-unknown ancestor） is somehow older than Spanish， though Basque has no clear birthday， either. By quite a coincidence， the first known words written in Old Basque—just six of them—also appear in the Emilian glosses， though the site makes much less of this fact. Or to take a more modern example， a book on American English called The Forgotten Founding Father aims to give Noah Webster’s modest early-19th-century reforms， such as respelling “center”， the heroic role humans seem destined to seek in the birth of their cultures.