The Real Surprise Contained in a Kinder Surprise Egg健达奇趣蛋里的真奇趣

Keith Kahn-Harris’s charming conceit is that the warning message within is a skeleton key1 to the languages of the world. 基思·卡恩-哈里斯可爱的奇思妙想：健达奇趣蛋里的安全警示可以成为开启多语言世界的“万能钥匙”。

Tucked inside with the cheap plastic toy Kinder Surprise Egg is a tiny sheet of paper that says： ‘WARNING， read and keep： Toy not suitable for children under three years. Small parts might be swallowed or inhaled.’ But the piece of paper does not just say it in English; it repeats the same message in 34 different languages and scripts.

廉价的塑料玩具健达奇趣蛋里塞着一张小纸片，上面写着：“警告！请阅读并保存。玩具内含小零件，存在误食吞咽或吸入风险，不适合三岁以下儿童使用。”纸片上并非只用英文写了这段话，还以另外34种语言和文本传递同样的信息。

Of course， any right-thinking chap will just crumple up this useless bit of paper and throw it in the bin. It is an amusing paradox of modern life that when you’re unpacking a new purchase， you know， with terrible certainty， that the slip of paper that says something like ‘IMPORTANT！ PLEASE READ！ CONTAINS VITAL SAFETY INFORMATION！’ is the one that you absolutely don’t need to bother with. It will just tell you that the product should not be used to stab yourself in the eye， or be set alight and left in a petrol station. Every sensible fellow knows that. Fortunately， Keith Kahn-Harris， the author of The Babel Message， is not a sensible fellow.

当然，任何思维正常的人都会把这张没用的纸片揉成一团，扔进垃圾桶。现代生活中有一个有趣的悖论：当你打开新买物品的包装，你十分确信自己完全不用理会那张带有“重要提示！请阅读！含有重要安全信息！”字样的纸条。它无非是告诉你，不要用该产品戳眼睛，或者把它点燃了遗留在加油站内。明白人都懂的。幸运的是，《巴别塔的信息》一书的作者基思·卡恩-哈里斯并不是一个明白人。

He collects these Kinder warning sheets. He obsesses over them. He tracks down versions new and old. And he has now written a 300-page book about them. Except， of course， that the book is not really about the warning message; it is about languages in general， the whole glorious worldwide mess of them.

他收集这些健达奇趣蛋的警示语小纸条，沉迷其中，研究各种新老版本，还专门写了一本300页的书。当然，这本书写的其实并不是警示语本身，而是人类各种语言一总构成的瑰丽世界。

The Kinder Surprise warning message is a conceit upon which to build a book. It’s a very neat and charming one. There is a delicious humour implicit in every page， as Kahn-Harris shows what the warning would look like in hieroglyphics or ancient cuneiform. But it is also， strangely， a very clever and methodical conceit.

从健达奇趣蛋的警示语切入，策划一本书，这样的构思简单质朴而又令人着迷。全书字里行间尽显风趣幽默，作者还给出了象形文字或古代楔形文字版本的奇趣蛋警示语。不可思议的是，这种巧妙的构思中倒也不乏机智与条理。

Too many books on language begin with the sublime. They tell you that you will never truly appreciate the wonders of Greek drama or Balinese poetry until you have spent a decade mastering every subtle detail and nuance of the language. This is both dispiriting for the general reader and unprovable. However， the Kinder Surprise warning message functions as a great leveller2. Languages can be compared in their ability to impart this simple bit of information. The results are truly odd. For example， I had no idea that Old Norse doesn’t appear to have had a word for ‘year’. Instead， a Viking would have been warned that the toy was not suitable for children with less than three winters.

有太多关于语言的书一开篇便说得无比玄妙。那些书里写道，要想真正品读希腊戏剧和巴厘语诗歌的美妙，你就要先花费10年时间来掌握相应语言的种种微妙之处和细微差异。这种说法既让普通读者感到十分沮丧，又无法验证真伪。然而，健达奇趣蛋的警示语为我们降低了进入多语言世界的门槛，我们可以比较各种语言在传达这种简单信息方面的能力。其结果着实令人意外——比如，我以前不知道古北欧语中似乎没有表示“年”的词汇，因此，适用于维京人的警示语是“本玩具不适合年龄未满三冬的儿童”。

Kahn-Harris applies this language test to everything. Thirty-four languages were not enough， so he has managed to obtain translations into many more—some of them real， such as Basque3 or Sumerian4， some artificial， such as Esperanto and Braille， and some fanciful， such as Klingon5 and Scots.

卡恩-哈里斯广泛应用这种比较不同语言的方法。34种语言还不够，所以他设法找到了更多语种的译文，其中一些是真实存在的语种（如巴斯克语和苏美尔语），一些是人工创制的语种（如世界语和盲文），还有一些是并不实用的语种（如克林贡语和苏格兰英语）。

As the title suggests， this is a book about all languages and about all forms of language. The author cannot， therefore， know them all. And therein lies the final charm of the work. Kahn-Harris confesses at the outset that he speaks only a very few languages， and most of those badly. This is an advantage.

正如书名所示，这是一本关于所有语言和所有语言形式的书。因此，作者不可能全然了解这些语言。而这就是此书的终极魅力所在。卡恩-哈里斯一开始就承认自己只懂区区几种语言，而且大多掌握得不好。这反而是一个优势。

Many books on language have the air of a smug teacher telling you that you really should know as much as they do， or at least have kept practising the French that you learnt at GCSE6. But The Babel Message does the opposite. It is filled with a sense of wonder， gazing at languages that neither the writer nor reader understands. Though the author has corresponded with experts， who have explained how a translation into some obscure creole7 works， the book is about ‘the pleasures and possibilities of not understanding’. It lingers upon the beauty of enigmatic alphabets， odd diacritics and the pleasant strangeness of the incomprehensible.

许多关于语言的书都流露出一种高高在上的说教感，预设读者和作者一样博学，或者最起码一直在练习中学学过的法语。《巴别塔的信息》却与之相反，凝视那些作者和读者都不懂的语言，连连称奇。尽管作者与专家们通过信，后者解释说某句话用晦涩的克里奥尔语（混合语）翻译如何可行，这仍是一本展现“不理解的乐趣和可能性”的书。这本书传递出美的体验，那种美来自神秘字母和奇特变音符，也来自难解字那令人愉悦的奇异感。

There is a lot to be said for gazing at what you do not understand. Not only is it a rather good metaphor for the human condition， but it makes us see things that we would not notice if our interest were purely utilitarian. Many a time I have sat on trains or planes in other countries wondering what a big red sign is warning me of， and ending only by admiring the font. （I also have a little collection of books that I have written translated into Thai， Korean， Japanese and other languages whose scripts I can’t read. It’s rather amusing to gaze at all the pretty symbols and think ‘I wrote that.’）