语言与文风2020beside.media
因纽特语：由谦逊、诗歌与土地塑造的语言
Inuttitut, a language shaped by humility, poetry, and the land
导读
这篇围绕 Inuttitut 展开，讨论一种语言如何与谦逊、诗意和土地经验相互塑造。评论区补充了写作者值得注意的角度：词汇常来自具体实践互动，而由语言结构推断文化特质很容易滑向浪漫化。读它能帮助我们在写语言、文化与地方经验时更谨慎也更有细节。
可以直接用的写作要点
- 01
写语言特色时先核实流行说法，别把“几百个雪词”这类传说当成文化论据。
- 02
用具体实践和互动来解释词汇差异，比如滑雪者对不同雪况的细分，比空泛赞美更有说服力。
- 03
不要由语法或词汇差异直接推断某种文化更敏锐或更高级，要用比较和实例约束判断。
- 04
写到濒危语言时，把语言濒危和社区保存的现实处境写进背景，避免只剩抒情。
HN 评论精选
词汇由具体实践和互动产生，而非文化传说。
不过别全信你听到的：并没有几百个表示雪的词。滑雪者会学大量描述不同雪况的词，从 death cookies（烂雪块）到 boilerplate（硬冰面）再到 corn snow（玉米雪）。词汇来自互动。我猜不同运动也会极大扩展与相关环境有关的词汇？
robocat查看英文原文
> Don’t believe everything you’ve heard, however: there are not hundreds of words for snow. Skier’s learn a large number of words for different types of snow: everything from death cookies to boilerplate to corn snow. Vocabulary comes from interaction. I am guessing different sports have wildly expanded vocabulary for certain elements of the relevant environment?
写濒危语言应关注社区现实与保存行动。
这门语言是不是几乎灭绝、社区几乎被摧毁？我记得读过，使用者只剩几百人，随着更多加拿大人迁入，因纽特社区和语言正受到威胁。有没有系统性保存语言和社区的计划？至少记录词汇、语法、发音？
disown查看英文原文
Isn't the language almost extinct and the community almost wiped out? I remember reading a while back that there are only a few hundred speakers and as more canadians move into the area, the inuit community and language were being endangered. Is there a systematic campaign to preserve the language and/or community? At the very least to set down the vocabulary/grammer/pronounciation/etc?
警惕用语言结构浪漫化或本质化文化。
从语言特征推断人或文化特征，至少自萨丕尔—沃尔夫假说以来就很有争议。若你欣赏一种文化，很容易编出故事：这门语言有英语没有的区分，说明说话者更敏锐；或没有某些区分，说明不受工业文明琐事干扰。但语言类型学显示，有或没有某特征的语言遍布不同文化社会，很多被赋予深意的概括在数据面前站不住脚。
schoen查看英文原文
The practice of drawing conclusions about people or their cultures based on properties of their language has been controversial since at least the original Sapir and Whorf stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_time_controversy If you admire or appreciate a culture, you might argue that the culture's values or history or distinctive outlook are directly reflected in grammatical features or vocabulary of an associated language. While this might be true in some ways and to some extent, it's something that's also very easy to deceive yourself about. You can easily make up a story about how distinctions that one language does (or doesn't) draw reflect the excellence or more appropriate priorities of its speakers' culture. Like "oh, this language makes distinctions that English doesn't -- because the people who speak it are so attuned to perceiving fine details!" or "oh, this language doesn't make distinctions that English does -- showing how its speakers are not distracted by the pointless minutia that occupy us in settled industrial civilization!". A challenge to this kind of analysis is that studies of linguistic typology (deep structural features that languages do or don't have in common) show languages with, and without, particular characteristics all over the world, in languages spoken by people from all different kinds of cultures and societies. Most generalizations that might be given a higher significance just sort of fall flat when you look at typology data. Oh, that cool thing that we like in this language -- is also present in this other language from a different culture and part of the world! Oh, that thing we find annoying or irritating -- is present elsewhere too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_typology A kind of counterexample that I learned from John McWhorter's books is that complicated irregularities in languages (e.g. a very large number of noun classes with distinctive classifiers and agreement rules, or a very large number of irregular verb forms) are likely a sign of smaller and more isolated speaker communities, whereas simplification that removes these irregularities is associated with circumstances in which more people have to use a language non-natively (and therefore have a harder time mastering these details), which could include migration, social disruptions, or the widespread use of a language as a lingua franca, trade language, language of imperial administration, etc. That does mean that indigenous languages (especially if they have almost exclusively been used by a native speaker community in a relatively small area) can often be harder to learn for non-native speakers. But you still can't necessarily count on cultural generalizations based on those observations. One exercise you can try to do (maybe this is also an idea from McWhorter?) is pick a random set of characteristics that some language might have, and then try to come up with an essay explaining why those features show how awesome or admirable the speakers' culture must be. If it sounds deeply plausible, then maybe that's a sign that people aren't actually good at being objective about this. :-)
同类还值得读
像说话一样写作
Write like you talk
这篇短文主张写作应像说话一样自然、清晰，避免装腔作势的书面腔。
语言与文风2015 · 647 分 · 272 评4 条写作要点编辑精选法律语言难懂源于写作不佳，而非专业概念
Poor writing, not specialized concepts, drives difficulty with legal language
这是一项认知科学研究：法律文本难懂，主要不是因为充斥专业术语，而是因为写作者把句子写得又长又绕、修饰语层层嵌套、回指距离过远。
语言与文风2022 · 559 分 · 322 评5 条写作要点编辑精选写得简单
Write Simply
保罗·格拉汉姆在这篇短文里主张：好文章应该写得简单——用日常词汇、短句、直白的结构，不为显得聪明而堆砌复杂表达。
语言与文风2021 · 484 分 · 330 评4 条写作要点编辑精选Tortured phrases：科学写作中出现的一种可疑文风
Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science
《自然》新闻报道了一种在科学论文中蔓延的怪现象：原本标准的术语被同义替换软件改写成了古怪说法，比如把 "cloud computing" 写成 "haze figuring"。
语言与文风2021 · 329 分 · 256 评4 条写作要点编辑精选乔治·奥威尔 1940 年对《我的奋斗》的书评
George Orwell's review of Mein Kampf (1940)
这是奥威尔1940年对《我的奋斗》的书评。
语言与文风2014 · 305 分 · 240 评4 条写作要点编辑精选