语言与文风2013washingtonpost.com
语言学家识别出15000年前的“超稳定词汇”
Linguists identify 15,000-year-old ‘ultraconserved words’
导读
这篇报道介绍一项声称识别出1.5万年前“超稳定词”的研究，并给出古人可能听懂现代句子的戏剧化例子。对写作者而言，它是一则科普写作案例：如何避免把统计相关性写成可理解性，如何区分词汇存续与语音存续，以及报道研究时应回到原始论文和具体词形。
可以直接用的写作要点
- 01
写科普时不要把“统计上可证明的对应”夸大成“古人能听懂这句话”，结论强度要与证据匹配。
- 02
报道语言学研究要区分词汇项的存续和语音形式的存续，不能用“词义重要”直接解释语音长期不变。
- 03
引用研究时尽量给出原始论文和具体词形、例证，而不是只列意义或戏剧化例句。
- 04
开头用“猎人采集者能听懂”这类画面很抓人，但若经不起专业读者推敲，会损害全文可信度。
HN 评论精选
科普夸大了可理解性，统计对应不等于同词。
我对研究结论本身保留判断，直到读完论文（尽管以历史语言学背景，我对任何提出历史“超级语系”的主张都学会非常怀疑）。但我要抱怨科普开头：认为猎人采集者有可能听懂文中例句，这荒谬可笑。古英语使用者也只能勉强听懂（正如我们也只能勉强理解 gief þæm menn ealdan þisne fýr），更别说我们与所述猎人采集者之间还有数千年变化。“两个词有统计上可证明的对应关系”和“两个词被理解为同一个词”天差地别。
andolanra查看英文原文
I'm going to reserve judgment on the findings themselves until I read the paper (although, having a background in historical linguistics, I've learned to be very skeptical of any claim that posits historical superfamilies.) However, I will complain about the pop-science intro, because the thought that a hunter-gatherer has some chance of understanding a sentence like the one given is laughably preposterous. An Old English speaker would only barely understand it (just as we would only barely understand gief þæm menn ealdan þisne fýr[1]), to say nothing of the many thousands of years of change between us and the hunter-gatherers spoken of. There is a vast difference between 'two words have a statistically provable correspondence' and 'two words are understood as the same word.' [1]: My old English is pretty weak, so I take full responsibility for grammatical errors. Edit: accidentally used 'th' instead of 'þ' in the Old English.
批评报道混淆词汇存续与语音存续，且不给实际词形。
languagehat 上有人写道：这完全是胡扯，实际语言学家在 LH 讨论串里发表了意见。Marie-Lucie Tarpent 说：文章把“Eurasiatic”（Greenberg 提出的假设超级语群）说成科学家的重大发现，但对它与 PIE 的关系显得混乱。文章还引用几个作者认为文化上太重要、所以保存了1.5万年的词（如树皮）。像 Renfrew 和 Proto-World 那些人一样，作者似乎不区分词汇项的存续（尽管经数千年音变已不可辨认）和构成它的语音的存续（语音独立于整词意义）。例如 Renfrew 等人认为“nephew”因概念重要几乎未变，实际是其中辅音更抗变化。无论如何，文章不引用任何实际词形，只给意义。读者风险自担。
dmd查看英文原文
languagehat writes, over at metafilter: Yeah, this is complete bullshit. Actual linguists weigh in in this LH thread [ http://www.languagehat.com/archives/004994.php ]; Marie-Lucie Tarpent writes: The article announces "Eurasiatic" (a hypothetical supergroup originally suggested by Joseph Greenberg of "Amerind" notoriety) as a major discovery by scientists (not linguists) but seems somewhat confused as to its relation with PIE. It also quotes a few words which the authors interpret as culturally too important to have been lost or replaced, so that they have lasted 15,000 years (one of these words is "bark" (of a tree) for which the authors propose an explanation). Like Renfrew and the Proto-World people, the authors do not seem to differentiate between the survival of a lexical item (although made unrecognizable through millennia of phonological changes) and the survival of the sounds that compose it (which are independent of the meaning of the whole word) (eg Renfrew et al thought that words for 'nephew' had endured almost unchanged for hundreds of years because of the importance of this concept, but actually this longevity is due to the fact that the consonants in the word had been more resistant to change than others, as shown by the behaviour of those consonants in other words totally unrelated semantically to 'nephew'). In any case, the article does not cite any actual forms, only meanings. Read it at your own risk. And Piotr Gąsiorowski says: This is exactly the kind of approach which makes wishful thinking look like science and gets it past reviewers. Even if the numerical methods are basically sound, the data are garbage (obtained by the intuitive eyeballing of reconstructions from the Tower of Babel database -- itself a highly questionable source -- without any actual comparative analysis). No different from ordinary "mass comparison", except perhaps for a tighter control of semantic matches. [...] I realise that one has to start somewhere, but mass comparison is at best of some help in formulating preliminary hypotheses, and mass comparison based on unreliable data is no use at all.
用翻译软件做粗糙验证，反映科普例句容易让读者误解比较对象。
我不明白。我知道这是非常粗糙的方法，但我把文章里的句子放进谷歌翻译……翻成几种语言后，几乎没有哪个词听起来接近对应的英语词。法语和丹麦语有一些相似，但那是意料之中的。我是不是从根本上误解了什么？作为参考，我试了爱沙尼亚语、阿尔巴尼亚语、捷克语、芬兰语和格鲁吉亚语。
jbattle查看英文原文
I don't get this. I know this is a monstrously crude approach, but I put the sentence given in the article to Google translate "You, hear me! Give this fire to that old man. Pull the black worm off the bark and give it to the mother. And no spitting in the ashes!" After translating it into a few different languages, almost none of the words sound anywhere close to their English counterparts. French and Danish had a fair bit of similarities but that's to be expected. Am I fundamentally misunderstanding something here? For reference I tried estonian, albanian, czech, finnish, and georgian
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