《历史语言学》章节试读

《历史语言学》的笔记-第10页 - 1.3 Attitudes to language change

At every time, and in every place, there is a body of conservative opinion which holds that the language reached some kind of pinnacle of perfection a generation or so ago, and is now going rapidly downhill with all these ‘ugly’, ‘sloppy’, ‘illiterate’ new usage we keep hearing nowadays.
用中文说，这叫占据语言权力高位的人不可抑制的自恋与目光短浅。

《历史语言学》的笔记-第22页 - 2.1 Borrowing

Indeed, it is possible that our long tradition of constructing our technical terms from Greek and Latin may be drawing to a close. The scientists of earlier generations were often well acquainted with the classical languages, but today’s technical people rarely are, and in particular the people who have created our now vastly important computer industry now know nothing of Greek or Latin. It is noticeable that technical terms in computing are never formed in the traditional Graeco-Latin manner, and Greek and Latin elements appear only occasionally and incidentally. Computer people prefer other devices for coining their technical terms…
If this trend is somewhat a misfortune for the whole Europe, I would rather say, being a student using English as a second language, I get splendid schadenfreude from it…

《历史语言学》的笔记-第70页 - 3.7 The regularity issue: a first look

I shall merely adopt a policy as a basis for further discussion: sound change is normally regular, and the cases that are not regular are puzzles calling for an explanation. This policy has proved to be of great deal benefit in historical linguistics, and it will provide a firm foundation for our discussion in this book, in spite of the fact that it is no strictly true. By the time you have finished this book, you will understand both why it is not true and why it is none the less an excellent working hypothesis.
有木有牛顿经典力学向相对论转向时期的历史相似性错觉？

《历史语言学》的笔记-第34页 - 2.3 Formation of new words

A sort of combination of compounding and clipping is blending, in which pieces of existing words are combined to make a new word...A sort of combination of compounding and clipping is blending, in which pieces of existing words are combined to make a new word...Blends were widely used for official purposes in German during the Nazi era and in Russian during the Communist period.短命王朝错误地选择制定了短命的语言政策。。。

《历史语言学》的笔记-第231页 - 8.5 Semantic reconstruction

Earlier generations of European linguists, all of them speakers of IE languages, tended to assume without discussion that such a fine, upstanding proto-language as PIE, the speech of those splendid folk who carried their languages into a huge area of the globe, must naturally have been equipped with a full set of numerals up to 100, at least, and therefore tried stoutly to reconstruct a PIE numeral system of this size, invoking in the process any number of ‘replacements’ and ‘analogical formations’ to account for the wide discrepancies in the formation of the attested numerals. More recently, however, some specialists have begun to question this assumption, and to put forward the awful suggestion that the speakers of PIE could not count beyond ten. Their idea is that numbers beyond ‘ten’ were created independently in the various daughter languages after they have diverged from the ancestral tongue.
哈哈哈，果然算数还是我大中华帝国更牛么。。。

《历史语言学》的笔记-第122页 - 5.5 Morphologization of phonological rules

Of course, this striking idea can be made to work only if the proponents of NM can find some principled way of explaining why particular resolutions of such conflicts are preferred in particular cases: it is hardly adequate merely to invoke a different set of principles for each change we encounter. It remains to be seen whether NM will be successful in achieving this.
赞学风！

《历史语言学》的笔记-第19页 - 2.1 Borrowing

It is even possible to ‘borrow’ a word which doesn’t exist at all: English nom de plume ‘pen name’ is ‘borrowed’ from French, but no such word exists in French, in which the equivalent item is nom de guerre. English-speaker with a somewhat limited command of French were trying to borrow something from French, but got it wrong, and wound up inventing some fake French and borrowing that…Why should English-speakers go to the trouble of trying to borrow a French word for something when English already had a perfectly good word with the same meaning: pen name? The reason is a simple one: prestige…Not long ago, a well-known British journalist of courtly manners, needing a word to identify the prominent physical charms of a buxom young lady, found the entire vast repository of English words for mammary glands so obviously inadequate that he wound up referring ever so deliberately to her embonpoint. This was a curious choice, since this French word, though it originally meant ‘well developed’, today means only ‘stoutness’, which is not exactly what the speaker was trying to convey – but presumably the whole point was merely to use a French word, rather than an English one, because French words are by definition refined and elegant than our blunt and coarse English ones.
今日最佳笑话：两个优越种族的文盲行为与屌丝历史。

《历史语言学》的笔记-第108页 - 5.2 Analogy and levelling

These last examples bring us to an important point. Regular phonological changes very often disrupt regular inflectional paradigms, but at the same time the pressure of an analogy tends to maintain or restore those regular paradigms. There is thus a fundamental conflict between sound change and analogy. This conflict is neatly summed by a dictum often called Sturtevant’s paradox, after Edgar Sturtevant, the American linguist who first stated it nearly a century ago: sound change is regular, but produces irregularity; analogy is irregular, but produces regularity.
我已然厌倦了在学校的课堂里听“中国语言学受西方语言学影响太深“一类定性讨论又看不到实例，这个段落确实让我惊讶与中西语言的巨大差异

《历史语言学》的笔记-第21页 - 2.1 Borrowing

Mostly, though, English-speakers are not fond of calques: we prefer to borrow directly.为什么？因为英语者比较懒还是因为英语者比较喜欢装X。。。？

《历史语言学》的笔记-第37页 - 2.3 Formation of new words

Only a few years ago, the US courts stripped Parker Brothers of their copyright trade name Monopoly, ruling that the word had become a generic term for any board game. (As a keen game-player myself, I find this last ruling incomprehensible: who are all these dimwits who apparently can’t tell Monopoly from Scrabble?)
这是在卖萌么。。。

《历史语言学》的笔记-第171页 - 7.2 Dialect geography

Observing the difficulties with Wenker’s approach, the French linguist Jules Gilliéron tried another technique. He trained a single worker, Edmond Edmont, who proved to be a talented and reliable investigator, then spent the years between 1896 and 1900 cycling around France, stopping in a total of 639 localities to make friends with the local people and ask his questions. 突然想到，这么酷的职业是不是可以叫做“自行车游吟语言学家”？可惜现在是没啥机会做这行当了。。。