评论
打印
You’re listening to a celebration in the Levenofi village in the remote highlands of the island nation of Papua New Guinea.
您正在收听的是Levenofi村的庆祝活动，这个村落位于巴布亚新几内亚偏远的高原地区。
I was here with our Scientific American video crew last year to make a documentary.
去年，我与我们《科学美国人》的视频摄制组在这里拍了一部纪录片。
I and my co-producer Kelso Harper didn’t know what any of these words meant.
我和联合制片人凯尔索·哈珀都不知道这些词是什么意思。
But as the entire village—men, women, kids, grannies—swung their hips, waved branches and sang in this beautiful, heartfelt chorus, we knew intuitively that we were being welcomed.
不过，当全村的男女老少扭着屁股，挥舞着树枝，合唱着这首美丽而真挚的歌曲时，我们通过直觉知道，我们受到了欢迎。
After all of the singing, we were invited to partake in a mumu.
在歌曲结束后，我们被邀请去参加mumu盛宴。
It’s this delicious feast that’s made from wrapping meats and vegetables and spices in banana leaves and then cooking them in this massive earth oven with steam and hot stones.
Mumu是一种美味的盛宴，用香蕉叶包裹肉类、蔬菜和香料制成，然后将其放入这个巨大的土灶里用蒸汽和滚烫的石头烹饪。
Finding myself here—in an island nation that’s home to more than 300 tribes and about 850 different languages—was one of the most remarkable experiences of my entire life.
来到这个拥有300多个部落、大约850种不同语言的岛国，是我一生中最难忘的经历之一。
Papua New Guinea also happens to be the most linguistically diverse place on earth. But that incredible diversity is declining.
巴布亚新几内亚恰好也是地球上语言最多样化的地方。但这种令人难以置信的多样性正在下降。
Half of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken today could be gone by the end of the century.
今天使用的大约7000种语言中，有一半可能在本世纪末消失。
And Papua New Guinea, which hosts more than 10 percent of the world’s languages, is now finding its own linguistic diversity under threat.
巴布亚新几内亚(拥有世界上超过10%的语言的国家)现在发现自己的语言多样性正受到威胁。
After this experience, I had to learn more.
经过这次经历，我必须学习更多。
Where have we lost languages in other parts of the world, and how have they been forgotten? Are we trying to bring them back?
世界上哪个地方的语言消失了？我们是如何遗忘这些语言的？我们要试图把这些语言找回来吗？
More importantly, how do we trace the roots of our collective memory back to the very sounds that first made us human?
更重要的是，我们如何将我们集体记忆的根源追溯到最初造就我们人类的声音？
For Scientific American’s Science, Quickly, this is Tulika Bose.
欢迎大家收听《科学美国人》的科学快播栏目，我是图利卡·博斯。
Everybody said, “Why have you come? We have forgotten our language. We do not know what you’re talking about. We cannot help you at all.”
每个人都说：“你们为什么来了? 我们已经忘记了我们的语言。我们不知道你们在说什么。我们根本帮不了你们。”
That’s Anvita Abbi. She’s this incredible Indian linguist who specializes in indigenous languages and has this unbelievable passion for decoding grammatical structure.
这是安维塔·阿比，她是一位出色的印度语语言学家，专门研究土著语言，对解码语法结构有着不可思议的热情。
Lately, I had—for [the] last two decades, I had been working on the languages of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.
在最近以及过去的二十年里，我一直在研究安达曼群岛和尼科巴群岛的语言。
These are the 550 islands in the Bay of Bengal, south of India.
这些是位于印度南部孟加拉湾的550个岛屿。
She’s talking to me about the year 2001, when she first arrived in Port Blair, the capital of the Andiman and Nicobar Islands, a territory of India in the Bay of Bengal.
她跟我说，2001年，她第一次来到布莱尔港，这个港口是安迪曼群岛和尼科巴群岛的首都，是印度一片位于孟加拉湾的领土。
Anvita also wrote an article that appeared in our June 2023 issue that goes into this more in depth. (I highly, highly recommend reading it and subscribing.)
安维塔还写了一篇文章，发表在我们2023年6月的那期杂志上，那篇文章对此进行了更深入的探讨。(我强烈推荐大家阅读并订阅这篇文章。)
