单词那些事儿

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单词那些事儿

Johnson Degrees of separation

Words, like people, have tangled and extensive family trees.

学习英语离不开单词，今天我们就来看一看单词的来源。单词和人一样，有着复杂(tangled)而广博的（extensive）家谱图(family trees)。

01

第一段

It is natural to try to find resemblances in family photos: grandma’s nose here, Uncle Jim’s hairline there. When considering the family of English words, it is tempting to look for the same sort of likenesses. Often they are real; for instance, regal and royal derive from the same source, which was imported into English twice, from both Grandpa Latin and Aunt French.

在家族照片里找到相似处非常自然：祖母的鼻子，或者叔叔的发际线。这里用It’s natural to do sth. 的句型表示做…很自然。紧接着用v-ing表示伴随，在考虑英语单词的家族时，人们倾向于（it is tempting to do）寻找(look for)同种类型的(the same sort of)相似度(likeness)。for instance例如。derive from由…起源。be imported into进口到。regal(帝王的)和royal(皇家的)就是同一来源，并且从爷爷拉丁语和婶婶法语借来，并且被两次进口到英文中。这里是形象的说法，因为拉丁语是法语和英语的起源，所以称为“爷爷”。

02

第二段

But often they are not. In the human world, people sometimes find out to their shock that they are adopted, or take a DNA test and discover a surprising parentage. At this point, resemblances that they thought were genetic turn out to be illusory. Similarly, two words can look so alike that it seems they simply must be siblings-yet they aren’t.

在人类世界，人们有时会惊讶地(to their shock)发现(find out)他们是被收养的，或者经过DNA测试后，发现了令人惊讶的身世(parentage)。曾以为的基因(genetic)相似性(resemblance)实际上(turn out to be)是虚假的(illusory)。同样的（similarly），两个单词看起来相似，似乎是同一家族，事实上可能不是。

03

第三段

Take pawn the verb and pawn the noun. Both have to do with exchanging something for something else of value. In chess, a pawn is sacrificed for strategic advantage; at the pawn shop, a guitar is sacrificed for much-needed cash. Are they variants of the same word? No. While one word can develop many senses-to run a computer program is descended from the word to run with your legs-sometimes two words identical in spelling and pronunciation have entirely separate origins.

拿pawn这个词作为动词和pawn作为名词来讲，两个都是表示将某物与有价值的某物交换。在象棋中，pawn表示为战略优势(strategic advantage)做出牺牲(is sacrificed for)。在当铺(pawn shop)， 一把吉他被用来换取急需的(much-needed)现金(cash)。他们是同一个单词的变体吗？(variants)。一个单词可以发展出很多意思-运行(run)计算机程序是从词组“用四条腿跑步run”传下来(be descended from)的。有时候两个单词在拼写和发音方面都一样（identical in），却有着完全(entirely)不同的起源。

04

第四段

As with pawn. The verb may be from a Germanic root meaning “surety”, which made its way into English via French; in modern German, Pfand is a “deposit”. The chess-piece, though, has totally different story. It came from (Norman) French, as paun, but that in turn came from Latin pedon-a foot soldier (compare pedestrian). Since a foot soldier is slowly and dispensable, it came to mean a sacrificable chess-piece, and, in other languages, a menial laborer. English borrowed peon, another form of the same word, from Spanish. Pawn is related to peon, but not to pawn.

关于(as with)pawn这个词，动词可能来源于德语词根，意思是担保，通过法语传入英语。在现代德国，Pfand是存款。而棋子中却完全不一样。它来源(come from)于（诺曼）法语paun，反过来paun又来源于拉丁语的pedon-步兵（可以和步行者pedestrian比较）。步兵很慢，不重要，所以后来慢慢含义为可以牺牲的棋子。在其它语言中，就是报酬低的人（menial laborer）。

英语中从西班牙语中借用了peon，同一个词的另一种形式。Pawn与peon相关(is related to)，却同时又不是典当的意思。

05

第五段

This kind of thing is all over the language. Repair (to fix) and repair (as in “let’s repair to the smoking room”) look like they must be the same word with different meanings. In fact, they are pawn-style homonyms. The “fix” word comes from repatriare, to go back to your country.

这种现象出现在所有语言中。Repair(修理)，repair to…去一个特殊的地方。看起来他们似乎是同一个单词，有不同的含义。事实上，他们是pawn这种类型的同形异义词。fix来源于repatriare, 回到自己的国家。

06

第六段

Isle and island seem to be obvious relatives. In fact their resemblance is happenstance combined with human error. “Isle” comes from Latin insula; its “s” became silent in its voyage through French. But island is Germanic (the-land is a hint, and the “I” is reminiscent of cousins like Icelandic eyja). Medieval writers mistakenly thought that the word, then written as iland, came from insula too. They inserted the “s” to reflect that (incorrect) etymology. It has never been pronounced.

Isle和island看起来似乎是明显有关联的词。事实上它们的相似性只是人类错误的偶然产物（happenstance）。“Isle”来源于insula，s在单词经过法语时失去了发音(become silent)。但是island是德语的词汇（land是暗示，提示，“I”是回忆表亲的）。中世纪作家(medieval writers)错误地认为单词写成iland的，也来源于insula。他们将s插入（insert）来反应（错误的）词源，但从来不发s音。

07

第七段

In fact, odd as it may seem, island is related to aquatic. The source of nearly every language in Europe and many in the Middle East and South Asia is Proto-Indo-European (PIE), spoken perhaps 5,000 years ago. That’s enough time for some truly scrambling sound changes: PIE’s akwa mutated into agwjo, aujo and ieg in the Germanic branch of family before becoming the “I” in island. In the Romance branch, it stayed closer to its roots and became Latin aqua. Reconstructing PIE is one of the unsung achievements of modern science. Working backwards from today’s language through written classical ones allowed philologists to discover systematic changes, which in turn let them peer further into the past to posit what the unwritten PIE would have sounded like.

事实上，奇怪的是（odd as it may seem），island与aquatic(水的)相关。欧洲几乎每种语言的来源和中东、南亚的很多语言都是5000年前说的原始印欧语Proto-Indo-European (PIE)。有足够的时间让发音也发生改变：比如原始印欧语的akwa在变成“island”中的“I”之前变异为(mutate into)德语分支的agwjo, aujo, ieg. 在罗曼语言分支(Romance Branch)，它与词根（root）更接近(stay closer to)，变成拉丁语的aqua.重建(reconstructing)PIE是现代科学未唱响的成就（unsung achievements）之一。通过传统的书面语言（written classical ones），用现在的语言到过去的时代探寻语言，让语言学家(philologist)发现系统的(systematic)变化，反过来让他们窥视(peer into)到过去，假设（posit）没写下来的PIE如何发音。

08

第八段

Browsing through an index of Indo-European roots (the American Heritage Dictionary website has an excellent one) enables verbal discoveries as startling as the fact that Dick Cheney is distantly related to Barack Obama. Dyeu (to shine) not only yielded day and diary but deity and divine, plus the gods’ names Jove, Jupiter, Zeus and Tiu. That last term, for a Norse god, appears in Tuesday-which therefore includes dyeu twice.

浏览印欧语系(Indo-European)词根的索引（index）（美国传统词典网站有一个较好的索引）让语言发现(verbal discoveries)与事实一样惊人：迪克·切尼和奥巴马有遥远的关联。Dyeu不仅仅产生（yield）day和diary,也产生deity和divine,还有一些神的名字如Jove, Jupiter, Zeus和Tiu.最后一个Tiu,挪威（Norse）神，出现在星期二，因此包含两次dyeu。

09

第九段

Since PIE’s descendants are now spoken from Donegal to the Bay of Bengal, the “family” in question is not just the vocabulary of English but that of some 3bn people speaking over 400 modern languages. The stories of words that are surprisingly unrelated (pawn-pawn, repair-repair) are overwhelmed by the number of those that are just as startlingly connected (island-aquatic, divine-Tuesday). Those links are a good reminder of just how big the circle of family can be drawn, if you are open-minded enough in today’s nervously nationalist age. Time and distance can too easily obscure the fact that words-like people-have many more relatives than they might seem to.

从多内加尔(Donegal)到孟加拉湾(the Bay of Bengal)都使用PIE演变的语言以来，家族问题就不仅仅是英语词汇而是30亿人讲400种语言的事情。那些毫不相关到让人惊讶的(surprisingly unrelated)单词的故事充斥着相关联到让人惊讶的(startlingly connected)单词数量。（island-aquatic, divine-Tuesday）在当今这个民族主义者(nationalist)时代，如果你足够思想开明(open-minded)，这些联系都能很好地提醒(a good reminder)人们究竟这个家谱图可以画多大。时间和距离太容易模糊(obscure)事实，像单词一样的人会比看起来有更多的亲戚。

Creator：Julia

Editor：Tony

Copyreader：Tony

Designer：Jasper