拯救瀕臨消失的語言

四川 蔣建平（特級教師）

隨著越來越多的人說漢語、英語、西班牙語和法語，有些語言正慢慢消失。 根據聯合國教育、科學及文化組織（UNESCO）的統計，當今世界所使用的語言中，有一半可能在下個世紀消亡。 拯救瀕臨消失的語言迫在眉睫。

?文章詞數 292 難度 ★★★ 建議用時 6 分鐘

1 As more and more people speak the global languages of Chinese, English, Spanish, and French, other languages are rapidly disappearing.

In fact, half of the languages spoken around the world today will likely die out by the next century,according to United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

2 In an effort to prevent language loss,scholars from a number of organizations—UNESCO and National Geographic among them—have for many years been documenting dying languages and the cultures they reflect. Mark Turin, a scientist at the MacMillan Center Yale University, who specializes in the languages and oral traditions of the Himalayas, is following that tradition. His recently published book, A Grammar of the Thangmi Language with an Ethnolinguistic Introduction to the Speakers and Their Culture,grows out of his experience of living,working,and raising a family in a village in Nepal.

3 Documenting the Thangmi language and culture is just a starting point for Turin, who seeks to include other languages and oral traditions across the Himalayan reaches of India, Nepal, Bhutan, and China. But he is not satisfied to simply record these voices before they disappear without a record. At the University of Cambridge, Turin discovered a wealth of important materials, including photographs,films, tape recordings, and field notes, which had remained unstudied and were badly in need of care and protection. Now, through the two organizations that he has founded, the Digital Himalaya Project and the World Oral Literature Project, Turin has started a campaign to make such documents, for the world available not just to scholars but to the younger generations of communities from whom the materials were originally collected. Thanks to digital technology and the widely available Internet, Turin's notes, the endangered languages can be saved and reconnected with speech communities.

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As more and more people speak the global languages of Chinese, English, Spanish, and French,other languages are rapidly disappearing. 隨著越來越多的人說漢語、英語、西班牙語和法語這些全球性的語言，其他語言正在迅速消失。

【點石成金】本句是一個主從復合句，other languages are rapidly disappearing是主句，As more and more...Spanish, and French是As引導的時間狀語從句。

Cutural Background

世界上有多少種語言?

根據德國出版的《語言學及語言交際工具問題手冊》，現在世界上已查明的有5,651種語言。 在這些語言中，約有1,400種還沒有被人們承認是獨立的語言，或者是正在衰亡的語言。在4,200多種已

被承認的獨立的語言中，能得到很好的研究的僅有500種，而有1,500種幾乎還沒被研究過。