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英语中最古老的词汇

作者：maisie 文章来源：本站原创点击数更新时间：2009-11-25 12:46:56 文章录入：maisie 责任编辑：maisie

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英语中最古老的词汇[文章版权禁止转载:考试与评价 http://www.trgroup.com.cn/te/ wyfq!QYp6xSY'n25vFroG]

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Some of the oldest words in English have been identified, scientists say.
科学家们相信，他们找到了英文中最古老的文字。

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Reading University researchers claim "I", "we", "two" and "three" are among the most ancient, dating back tens of thousands of years.
雷丁大学的研究人员认为，“我”、“我们”、“二”和“三”是英文中最古老的词汇，它们的历史可以追溯到四万年前。

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Their computer model analyses the rate of change of words in English and the languages that share a common heritage.
科研人员们通过一个计算机模型，对英文词汇变化和消失的几率进行了分析测算，并展现出语言的普遍发展历程。

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The team says it can predict which words are likely to become extinct--citing "squeeze", "guts", "stick" and "bad" as probable first casualties.
研究预测，“挤”、“胆量”、“木棍”和“坏”将很可能成为最先被废弃和绝迹的词汇。

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"We use a computer to fit a range of models that tell us how rapidly these words evolve," said Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading.
雷丁大学进化生物学家马克•佩格尔说：“我们利用计算机模型测算出这些词的发展速率。”

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At the root of the Reading University effort is a lexicon of 200 words that is not specific to culture or technology, and is therefore likely to represent concepts that have not changed across nations or millennia.
雷丁大学的研究进行的基础是一个包含约200个词汇的词汇库，库中的词汇大多是一些表达人类对事物共同感知、不易因习俗和科技而改变的词，而非那些随着科技和时代进步应运而生的新词。

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"We have lists of words that linguists have produced for us that tell us if two words in related languages actually derive from a common ancestral word," said Professor Pagel.
佩格尔教授说：“我们开发这个词汇库首先需要让语言学专家来告诉我们，不同语系的两个词汇是否会存在一个共同的出处。”

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"We have descriptions of the ways we think words change and their ability to change into other words, and those descriptions can be turned into a mathematical language," he added.
佩格尔教授补充说道：“我们掌握了词汇改变以及它们转变成其它词汇的信息，之后我们把这些信息转变成数学语言。”

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What the researchers found was that the frequency with which a word is used relates to how slowly it changes through time, so that the most common words tend to be the oldest ones.
研究人员还发现，词汇的使用频率和其生命力紧密相关，越是普通的词汇，存在的时间也越长久。

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For example, the words "I" and "who" are among the oldest, along with the words "two", "three", and "five". The word "one" is only slightly younger.
比如，“我”、“谁”、“二”、“三”和“五”的历史就非常久远，而“一”则略微年轻一点。

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The word "four" experienced a linguistic evolutionary leap that makes it significantly younger in English and different from other Indo-European languages.
英文数字“四”由于经历过一次语言上的进化过程，所以更为年轻一些，它和其它欧印语种的发音也大为不同。

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Meanwhile, the fastest-changing words are projected to die out and be replaced by other words much sooner.
与之相比，变化速度越快的词汇，消亡以及被其它词汇取代的速度也越快。

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For example, "dirty" is a rapidly changing word; currently there are 46 different ways of saying it in the Indo-European languages, all words that are unrelated to each other. As a result, it is likely to die out soon in English, along with "stick" and "guts".
例如，“脏”就是一个变化迅速的词汇，欧印语系中表达“脏”的方式共有46种，而且每种听上去都很不相同。所以，这个词和“木棍”、“胆量”一样，很可能很快就在英文中消失。

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"If you've ever played 'Chinese whispers', what comes out the end is usually gibberish. Yet our language can somehow retain its fidelity," Professor Pagel said.
佩格尔教授说：“玩过‘传话’游戏的人都知道，同样的一句话从第一个人传到最后一个人时通常已经面目全非了。由此看来，语言对我们还是很忠诚的。”

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