预报名时间英文字母起源
译者：jennyjiao
发布：2012-01-14 01:35:51双语对照 | 查看译者版本
新托福考试冲刺试题>babylonThe origins of abc
英文字母起源
We e it every day on signs, billboards, packaging, in books and magazines; in fact, you are looking at it now — the Latin or Roman alphabet, the world’s most prolific, most widespread abc. Typography is a relatively recent invention, but to unearth the origins of alphabets, we will need to travel much farther back in time, to an era contemporaneous with the emergence of (agricultural) civilisation itlf.
每天，你可在大大小小的标识牌和广告牌，形形色色的包装袋，千千万万本书籍与杂志之间看到它。其实，你现在正读着它呢——它就是世界上影响最深远，传播最广泛的拉丁字母。
字体设计（Typography）是一项较近的发明，而要追溯字母起源，需倒回得更远，应倒回至（农业）文明出现的时代。
afu
Robert Bringhurst wrote that writing is the solid form of language, the precipitate. But writing is also much more than that, and its origins, its evolution, and the way it is now woven into the fabric of civilisations makes it a truly wonderful story. That story spans some 5,000 years. We’ll travel vast distances, meet an emperor, a clever Yorkshireman, a Phoenician princess by the name of Jezebel, and the ‘purple people’; we’ll march across derts and fertile plains, and sail across oceans. We will begin where civilisation began, meander through the Middle Ages, race through the Renaissance, and in doing so discover where our alphabet originated, how and why it evolved, and why, for example, an A looks, well, like an A.turtle island
罗伯特·布林赫斯特（Robert Bringhurst）曾写道，文字“固化语言，是语言的沉淀”。然而，文字远非如此，其起源、发展以及今昔展现与文明交织在一起，跨越了大约5000年，娓娓道来一个既真实又精彩的故事。我们将穿越时空，拜见一代帝王，遇见一个聪明的约
克郡人，相识一位名叫耶洗别（Jezebel）的腓尼基公主，还会结识一个“紫色民族”。我们将穿越贫瘠的沙漠，跨过肥沃的平原，在广阔无边的大海里乘风破浪。我们将从文明之始说起，中间会漫谈中世纪，提及文艺复兴，循序渐进，一环环考证字母起源，其发展始末以及为什么，打个比方，A是A这个样子。
SUMER
苏美尔
Cuneiform
楔形文字
小语种招生>马尔克斯去世
The Sumerians began to experiment with writing at the clo of the fourth millennium BC, in Mesopotamia between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates (roughly modern-day Iraq). Like most writing systems, Cuneiform, initially scratched — later impresd by a stylus — into soft clay, started out as a ries of pictograms — pictures reprenting words. The word for bird, for example, existed at first as a simple pictorial reprentation of a bird. The figu
从不放弃英文>lengthre below demonstrates this process of abstraction or rationalization. In time, the pictures of things came to reprent, not only things but, sounds. It is clear that a written language with signs that reprent sounds requires fewer characters than a language in which a sign stands for a thing or an idea. We u 26 letters (and the Romans ud only 23 to create some of the most outstanding literature the world has ever known) while the Chine, for example, have to learn thousands of characters to express themlves. Even early cuneiform comprid some 1,500 pictograms. A language in which a picture or grapheme reprents a thing or an idea has its advantages: people may speak any language while the written form stays the same. So a Chine from the Southern provinces can speak a totally different dialect than his compatriot in Beijing, who would not understand him when he speaks, but can read what he writes.
大约公元前四千年，在底格里斯河与幼发拉底河流域的美索不达米亚（大致是今天的伊拉克），苏美尔人就开始尝试创造文字。和大多数文字一样，起初，楔形文字只是胡乱涂鸦，不久被刻于陶土之上，这便开创了一套象形文字体系，即用图形来表达。举个例子，表示“鸟”的这个字，其雏形是一个鸟的简笔画。下图展示这一抽象或者理性化过程。最后，
表示事物的图形具有了既代物，又表音的功能。显然，比起一种仅仅具备表物或表意功能的语言符号，兼具表音功能的体系会使用更少的符号。我们使用26个字母（拉丁语仅使用23个字母就创造了举世闻名的文学巨库），而像汉语，就得学会几千个汉字才能进行表达，就连早期的锲形文字也要有大约1500个图形。以图形或图素代表事物或意思的语言有其自身优势：人们可以说不同的语言，但会写同一种文字。这就是为什么中国一些南方省市的人们说自己的方言，北京人完全听不懂，但是写出来就懂了。
1.1 The pictographic origin of Cuneiform.
later什么意思1.1 楔形文字的象形起源
Figure 1.2 is an example of Proto-Cuneiform, one of the earliest examples of writing kno
w to us. It’s a form of Cuneiform that exists between the earliest purely pictographic forms and the later more abstract forms. Moreover, as there was no fixed or standard writing direction, the signs were often rotated to conform to the direction of writing employed — a bird is still a bird through 360 degrees of rotation.
