The Hall-Marks of American.doc

The Hall-Marks of American美国的特点By H.L. Mencken HL门肯The characters chiefly noted in American English by all who have discussed it are, first, its general uniformity throughout the country; second, its impatient disregard for grammatical, syntactical, and phonological rule and precedent; and third, its large capacity (distinctly greater than that of the English of present-day England) for taking in new words and phrases from outside sources, and for manufacturing them of its own material.所谓的特点主要是指大家所谈论的美式英语。首先是它全国通用，差别不大。其次是它不注重语法，句法和音韵规则及过去的成例。第三，它大量地（明显的大于当下英语的数量）采用外来的新词和短语，并且把它们变成自己的语言。The first of these characters has struck every observer, native and foreign. In place of the discordant local dialects of all the other major countries, including England, we have a general Volkssprache for the whole nation, and if it is conditioned at all it is only by minor differences in pronunciation and vocabulary, and by the linguistic struggles of various groups of newcomers. No other country can show such linguistic solidarity, nor any approach to itnot even Canada, for there a large minority of the population resists speaking English altogether. The Little Russian of the Ukraine is unintelligible to the citizen of Moscow; the northern Italian can scarcely follow a conversation in Sicilian; the Low German from Hamburg is a foreigner in Munich; the Breton flounders in Gascony. Even in the United Kingdom there are wide divergences. When we remember, says the New International Encyclopedia, that the dialects of the counties in England have marked differencesso marked, indeed, that it may be doubted whether a Lancashire miner and a Lincolnshire farmer could understand each otherwe may well be proud that our vast country has, strictly speaking, only one language. There are some regional peculiarities in pronunciation and intonation, but when it comes to the words they habitually use and the way they use them all Americans, even the less tutored, follow pretty much the same line. A Boston taxi-driver could go to work in Chicago or San Francisco without running any risk of misunderstanding his new fares. Once he had flattened his as a bit and picked up a few dozen localisms, he would be, to all linguistic intents and purposes, full naturalized.这些特性中的第一个特性就已让国内的和国外的所有观察者都受到震撼。其它的说英语的主要国家，包括英国，都有很多的地区方言，而我们整个国家都讲着相同的话语，如果有什么差别的话，那也只是不同的新移民团体在语言碰撞后，在发音和用词方面细微的差异。再没有哪个国家能够展现出如此的语言一致性，连接近这种情况的国家也没有-甚至连加拿大也做不到这点。因为加拿大的人口中有大量的少数民族完全不说英语。乌克兰的一些俄国人说的话，莫斯科市民一点也听不懂；意大利北部的人几乎听不懂西西里岛人说的是什么。来自汉堡讲方言的德国人到了慕尼黑就像是外国人一样。布列塔尼人去加斯科尼会忐忑不安。甚至在大英帝国也普遍存在着语言上的差异性。当我们想起，全新国际百科全书说，英格兰的一些郡所讲的方言有着明显的差别确实，那么大的差别，我们有理由怀疑一个兰开夏郡的矿工和一位林肯郡的农民能否彼此明白对方说话的意思。我们有充分的理由而自豪，在我们辽阔的国家里，严格地说来，只有一种语言。在发音和语调方面，有些地区存在着自己的特点，但就他们日常的用法和方式而言，全美国人都一样，甚至不用什么解释，也没有交流的问题。一个波士顿的出租汽车司机，假如去芝加哥或旧金山拉活不会有任何语言交流的障碍。一旦他搞懂了当地的话，就会选上四五个，完全对照语言学的意图和目的，把它们完全纳入到日常语言之中。Of the intrinsic differences that separate American from English the chief have their roots in the obvious disparity between the environment and traditions of the American people since the seventeenth century and those of the English. The latter have lived under a relatively stable social order, and it has impressed upon their souls their characteristic respect for what is customary and of good report. Until the World War brought chaos to most of their institutions, their whole lives were regulated, perhaps more than those of any other people save the Spaniards, by a regard for precedent. The Americans, though partly of the same blood, have felt no such restraint, and acquired no such habit of conformity. On the contrary, they have plunged to the other extreme, for the conditions of life in their country have put a high value upon the precisely opposite qualities of curiosity and daring, and so they have acquired that character of restlessness, that impatience of forms, that disdain of the dead hand, which now broadly marks them. From the first, says a literary historian, they have been less phlegmatic, less conservative than the English. There were climatic influences, it may bethere was surely a spirit of intensity everywhere that made for short effort. Thus, in the arts , and thus in business, in politics, in daily intercourse, in habits of mind and speech. The American is not, of course, lacking in a capacity for discipline; he has it highly developed; he submits to leadership readily, and even to tyranny. But, by a curious twist, it is not the leadership that is old and decorous that commonly fetches him, but the leadership that is new and extravagant. He will resist dictation out of the past, but he will follw a new messiah with almost Russian willingness, and into the wildest vagaries of economics, religion, morals, and speech. A new fallacy in politics spreads faster in the United States than anywhere else on earth, and so does a new fashion in hats or a new revelation of God, or a new means of killing time, or a new shibboleth, or metaphor, or piece of slang. Thus the American, on his linguistic side, likes to make his language as he goes along, and not all the hard work of the schoolmarm can hold the business back. A novelty loses nothing by the fact that it is a novelty; it rather gains something, and particularly if it meets the national fancy for the terse, the vivid, and, above all, the bold and imaginative. The characteristic American habit of reducing complex concepts to the starkest abbreviations was already noticeable in colonial times, and such highly typical Americanisms as O.K., N.G., and P.D.Q., have been traced back to the early days of the Republic. Nor are the influences that shaped these tendencies invisible today, for institution-making is yet going on, and so is language-making.自17世纪以来以及英语的演变，从英语中分离出来的美式英语的内在差异性主要是由于美国人的环境和传统有了明显的变化。后者一直生活在一种相对稳定的社会次序中，并打上了他们尊重习俗和良好声誉的精神和特征的印记。他们的整个生活一直都井然有序，直到世界大战爆发，大部分的体系出现了混乱，由于历史的原因，除西班牙人外，或许其他人要更混乱一些。虽然多种民族生活在一起，但美国人却不觉着有什么不方便，并不强求生活习惯的一致。相反，由于他们原来国家的生存环境，认同了好奇和勇敢的品质，于是他们又进入了另一个极端，因此他们形成轻视礼节，鄙视陈规陋习的不安分的性格，目前这已成为了美国人普遍的特点。史料表明，从一开始他们就比英国人热情，不保守。也可能有气候方面的影响，但肯定处处都存在着有助于简约的强烈精神。在艺术创作上是如此，在商务活动中是如此，在政治，日常交往，思维习惯和讲话等方面都是如此。当然，美国人并不缺乏自律的能力，而是将这种能力发展到了高级阶段；他乐意服从领导，乃至于暴政。但在好奇心的影响下，除了那种新锐，敢做敢为的领导外，并不服从那种老派的，一本正经的对其没有什么影响的领导。他会对抗过时的命令，但他会追随一个新的救世主，就像俄国人民心甘情愿地追随救星（列宁）一样，并且投身到经济，宗教，道德以及言谈的那种最剧烈的行动中。在美国，政坛上出现一个新的谬论都要比地球上其它地方传播得更快，所以帽子的翻新花样，上帝的新启示，消磨时间的新方式，新的口音，比喻或者一句俚语都会传播的飞快。因此在其语言方面，美国英语常常是随心所欲，就连那些古板的女教师们的坚守也无济于事。事实上，新奇的事物就是新奇，没有什么可失去的东西；特别是，如果它满足了国人对简练，生动，尤其是大胆而富于想象力的幻想时，收获便是自然而然的事了。在殖民时期，典型的美国英语把复杂的概念简单化的习惯就已经相当明显，诸如非常典型的美国英语，如好，无用，马上都可追溯到共和国早期的岁月。对于制度的制定和语言的演变，对形成今天的这些无形的趋势并没有什么影响。But of more importance than the sheer inventions, if only because much more numerous, are the extensions of the vocabulary, both absolutely and in ready workableness, by the devices of rhetoric. The American, from the beginning, has been the most ardent of recorded rhetoricians. His politics bristles with pungent epithets; his whole history has been bedizened with tall talk; his fundamental institutions rest far more upon brilliant phrases than upon logical ideas. And in small things as in large he exercises continually an imcomparable capacity for projecting hiddenand often fantastic relationships into arresting parts of speech. Such a term as rubberneck is almost a complete treatise on American psychology; it reveals the national habit of mind more clearly than any laboured inquiry could ever reveal it. It has in it precisely the boldness and contempt for ordered forms that are so characteristically American, and it has too the grotesque humour of the country, and the delight in devastating opprobriums, and the acute feeling for the succinct and savoury. The same qualities are in rough-house, water-wagon, has-been, lame-duck, speed-cop, and a thousand other such racy substantives, and in all the great stock of native verbs and adjectives. There is, indeed, but a shadowy boundary in these new coinages between the various parts of speech. Corral, borrowed from the Spanish, immediately becomes a verb and the father of an adjective. Bust, carved out of burst, erects itself into a noun. Bum, coming by way of an earlier bummer from the German, becomes noun, adjective, verb, and adverb. Verbs are fashioned out of substantives by the simple process of prefixing the preposition: to engineer, to stump, to hog, to style, to author. Others grow out of an intermediate adjective, as to boom. Others are made by torturing nouns with harsh affixes, as to burglarize and to itemize, or by groping for the root, as to resurrect and to jell. Yet others are changed from intransitive; a sleeping-car sleeps thirty passengers. So with the adjectives. They are made of substantives unchanged; codfish, jitney. Or by bold combinations; down-and-out, up-state, flat-footed. Or by shading down suffixes to barbaric simplicity; scary, classy, tasty. Or by working over adverbs until they tremble on the brink between adverb and adjective; right, sure, and near are examples.但是比起那纯粹的发明更重要的是相关词汇的扩展，通过修辞的方法，既全面又实用，即使数量庞大。从一开始，美国英语就一直热衷于已有的修辞。其政治活动充满了尖刻的称呼；其整个历史都被夸张的言词而粉饰，基础体系更倾向于美妙的措词，而非逻辑思维。以小见大，不断地练就了一种无与伦比的能力，使隐含之意和通常的妙语进入到引人注目的言语之中。如“爱问长问短的人”这个词条几乎是将美国人的心理状态完全地展现了出来。它反映了国民更喜欢清晰思维的习惯，而不愿劳心费神去探究它有什么根据。其中有恰如其分的胆量和对成规的轻视，这就是典型的美国英语，而且它还具有这个国家特有的诙谐和祛除陈腐的快乐，以及探寻简明和快乐的那种强烈的情感。这里还有一些相同性质的词，如恶作剧，戒酒，过时的人，无用的议员，摩托警，和数以千计的这样生活的名词性词汇以及自创的大量的动词和形容词。然而，在不同的词类中，新造词汇的界限实际上很模糊。畜圈一词，源自西班牙语，很快就变成了一个动词以及一个形容词之父。破产这个词，由破裂演化而来，进而又可用作名词。乞讨，出自德语，由最早的懒汉一词转化而成，可用作名词，形容，动词和副词。一些动词是用名词简单地加上介词而形成的，如建造，砍伐，拱起，设计，创作出版。另一些产生于中性的形容词，如使兴旺。另外是由一些词义变异的名词配上醒目的词缀而成的，如行窃和逐条列举，或者就用词根，如使复活和定型。另外还有一些由不及物动词变化而来，如可乘睡30名旅客的卧车的睡字。形容词也是如此。它们由名词性实词组成，如鳕鱼，小公共汽车。或者大胆地把词连在一起，如被击垮的，向上状态，措手不及。或者就在词的后面很简单加上一个后缀，如提心吊胆的，优等的，美味的。或者重新使用那些在副词和形容词边缘徘徊的副词，例如正确的，当然和接近这些词。All these processes, of course, are also to be observed in the history of the English of England; at the time of its sturdiest growth they were in the most active possible being. They are indeed, common to all tongues; the essence of language, says Dr. Jespersen, is is activity. But if you will put the English of today beside the American of today you will see at once how much more forcibly they are in operation in the latter than in the former. The standard southern dialect of English has been arrested in its growth by its purists and grammarians, and burdened with irrational affectations by fashionable pretension. It shows no living change since the reign of Samuel Johnson.Its tendency is to combat all that expansive gusto which made for its pliancy and resilience in the days of Shakespeare. In place of the old loose-footedness there is set up a preciosity which, in one direction, takes the form of clumsy artificialities in the spoken language, and in another shows itself in the even clumsier Johnsonese of so much current English writing- the Jargon denounced by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in his Cambridge lectures. This infirmity of speechQuiller-Couch finds in parliamentary debates and in the newspapers; it has become the medium through which Boards of Government, County Councils, Syndicates, Committees, Commercial Firms, express the processes as well as the conclusions of their thought, and so voice the reason of their being. Distinct from journalese, the two yet overlap, and have a knack of assimilating each others vices. 当然，这些过程也是遵循着英国英语的历史；在其发展最顶盛的时期，它们曾是最为活跃的语言因素。的确，它们是普遍通行的语言；吉斯泊森博士说：语言之精华乃为活跃。然而，如果你将今天的英语与今天的美国英语相比较，你会立刻明白后者比前者在运用中更加充满了活力。英国南部的标准方言，由于受纯化论者和语法学家们的影响，它的发展受到了遏止，而且受到了非理性的时尚风气影响的困扰。自塞缪尔约翰逊的文风盛行以来就没有表现出像样的变化。它的趋势是与所有的莎士比亚时代那种普遍的，追求柔韧性的艺术风格相对抗。一方面，在口语中出现了一种拙劣的，人为的矫揉造作，取代了以前的灵活性，而在另一方面，那么多的英语作品中呈现出了更为拙劣的约翰逊式的文体对此，亚瑟奎勒库奇爵士在他剑桥的讲座中进行了专门的抨击。奎勒库奇在议会的辩论中和许多报纸上发现了这种言语的弊端它成为了政府部门，县议会，企业联合体，各种委员会，商务公司的媒介，解释了形成的过程，也总结了他们的想法，同时说明了它们存在的原因。与新闻文体不同，这两方面相互重叠，并且具有一种同化彼此罪恶的技巧。American, despite the gallant efforts of the pedagogues, has so far escaped any such suffocating formalization. We, too, of course, have our occasional practitioners of the authentic English Jargon, but in the main our faults lie in precisely the opposite direction. That is to say, we incline toward a directness of statement which, at its greatest, lacks restraint and urbanity altogether, and toward a hospitality which often admits novelties for the mere sake of their novelty, and is quite uncritical of the difference between a genuine improvement in succinctness and clarity, and mere extravagant raciness. The tendency, says one English observer, is to consider the speech of any man, as any man himself, as good as any other. The Americans, adds a Scots professor, are determined to hack their way through the language, as their ancestors through forests, regardless of the valuable growths that may be sacrificed in blazing the trail. But this Scot dismisses the English neologisms of the day, when ranged beside the American stock, as downy, feeble stuff ; it is to America, he admits, that we must chiefly look in future for the replenishment and freshening of our language. I quote one more Briton, this time an Englishman steeped in the public school tradition: 不管那些学究式的教师们如何努力，但到目前为止，美国人避开了这种令人窒息的形式化语言。当然，我们偶然也会出现正宗英语的信奉者，但基本上对美国英语的发展不起什么作用。也就是说，我们倾向于直截了当的表述，在它最佳状态时，即无约束，也不考虑文雅，而且为了交际，只是出于新颖的目的，常常接纳新奇的事物，对于简明和清晰哪个更名符其实的争执是相当的宽容，只不过是过于随性了点。一位英国的观察者说：所谓倾向，就是要考虑到所有人的言语，就像他自己那样的，几乎和其他人一样的其他人。美国人，加上一位苏格兰的教授，决心用他们的语言杀出一条路来，就像他们的祖先穿越森林那样，不管在开辟道路中可能付出什么样的代价。但当远离了美国英语时，这位苏格兰教授忽视了当时的英语新词的使用，如衰弱下去的，软弱的东西；那是美国的用词，他承认，我们必须面向未来，为了我们语言的振兴和鲜活。我再来引用一个英国人的话，这次英国人夸大了公立学校的传统： The English of the United States is not merely different from ours; it has a restless inventiveness which may well be founded in a sense of racial discomfort, a lack of full accord between the temperament of the people and the constitution of their speech. The English are uncommunicative; the Americans are not. In its coolness and quiet withdrawal, in its prevailing sobriety, our language reflects the cautious economies and leisurely assurance of the average speaker. We say so little that we do not need to enliven our vocabulary and underline our sentences, or cry Wolf! when we wish to be heard. The more stimulating climate of the United States has produced a more eager, a more expansive, a more decisive people. The Americans apprehend their world in sharper outlines and aspire after a more salient rendering of it. 美国的英语不仅与我们的英语不同，而且它有一种不竭的创造力，从某种意义上来说这可能与种族间的不适应有关，在民众的气质和他们讲话的方式间缺乏整体的一致性。英国人讲究礼节，但美国人却不是。在英语冷静及安静的退隐中，在英语一贯的严肃中，我们的语言反映了审慎的经济状况和整体悠然的自信。我们说得不多，因此不需要使我们的词汇那么活泼，也不需要强调我们的语句，或者叫喊“狼来了！”来引人注意。美国的风气愈是令人兴奋，就会培养出愈发热切、豪爽、果断的人。美国人以简单的视角来看待他们的世界，并设法用更加清晰的语言来表达自身。This revolt against conventional bonds and restraints is most noticeable, of course,on the lower levels of American speech; in the regions above there still linger some vestiges of eighteenth-century tightness.But even in those upper regions there are rebels a-plenty, and some of them are of such authority that it is impossible to dismiss them. I glance through the speeches of the late Dr. Woodrow Wilson, surely a conscientious purist, an Anglomaniac if we have ever had one, and find, in a few moments, half a dozen locutions that an Englishman in like position would certainly hesitate to use, among them we must get a move on, to hog, to gum-shoe, ornery in place of orddinary, and that is going some. I turn to the letters of that most passionate of Anglomaniacs, Walter Hines Page, and find to eat out of my hand, to lick to a frazzle, to cut no figure, to go gunning for, nothin doin, for keeps, and so on. I proceed to Dr. John Dewey, probably the countrys most respectable metaphysician, and find him using dope for opium. In recent years certain English magnificoes have shown signs of going the same route, but whenever they yield the corrective bastinado is laid on, and nine times out of ten they are accused, and rightly, of succumbing to American influence.当然，在美国人讲话的较低层次方面，这种反感传统的约束和限制的情绪是最明显的；在上述领域依然保留着十八世纪拘谨的痕迹。然而，甚至在上述领域也存在着许多反叛传统的人，而且他们中的一些人是相当有权威的，以至于不可能忽视他们。我浏览了伍德罗威尔逊博士晚期的一些讲话稿，无疑他是一位自觉的纯化论者，一个醉心于英国英语的人，如果我们曾经有过这样的人，而且我很快发现，就是在这种情况下有六种惯用语英国人也是会谨慎使用的，其中有我们悄悄地前行，窥探，用一般代替普通，以及那是需要花额外气力的事。我借助于最热心的亲英人士沃尔特汉斯的一些信件，就发现了完全服从于我，陷入彻底的狼狈，不重要，去寻找，决不，永远等等用法。我再谈谈约翰杜威博士，或许是这个国家最受尊敬的精神治疗专家，而且发现他在使用麻醉药物一词来代替鸦片这个词。在最近几年中，有迹象表明，某些英语的权贵正走着同样的路线，然而，无论何时他们放弃坚守，十有八九他们都会受到指责，而且公正地说，他们正屈服于美国英语的影响。Let American confront a novel problem alongside English, and immediately its superior imaginativeness and resourcefulness become obvious. Movie is better than cinema; and the English begin to admit the fact by adopting the word; it is not only better American, it is better English. Bill-board is better than hoarding. Office-holder is more honest, more picturesque, more thoroughly Anglo-Saxon than public servant, Stem-winder somehow has more life in it, more fancy and vividness, than the literal keyless watch. Turn to the terminology of railroading (itself, by the way, an Americanism); its creation fell upon the two peoples equally, but they tackled the job independently. The English, seeking a figure to denominate the wedge-shaped fender in front of a locomotive, called it a plough the Americans, characteristically, gave it the far more pungent name of cow-catcher. So with the casting which guides the wheels from one rail to another. The English called it a crossing-plate;the Americans, more responsive to the suggestion in its shape, called it a frog. American is full of what Bret Harte called the saber-cuts of Saxon, it meets Montaignes ideal of a succulent and nervous speech, short and compact, not as much delicate and combed out as vehement and brusque, rather arbitrary than monotonous, not pedantic put soldierly, as Suetonius called Caesars Latin.。One pictures the common materials of English dumped into a pot, exotic flavorings added, and the bubbling assiduously and expectantly skimmed. What is old and respected is already in decay the moment it comes into contact with what is new and vivid. When we Americans are through with the Engl