内容简介

《语言的简史》这本书的作者是英国语言学家和学者David Crystal。他的研究和作品主要涉及语调、文体学、应用语言学、语言教学、第一语言习得等领域。值得一提的是他最有名的书《剑桥语言百科全书》，是由剑桥大学出版社和英国英语百科全书出版的。

《语言的简史》是2010出版的一本语言学著作。由于其被读者们喜欢的简单的风格和可读性，已经被翻译成希腊语，葡萄牙语和其他语言。书中的很多地方都是值得细读的，读者受益良多。

我的任务是将这本书的第14至17章就内容、理想、风格和文化差异方面准确地翻译成中文。第十四章的内容主要是关于世界语言。这一章阐述了不同的方言和语言，并指出语言是由不同的方言组成地。作者进一步指出世界上所有的语言（约6000种）都可以据此分类。第十五章讲的是口语的来源。本章首先指出世界上有许多独立的语言，很难确定他们之间的关系。接着作者开始探索口语的起源。通过研究古代人的颌骨和嘴及颈部周围的骨结构，发现在公元前30,000年的时候，他们可能已经开始说话了。第十六章介绍了写作的来源。它告诉我们，楔形文字书写系统是世界上第一个书写系统。第十七章的内容是关于现代写作。这一章主要是讲了写作的发展和能代表声音的一些标志的出现。当人们开始用符号代表声音时，他们可以用符号组合来表示不同的含义，这翻开了语言发展的新篇章。

INTRODUCTION

The book A Little Book of Language is written by David Crystal. He is a British linguist and scholar. His study and works mainly involve intonation, stylistics, applied linguistics, language teaching, first language acquisition, and other fields. It is worth mentioning that his most famous book is Cambridge language encyclopedia published by University of Cambridge press and the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English language.

A Little Book of Language is a linguistic work published in 2010. Because of its simple style and readability by all readers, it has been translated into Greek, Portuguese and other languages. In the book many things are worth scrutinizing and readers can benefit a lot from it.

My task is to translate chapters 14-17 of this book into correct Chinese in terms of content, ideals, style and cultural differences. The fourteenth chapter is mainly about the world language. This chapter first illustrates different dialects and languages and then points out that a language may consist of different dialects. The author further points out that all the languages of the world (about 6000) can be classified accordingly. The fifteenth chapter is about the source of spoken language. This chapter first illustrates that there are many isolated language in the world and it is difficult to determine the relationship between them. Afterwards, it begins to explore the beginning of oral language. By studying skeletons of ancient human and also the shape of their jaws and the bony structures surrounding the mouth and in the neck of ancient human, it finds out that around 30,000 BC ancient human were well on the way to speak. The sixteenth chapter describes the source of writing. It tells us that cuneiform writing system is the first writing system of the world. The seventeenth chapter is about the modern writing. This chapter is mainly about the development of writing and the emergence of the sign standing for sounds. While people began to use signs to represent sounds, which opened a new chapter in the development of language.