问答题 Where in the world is the largest number of different languages spoken? Most linguists would probably plump for New Guinea, an island that has 830 recognized tongues scattered around its isolated, jungle-covered valleys. But a place on the other side of the world runs it close. The five boroughs of New York City are reckoned to be home to speakers of around 800 languages. Many of them close to extinction.
(1) New York is also home, of course, to a lot of academic linguists, and three of them have got together to create an organization called the Endangered Language Alliance (ELA), which is ferreting out speakers of unusual tongues from the city's huddled immigrant masses. The ELA, which was set up last year by Daniel Kaufman, Juliette Blevins and Bob Holman, has worked in detail on 12 languages since its inception. It has codified their grammars, their pronunciations and their word-formation patterns, as well as their songs and legends.
Each volunteer speaker of a language of interest is first tested with what is known as a Swadesh list. This is a set of 207 high-frequency, slow-to-change words such as parts of the body, colors and basic verbs like eat, drink, sleep and kill. The Swadesh list is intended to ascertain an individual's fluency before he is taken on. Once he has been accepted, Dr Kauf-man and his colleagues start chipping away at the language's phonology (the sounds of which it is composed) and its syntax (how its meaning is changed by the order of words and phrases). This sort of analysis is the bread and butter of linguistics.
Every so often, though, the researchers come across a bit of jam. The Mahongwe word manono, for example, means "I like" when spoken soft and flat, and "I don't like" when the first syllable is a tad sharper in tone. Similarly, mhaza could be either "chest" or "council house". In both cases, the two words are nearly indistinguishable to an English speaker, but yield starkly different patterns when run through a spectrograph. (2) Manono is a particular linguistic oddity, since it uses only tone to differentiate an affirmative from a negative—a phenomenon the ELA has since discovered applies to all verbs in Mahongwe.
Such niceties are interesting to experts. But the ELA is attempting to understand more than just the nuts and bolts of languages. It is collecting stories and other verbal material specific to the cultures of the participants. One volunteer, for example, wants to write a storybook for children in her language (Shughni), and also a recipe book. (3) That means creating a written form of the language, which the researchers do using what is known as the International Phonetic Alphabet. (4) Many of Dr. Kaufman's better finds, he says. have come from "hanging out at street corners with a clipboard on Roosevelt Avenue"—a street in the borough of Queens that he describes as the "epicenter of the epicenter" of linguistic New York. How long it will remain so is moot. The world's languages which number about 6, 900 are reckoned to be dying out at the rate of one a fortnight. The reason is precisely the sort of cultural mixing that New York epitomizes. (5) The value of learning any particular language is increased by the number of people who already speak it, while the value of a minority language is diminished as people abandon it. To those languages that hath, in other words, shall be given. From those that hath not, shall the last speakers soon be taken away?

【正确答案】当然,纽约也有许多语言学家,其中有三位共同成立了名为濒危语言联盟(简称ELA)的组织,它的目的在于从混乱的移民队伍中找出使用特殊语言的人群。
【答案解析】
【正确答案】manono是语言学上的一个异常现象,因为它仅仅可以根据语调不同就能区分肯定和否定——濒危语言联盟此后发现此种现象可用于马宏威语言中的所有动词。
【答案解析】
【正确答案】这意味着要创造该语言的书面形式,研究者们正在使用国际音标来做此事。
【答案解析】
【正确答案】考夫曼博士说,他的许多新奇发现都是“在罗斯福大街上拿着一块剪贴板闲逛时得来的”,他把位于皇后区的一条大街形容成纽约语言“中心的中心”。
【答案解析】
【正确答案】任何一种特殊语言学习的价值随着已经说此语言的人数的增加而增加,而少数人使用的语言在被抛弃后价值也就会降低。
【答案解析】