内容简介

David Crystal 是出生在北爱尔兰的英国著名语言学家和学者， 《语言的简史》（A Little Book of Language）是 David Crystal 于 2010 年出版的一本语言学著作，由于其文笔深入浅出、通俗易懂而深受各国读者喜爱，至今已被翻译成希腊语、葡萄牙语等多国语言，大大有助于更多语言爱好者认识和理解学习预言。其书中许多东西值得学习，让读者受益匪浅。

本论文翻译该书第 2-4 章，第二章主要是谈论最初的婴儿只会喊叫，但叫声因为不同的感觉而不同，全世界的婴儿表现大体相同。但是一年后，不同国家的婴儿对于表达不同的感觉有了语言上的变化。第三章分析了婴儿的学习步骤，由看到听，在一定的时间段能够掌握一定的词汇量，并通过作者儿子的具体例子进行说明。第四章是讲述婴儿可以理解经常听到的词或句子，但对于他们来说，熟练运用发声器官去发音，却要经过一番练习。气流从肺部开始往上，经过气管、咽喉，到达声带，根据需要使声带振动或不振动。振动影响到音高、音色，因而我们的耳朵可以分辨不同声音的区别。

INTRODUCTION

A Little Book of Language is a linguistic work that published in 2010 by David Crystal. David Crystal is a famous British linguist and scholar, he was born in Northern Ireland. In his early years, he followed Randolph Quirk to conduct research on English application, their research and works mainly involved the intonation, stylistics, applied linguistics, language teaching, children and lexicology etc. This book is simple and easy to understand by all readers, which has been translated into many languages.

I translated the chapter 2,3and 4.The second chapter, from cries to words. At first, the baby can only cry, but the cry is different caused by hunger and pain. And the baby will smile to express satisfaction - these responses, the world’s babies are roughly the same. But a year later, the expression of hunger, pain, and satisfaction by babies from different countries had a great difference. This chapter takes three months as a unit of study to observe the similarities and differences between the three babies speaking English and French languages in order to analyze the sequence of the infant’s language acquisition. The third chapter, learning how to understand. This chapter analyzes the learning process of the baby from seeing to listening, and baby will soon be able to master a certain vocabulary. The author used his son’s specific examples to illustrate that. The fourth chapter, making vibrations. In the previous chapter, the baby can understand the words or sentences that he often hears, it is necessary for him to use the sound organ to pronounce. The airflow from the lungs, through the trachea, throat to the vocal cords, as needed to make the vocal cords vibrate or not vibrate. Vibration affects pitch and timbre, so our ears can tell the difference between different sounds.