外刊精读117 / Economist / 语言中的冗余
117：More is more
Redundancy can be useful in writing and speech. Here’s when, why and how
冗余在写作和口语中很有用，以下是何时、为什么以及如何使用冗余
redundancy n. 冗余，累赘
redundant adj.
So rather than maintaining the now redundant leaves throughout the winter, the tree saves its precious resources and discards them.（与其在冬天保留这些显得多余的叶子，树木选择节约宝贵的资源，并遗弃它们。）
“Please return your tray tables to their full upright and locked position.” “Remember to take all of your personal belongings with you when you leave the train.” Something about writing announcements for public transport seems to bring out the wordiness in people. These instructions can be shortened to “Please put your trays up” and “Please take your things.”
“请将您的小桌板恢复完全直立并锁定的状态。“下车时记得带上您所有的私人物品。”公交通告的温馨提示似乎总是让人觉得啰嗦。这些指示可以缩短为“请把桌板收好”和“请拿好您的东西”。
tray n. 托盘
tray table 小桌板
upright adj.&adv. 直立的
释义：straight up or vertical
例句：Seats should be in the upright position during take-off and landing.（在起飞和着陆期间，座椅应处于直立状态。）
wordiness n. 冗长
wordy adj.
Your article is too wordy.（你的论文太啰嗦了。）
Redundancy is widely seen as a stylistic sin. “Omit needless words” is perhaps the least redundant statement of this view, made famous by “The Elements of Style”, a bestselling usage manual published in 1959. In it, E.B. White, an essayist and novelist, attributed the dictum to his university English teacher, William Strunk. In the classroom, Strunk “omitted so many needless words” that he was often “left with nothing more to say, yet with time to fill”. So Strunk resorted to saying everything three times: “Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!”
冗余被广泛认为是一种错误的语言风格。一本出版于1959年的畅销使用手册《语言风格要素》中，著名的那句“省略多余的废话”，也许是这个观点里最不多余的话。在文章中，散文家兼小说家埃尔文·布鲁克斯·怀特将这句名言归功于他的大学英语老师威廉·斯特伦克。在课堂上，斯特伦克“省略了太多不必要的词”，以至于他经常“没什么可说的，但还有时间来打发”。因此，斯特伦克把每件事都说三遍:“省略不必要的话！省略不必要的话！省略不必要的话！”
stylistic adj. 风格上的
sin n. 罪；过错
omit v. 省去，遗漏 =leave out
释义：to fail to include or do sth
例句：Some scientists have necessarily had to omit （leave out）the mathematics when they wrote books to explain their fields to non-scientists.（一些科学家在写书向非科学家解释他们的领域时，不得不省略数学知识。）
essayist n. 散文家
dictum n. 格言
resort to sth/doing sth 诉诸于
释义：to do sth that you do not want to do because you cannot find any other way of achieving sth
例句：I had to resort to violence to get my money.（我不得不诉诸暴力拿回我的钱。）
On reflection, though, did he really need to say that three times himself? If he had already said everything that was required, he could have let the class out early rather than repeating his call for concision. That he did so suggests there may be more value in redundancy than meets the eye. Language scholars, indeed, think it fulfils several functions.
然而，仔细想想，他真的需要自己说三遍吗？如果他已经把要求讲的都讲完了，他就可以早点下课了，而不是重复他要求简洁的要求。他这样做表明，冗余的价值可能比看起来更大。事实上，语言学者认为它有几个功能。
on reflection 深思熟虑
释义：after considering it
例句：On reflection, I decided I had been wrong.
concision / kənˈsɪʒn / n. 简洁
more… than meet the eye
释义：more…than there appears to be at first
One, hinted at by Strunk’s repetition, is learnability. Repetition, after all, is reinforcement. Languages that include the same piece of grammatical information in more than one way are probably more easily acquired by children, or indeed adults. For example, the -ed ending on the verb gives no new information in “Yesterday, he walked”, because “yesterday” already situates the event in the past. Many languages—Mandarin, for example—do not require such endings. In those, such as English, which do, the doubling up of signals may have developed to make them easier to learn.
首先，斯特伦克的重复暗示了一点，那就是可学性。毕竟，重复就是强化。以不同方式里包含同一条语法信息的语言可能更容易被儿童或成年人习得。例如，在“Yesterday，he walked”中以-ed结尾的动词没有给出新的信息，因为“yesterday”已经将事件置于过去。许多语言——比如汉语——不需要这样的结尾。在像英语这样的语言中，信号的重叠可能是为了使它们更容易学习。
hint v.&n. 示意，暗示
例句：
He has hinted at the possibility of moving to Canada.（他暗示可能会搬去加拿大。）
He has dropped/given several hints to the boss that he’ll quit if he doesn’t get a promotion.（他好几次暗示老板，如果自己没升职，他便会离开。）
learnability n. 可学性， 易学性
Another benefit of redundancy can be seen on those trains and planes. These are noisy and distracting places where a brusque “Please take your things” may not be heard by all passengers. Redundancy makes a signal robust. For instance, spacecraft beaming digital messages to Earth include “error-correction bits”, redundancies in the signal that allow engineers back home to reconstruct the inevitably degraded transmissions. Here redundancy is a feature not a flaw.
冗余的另一个好处可以在那些火车和飞机上看到。这些地方很嘈杂，让人分心，唐突的“请拿好你的东西”可能不会被所有乘客听到。冗余使信号更稳定。例如，向地球发送数字信息的宇宙飞船包括“纠错位”，即信号中的冗余信息，这使得工程师们可以回家重建不可避免的降级传输。在这里，冗余是一个特征，而不是缺陷。
brusque adj. 唐突的
释义：quick and rude in manner or speech
beam v. 发射
释义：to send out a beam of light, an electrical or radio signal, etc.
A recent study of Dutch and English confirmed this is true of human languages, too. It looked at how both languages handle sentences like “She gave the book to him”: ie, those with both a direct object, “the book”, and an indirect one, “him”. In both Dutch and English, word order is relatively fixed for the giver, thing given and recipient. But there are also ways of emphasising this information. The pronoun “She” is in the nominative case, marking it as the subject or giver. “Him” is in the objective case, making clear that it is an object (it is not “he”). Strictly, either the form of the pronouns or the word order could distinguish giver from recipient, but most such sentences in English and Dutch offer both.
最近一项对荷兰语和英语的研究证实，人类语言也是如此。它研究了两种语言如何处理像“She gave the book to him”这样的句子:即既有直接宾语“the book”，又有间接宾语“him”。在荷兰语和英语中，给予者、所送之物和接受者的词序相对固定。但也有强调这一信息的方法。代词“she”是主格，表示主语或给予者。“him”是宾格，明确它是一个客体(不是“he”)。严格来说，无论是代词的形式还是词序都可以区分给予者和接受者，但英语和荷兰语中大多数这样的句子都提供了这两种形式。
direct object 直接宾语
indirect object 间接宾语
pronoun n. 代词
nominative / ˈnɑːmɪnətɪv / adj. 主格
Languages may even adapt to maintain an optimal level of redundancy. A thousand years ago, every English noun—“king”, say, or “Alfred”—changed forms, as “he” does to “him”, to show which role every word played in a sentence (subject, direct object and so on). Over the centuries those endings disappeared, potentially making sentences ambiguous. The grammar of English responded by making word order, which had once been fluid, more rigid. And English still employs other features— such as the use of the preposition “to”, or the objective-case forms “him” and “her”—just in case.
语言甚至可以适应最佳程度的冗余。一千年前，每个英语名词——比如“king”或“Alfred”——都会改变形式，就像“he”变成“him”一样，以表明每个单词在句子中所起的作用(主语、直接宾语等等)。后面几个世纪，这些结尾消失了，可能使句子表达变得模棱两可。曾经灵活的英语语法通过排列词序回应，随之变得更死板的。英语还使用了其他一些特征，比如介词“to”的使用，或者宾语形式“him”和“her”的使用，以防万一。
optimal adj. 最佳的 =best
例句：Several treatment sessions are required in order to obtain optimal results.（为了获得最佳效果，需要进行多次治疗。）
say v. 比如 （前后有逗号）
They’ll look for, say, antiques that they can buy cheaply and expect to be able to sell at a profit.（他们会寻找，比如说，古董，他们可以便宜地买到，并期望能够卖出获利。）
ambiguous adj. 模糊不清的，模棱两可的
例句：
The government has been ambiguous on this issue.（政府在这件事的态度上模棱两可。）
His reply to my question was somewhat ambiguous.（他对我的问题的回复有点模棱两可。）
fluid n. 液体； adj. 液体的；易变的；流畅的
例句：
The situation is still very fluid.（现在的情况变幻莫测。）
His piano playing was beautifully fluid.（他的钢琴弹得优美流畅。）
rigid adj. 死板的，僵化的
释义：not permitting any change
例句：I keep to a rigid schedule.（我有一个严格的时间表。）
Another possible use of redundancy is simply to make listening or reading less taxing. If every possible word that can be removed is removed, so that every remaining one is absolutely crucial, listening and reading become stressful. You cannot let your mind wander for even a moment. Such prose is almost too dense with information; even a short passage of this kind would be demanding to read. Sometimes a little room to breathe is no bad thing.
冗余的另一个可能用途是简单地使听或读不那么费力。如果每一个可以去掉的单词都删除，这样剩下的每个单词都是绝对关键的，听力和阅读就会变得有压力了。你一刻也不能走神。这样的散文信息量太大了;即使是这样一篇短文，读起来也很吃力。有时候，有一点喘息的空间并不是件坏事。
taxing adj. 费力的
wander v. 开小差，走神
prose n. 散文，白话文
dense adj. 密集的，浓稠
搭配： dense fog/forest/smoke/crowd 浓雾/茂密的树林/浓烟/密集的人群
demanding adj. 费力的 =difficult
释义：needing a lot of time, attention, or energy
搭配：a demanding job/task
例句：I’m trying to learn English, and I find it very demanding.
Just a little, that is. The advice to keep it trim is still good counsel. Blaise Pascal, a French author of the 17th century, once apologised for a long letter by saying: “I have not had time to make it shorter.” Keeping things tight can be hard work for the writer, but it saves time for the reader, at least up to a point. Make your prose as lean as necessary to keep your reader reading—but not more.
只是一点点就够了。保持简洁的建议仍然是很好的忠告。17世纪的法国作家布莱士·帕斯卡曾为一封长信道歉说:“我没时间把它写短。”对作者来说，保持内容紧凑可能是一项艰巨的工作，但至少在某种程度上，它为读者节省了时间。让你的文章尽可能简洁，让你的读者继续阅读——但不是更多。
trim adj. 简洁的，整洁的
counsel n. 建议
up to a point 在某种程度上
释义：partly, or to a limited degree
例句：Of course there is some truth in all this, but only up to a point.
lean adj. 精简的
第一段 生活中的语言冗余现象
第二段 冗余常被认为是错误的
第三段 冗余也有正向功能
第四段 冗余的第一个功能（易于学习）
第五段 冗余的第二个功能（方便接收信息）
第六段 冗余在英语和荷兰语中的现象
第七段 冗余在英语语法中的演变
第八段 冗余的第三个功能（减轻听力和阅读的负担）
第九段 冗余要适度
