陳韋廷譯
The UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger is a melancholy document, charting the 3,000 or so languages that experts predict will vanish by the end of this century. For the most part, ethnographers and linguists are helpless in the face of the gradual erasure of collective memory that goes along with this loss of linguistic diversity.
Time to call in the composers?
「聯合國教科文組織世界瀕危語言地圖」是份令人憂傷的文件，它記錄著大約3000種專家們預測將在本世紀結束前消失的語言。大體而言，眼看著集體記憶隨語言多樣性失去而逐步消失，人類學家跟語言學家都感到無能為力。
號召作曲家來幫忙的時候是不是到了？
A growing number of them are turning their attention to languages that are extinct, endangered or particular to tiny groups of speakers in far-flung places with the aim of weaving these enigmatic utterances into musical works that celebrate, memorialize or mourn the languages and the cultures that gave birth to them. On Saturday, April 9, at the Cologne Opera in Germany, Australian composer Liza Lim unveiled her opera "Tree of Codes," which includes snippets of a Turkish whistling language from a small mountain village.
有愈來愈多的作曲家正把注意力轉向已滅絕，瀕危，或只有偏遠地區微小群體使用的語言，其目的是將這些費解的話語編成音樂作品，用以禮讚、紀念或是哀悼孕育它們的那些文化與語言。4月9日星期六，澳洲作曲家林麗莎（音譯）在德國科隆歌劇院推出她的歌劇「Tree of Codes」（密碼之樹，暫譯），其中包含來自土耳其山中一處小村落的口哨語言片段。
In February the New York Philharmonic performed Tan Dun's multimedia symphony "Nu Shu," the result of the composer's research into a language and writing system that was passed down among the female inhabitants of a small village in Hunan province in China for 700 years. Other composers who have done their own fieldwork include Vivian Fung, who investigated minority cultures in the Chinese province of Yunnan, and Kevin James, who sought out some of the last native speakers of minority languages in the Pacific Northwest, Australia and Japan.
The aesthetic uses to which the composers put these rare languages vary. Still, James, the founder of the Vanishing Languages Project, said that the goal was "not to set them to music, but set them as music."
紐約愛樂交響樂團在2月時演出了譚盾的多媒體交響曲「女書」，而這是譚盾研究中國湖南省一處小村子中，在女性居民間流傳已700年的語言與書寫系統的成果。其他已經做過實地考察的作曲家還包括，調查中國雲南省少數民族文化的馮偉君，以及在美國西北太平洋沿岸、澳洲及日本找出最後一些以少數民族語言為母語者的凱文．詹姆斯。
作曲家以不同的方式將這些稀有語言運用於美學上，但「消失中的語言計畫」創辦人詹姆斯表示，目的「不是將它們做成音樂，而是將它們當成音樂。」
It's an important distinction. Classical music has proved adept at preserving a language like Latin through liturgical settings that expose listeners to a language they no longer encounter in spoken form. But works like Mozart's Requiem or Orff's "Carmina Burana," with its sections in Middle High German, sprang from the same cultural soil that gave birth to their texts. By contrast, when composers reach for words that are unintelligible to all but a handful of speakers on the planet, the very notion of music as a vessel for semantic content is upended. Removed from all context and understanding, speech — a constellation of rhythm and melody, resonant vowels and percussive consonants — begins to resemble music.
這是個很重要的區別。古典音樂已證明很能保存像拉丁文這樣的語言，方式則是透過禮儀式的安排，讓聆聽者接觸一種已經聽不到人講的語言。然而像莫扎特的安魂曲或奧福有中古高地德語段落的「布蘭詩歌」這類作品，均來自於孕育它們文本的同一文化土壤。相反地，當作曲家處理地球上只有極少數人理解的語詞時，音樂作為語意內容載具的想法就會被顛覆。一旦從所有上下文關係和理解抽離，語言作為一群節奏與旋律、共鳴母音及敲擊子音的組合，便開始像音樂了。
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