Local Interpreter Services and the Curious Case of Boontling
发布人：天津翻译|天津翻译公司|翻译公司|乐译通翻译 发布日期：2015-05-29 浏览次数：3048次 返回上一页
Boonville, California, a few hours north of
San Francisco, is a small town known for its craft beer and its unique
contribution to communication – not the high tech communication that is the
stuff of Silicon Valley, but rather a more basic sort of innovation. With a
population of just over 1,000, Boonville is the home of Boontling, which, if
you didn’t know, is the town’s own language, developed over the past century-and-a-half,
mostly so that the denizens of Boonville could communicate with one another
without being understood by outsiders.
To be accurate, Boontling isn’t really a
‘language’ properly speaking, not the way linguists define it at least. One
could more accurately call it a regional vernacular, a jargon perhaps. It’s a
variety of spoken English that has never been spoken by more than 1,000 people
at a time and today its population of speakers is dwindling as their offspring
adopt the ways, customs, and speech of the very outsiders that Boontling was
intended to keep outside. No interpreter service can keep Boontling alive. The
sheer force of standardization is pushing it into the past.