On the Origin of Languages論語言的起源

It’s tempting to think that they have clear beginnings. They don’t.

人們往往認(rèn)為語言有明確的誕生時(shí)間，實(shí)則不然。

In a church hewn out of a mountainside， just over a thousand years or so ago， a monk was struggling with a passage in Latin. He did what others like him had done， writing the tricky bits in his own language1 between the lines of text and at the edges. What makes these marginalia more than marginal is that they are considered the first words ever written in Spanish.

大約一千多年前，在一座從半山腰雕鑿出來的修道院中，有位修士正在冥思苦讀一篇拉丁語文章。（剩余5918字）