翻訳で学ぶ文法の真価

「英語の文章って、読んでて面白いの？」という問いかけにはいろいろと抽象論で答えるよりも、文法が分かると読めるようになる面白い刺激的な文章をどんどん具体的に紹介していくのが一番よいと思われます。そこで、以下のような文章たちを順番に読んでいってみてください。タイトルを参考にしながら、しっかり理解できれば、きっと楽しい発見があるはず。分からなかったら、ぜひ質問してくださいね！それでは！

1.【内容：懐疑の重要さ】
If it had not been for doubt, we should be even more ignorant than we are. It is generally accepted that it was a good thing for Copernicus to doubt that the earth is the center of the universe.

2.【内容：保育園は小学校を下に延長したものではなく家庭を上に延長したもの】
The function of the nursery school is not to be a substitute for an absent mother, but to supplement and extend the role which in the child’s earliest years the mother alone plays. The nursery school is probably most correctly considered as an extension ‘upwards’ of the family, rather than an extension ‘downwards’ of the primary school. It seems desirable, therefore, before discussing in any detail the role of the nursery school and of the teacher in particular, to set down a summary of what the infant needs from the mother, and the nature of the role that the mother plays in fostering healthy psychological development in the child’s earliest years. It is only in the light of the mother’s role and the child’s needs that a real understanding can be gained of the way in which the nursery school can continue the mother’s work.

3.【内容：地球の歴史の中で文明の歴史など一瞬である】
Four and a half billion years ago, the earth was formed. Perhaps a half billion years after that, life arose on the planet. For the next four billion years, life became steadily more complex, more varied and more ingenious, until, around a million years ago, it produced mankind —— the most complex and ingenious species of them all. Only six or seven thousand years ago —— a period that is to the history of the earth as less than a minute is to a year —— civilization emerged enabling us to build up a human world and to add to the marvels of evolution marvels of our own: marvels of art, of science, of social organization, of spiritual attainment.

4.【内容：句読点はなぜ重要か】
Spoken language, rich and beautiful as it can be in other respects, must often be less compact and complex, because it does not have the precise syntactical signals that marks of punctuation give to written language.

5.【内容：子どもは贈与が苦手】
Children love to get gifts —— so much so that they may break a fundamental rule of good manners and ask for them. Their early gift giving ( birthday gifts to friends ) is sometimes done reluctantly. How they wish they could just keep the gift themselves! Or you might find yourself buying two identical items —— one for your son to give away and one for him to keep.
　As children get older, getting and giving gifts will take on more meaning. They’ll begin to realize that they should give gifts in a similar price range as their friends do; they shouldn’t spend more than others. Nor should they ever feel they must buy a gift that hurts their family’s budget. It’s more thoughtful to buy a gift that reflects the interests of the other person than to spend a lot of money.

6.【内容：メタ認知の重要さ、そしてOSV倒置】
I came to know by painful experience that not a child in a hundred knows whether or not he understands something, much less, if he does not, why he does not. The child who knows, we don’t have anything to worry about; he will be an excellent student.

7.【内容：重力が問題になる世界と表面張力が問題になる世界】
There is a force which is as formidable to an insect as gravitation to a mammal. This is surface tension. A man coming out of a bath carries with him a film of water of about one-fiftieth of an inch in thickness. This weighs about a pound. A wet fly has to lift many times its own weight and, as everyone knows, a fly once wetted by water or any other liquid is in a very serious position indeed.
→formidableは「恐るべき」と訳す

8.【内容：パーソナリティの可変性とキャラクターの不可変性】
There are many fairy tales in which the disparate aspects of one personality are projected onto different figures, such as one of the stories of the Thousand and One Nights, “Sindbad the Seaman and Sindbad the Porter.”

9.【内容：現在に直接関わらないアブセントな過去や未来さえプレゼントにするのが人間】
It was language that, for the first time, enabled our ancestors to teach others, including their children, about objects and events that were not actually present. There are other intelligent animals living today with complex brains and elaborate communication systems, but they cannot, so far as we know, do that. Chimpanzees and other apes can be taught many of the signs of American Sign Language, ASL. They have acquired three hundred or more, and can use them in new contexts and with each other as well as their trainers. But they did not, during their evolution, develop the uniquely human ability to talk about that which is not present, share events of the distant past, plan for the far-off future, and, most important, discuss ideas, exchanging them to share the accumulated wisdom of an entire group.

10.【内容：文脈に応じた自己規定の変化】
Journalists can function in three different ways. Firstly, they can act as ‘servants of the state’ reporting only news that supports those in power and ignoring or simply criticizing opposition to the state. Secondly, they can act as ‘observers’ reporting only what they see as the objective facts. Thirdly, they can act as ‘watchdogs’ demanding that powerful people explain their actions and criticizing decisions or policies that they think are wrong or mistaken. According to the particular situation at a given time, the same journalist or organization may act in any of these ways.

11.【内容：他人を褒めまくる人の内実】
Those who praise others but don’t estimate or despise themselves may or must be those who praise themselves but don’t estimate or despise others.

12.【内容：エキスパートとはどういう人種なのか】
An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.

13.【内容：好奇心と希少さには警戒せよ】
All men naturally desire to know; but the desire to know, as perfectly correct and rational as it is in itself, often becomes a very dangerous vice through the false judgments that accompany it. Curiosity often tempts us with vain objects of our meditation and our attention, and often attaches to these objects false impressions of sublimity; it enhances them with the deceptive luster of rarity and represents them so attractively that we have difficulty contemplating them without excessive pleasure and attachment.

14.【内容：近い将来きっと証拠が手に入るという主張は証拠にはならない】
I decline to accept as proof the statement that we will have proof in the future. All I can do is deal with what we know today.

15.【内容：「自然」という語の意味を我々は知りすぎていて定義不能でもある】
“Nature”, as Raymond Williams has remarked, is one of the most complex words in the language. Yet, as with many other problematic terms, its complexity is concealed by the ease and regularity with which we put it to use in a wide variety of contexts. It is at once very familiar and extremely elusive: an idea we employ with such ease and regularity that it seems as if we ourselves are privileged with some “natural” access to its intelligibility; but also an idea which most of us know, in some sense, to be so various and comprehensive in its use as to defy our powers of definition.
レイモンド・ウィリアムズの言葉を借りれば、「自然」とは言語の中で最も複雑な語の一つである。しかし、問題を含んだ他の多くの言葉と同様に、その複雑さは、私たちがそれを多種多様な文脈の中で気軽に、頻繁に用いていることによって覆い隠されている。 それは、非常に馴染みのあるものでもあり、またきわめて定義しがたいものでもある。それは、ある程度「自然に」それを理解できるという特権が私たち自身に備わっているように思われるほど、気軽に、頻繁に用いている概念である。しかしまた、それは、私たちには定義できないほどその使い方が多様で広範囲に及んでいると、私たちの大部分のものがある意味で知っている概念でもある。

16.【内容：ダーウィンとクジャクの羽】
Science has stripped most of the wonder from the world we can see around us, which may be one reason why we have become so careless about it. We label things, and think we know them, ever since we named the beasts, but the more one looks at a drop of water, or a blade of grass, or gazes into someone else’s eyes, the more extraordinary what one is looking at becomes. Darwin once confided to a friend that the sight of a peacock’s tail feather made him feel sick. How could such an elaborate and beautiful structure have simply evolved through the luck of the draw of natural selection?

17.【内容：三歳児のジェンダー】
Few things are so clear in the mind of a three-year-old as the knowledge of his or her own gender. Being aware that you are a girl or a boy seems to be a fundamental step in learning who you are. Which is why children of this age are comically sensitive to any hint of sexual ambiguity. A little girl will refuse to go out if her hair is cut so short that she looks “like a boy”. There are adult men who can still recall the mortification of being ridiculed, at the age of four, for wearing a frilly shirt or pink under-pants, or some equally damning bit of “feminine” apparel.
　Nobody who has visited a nursery could fail to notice the difference between the behaviour of boys and girls and the determination with which they enforce that difference. Tiny children certainly do choose activities which are a kind of caricature of grown-up male and femaleness.

18.【内容：人間の基本構造は共通なのになぜ旅をするべきなのか】
Human beings are more alike than unalike, and what is true anywhere is true everywhere, yet I encourage travel to as many destinations as possible for the sake of education as well as pleasure.
　It is necessary, especially for Americans, to see other lands and experience other cultures. The American, living in this vast country and able to traverse three thousand miles east to west using the same language, needs to hear languages as they collide in Europe, Africa, and Asia.
　A tourist, browsing in a Paris shop, eating in an Italian ristorante, or idling along a Hong Kong street, will encounter three or four languages as she negotiates the buying of a blouse, the paying of a check, or the choosing of a trinket. I do not mean to suggest that simply overhearing a foreign tongue adds to one’s understanding of that language. I do know, however, that being exposed to the existence of other languages increases the perception that the world is populated by people who not only speak differently from oneself but whose cultures and philosophies are other than one’s own.

19.【内容：自然的秩序と恣意的秩序】
Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If, in your bold creative way, you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe. The moment you step into the world of facts, you step into a world of limits. You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes. Do not free a camel of the burden of his hump: you may be freeing him from being a camel. Do not go about as a demagogue, encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end. This is certainly the case with all artistic creation, which is in some ways the most decisive example of pure will. The artist loves his limitations: they constitute the thing he is doing. The painter is glad that the canvas is flat. The sculptor is glad that the clay is colourless.
(Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 71)
→キャンバスが平面であるせいで立体では描けなくなるし、キャンバスが平面だからこそ立体感を出す技法を創造することができる。粘土も無色以外の色では作れないからこそその制限の中でどうやって陰や彩度を表現していくかという工夫や彫刻の創造性が発達していく。

20.【内容：クローンが私と同一人物ではない理由は以下の通り】
Scientists have been experimenting with cloning since 1970 using plants, animal embryos, frogs and toads. But until the birth of “Dolly”, the first cloned mammal born in 1997, it was considered impossible to clone humans. But the refinement of a technique called nuclear transfer has changed all that.
　However there are problems with the procedure. It took over 277 tries to create Dolly. What is even more problematic is that human cloning would be even more difficult to achieve because human DNA is more complicated, creating a higher potential for error and greater risks.
　So if one ignores the difficulty in creating a clone, assuming that future technology advances will solve this problem, would my clone be completely identical to me? The answer to this question is no and the reason why can be found in nature by examining identical twins. Identical twins have the exact same genetic code but they are not identical people, even if they are raised in the exact same environment and have similar if not identical life experiences. The entire act of cloning is a process of creating a chronologically younger genetic ‘twin’ of yourself. In such a case, all the observations and rules of a naturally occurring identical twin pairing would apply. For example, my clone would appear completely identical to me but would have different fingerprints.

21.【内容：「イディオレクト」と「コード」の違い】
Each of us varies his speech many times during the day depending upon the person or persons we are with and the situation in which we find ourselves. The phenomenon is so common that we have coined a term for it: “code-switching.” “Code” is the name given to the shared language of a community of speakers as opposed to the word “idiolect” which is used to refer to a person’s individual use of the language or dialect.

22.【内容：久しぶりに会うと逆に話題がないのはなぜか】
It is sometimes noted that we have less news to give to someone we haven’t spoken to for, say, six months, than to someone to whom we speak nearly every day. What counts as news depends on its immediacy. An item that may happily be reported to a friend the day after it happened, no longer appears to be newsworthy after six months. If something is not mentioned soon after it happened, then it can amount to nothing. So the items of news that you can tell after six months are only things that are worthy of attention over such a long period.

23.【内容：「感情の関与を排除する人」と「苦悩の感情を最小にしようとする人」】
In a widely used personality test, people are asked to say which they feel is more important: justice or mercy. On the one hand, those who choose justice are considered to be more rational and fair-minded. They do not allow their emotions to interfere with what they know is right, and all their decisions are based primarily on sound reasoning. On the other hand, those who feel mercy is more important are thought to let their feelings rule their heads. Although they can also be fair-minded, people in this latter group think carefully about how their judgments can affect others and try to avoid causing further sufferings.

24.【内容：火事は地球の自然本性ではない】
So important is the role of the environment that talking of an “innate” tendency to be aggressive makes little sense for animals, let alone for humans. It is as if we were to assert that because there can be no fires without oxygen, and because the Earth is blanketed by oxygen, it is in the nature of our planet for buildings to burn down.
→対応関係は次のようになっている。
「①動物：地球」＝「②攻撃性：火事」＝「③生命力：酸素」
③がなかれば②はありえず、①は③にみちているからといって、②は①の自然本性だとは限らない。実際、現に②が発現しているからといって、環境要因による後天的獲得が大きいので②が①の生得的性質ということにはならない。

25.【内容：言語が持つ目的や理念の固定機能】
The fact that animals lose their knowledge of things as time goes by, and consequently their interest in them, accounts for their absurd behavior in many situations. They constantly interrupt one line of action to do something else, and they may come back to the first activity or forget it altogether. Human beings, on the other hand, thanks to language, are able to pursue one purpose or to act in relation to a principle or to an ideal over long periods of time.