“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”——Charles Darwin
大致翻译：如是观之，生命是如此的波澜壮阔——数种自然之力创造了世界原初的几个乃至一个物种；然后就在自然规律的管辖下，美丽的生物世界就在循环往复的无尽进化中形成了，——进化仍在进行着。
“Syllepsis、Propinquity、Villanelle、Caprice……”，多么奇妙啊，多么自豪啊，我会说话，我可以用我的嘴巴发声，分辨出每一个音节。也许，这真的微不足道！这不过是人类几十万年进化的结果——声带扩张，大脑进化；这不过是我儿时，父母亲人在我的耳旁咿呀低语的结果。
也许美妙的不是我掌握了它，而是我遇上了它。语言，通过人类这个载体传播，变化，再在当地落户——这足够称得上是“史诗般”的旅程了。我更愿意用那个中性词“they”来称呼它。
记忆里，我对语言的热爱始于我读7年级的时候。那时，为了参加一个全国拼字比赛，我学习了1万个单词。在第16级的时候我被“ginglymus”中的“y”打败了。从它的发音中我知道这里是[li]，愣是没有拼出来。但是，听妈妈说我老早就爱上它了，二岁的时候，我就能在几个研究生面前拼出“physiology”。无论如何，单词走进了我的生命里，就像生命一样变幻莫测，而每一次都能给我带来一些我从未听过的“先辈们”的故事。
以“芝麻”为例：毫无疑问，最开始流传的是拉丁语和希腊语，然后才是英语。经过上千年的洗礼，经历了闪族语：包括阿拉伯语和希伯来语、巴比伦语、亚述语。这些部落、地方的古文明在英语存在以前就已经相当成熟了。如今的“sesame”，只是历尽了风雨沧桑，在数个消亡的物种与被遗忘的化石堆里“爬”出来的，3个音节就概括了印度河西部的全部芝麻培育史。
可能这就是我要“搜集”各种语言的原因吧。在学校我主要说的是英语，回到家里我开始学习汉语，《加缪》让我领悟法语的魅力，通过阅读博尔赫斯的短篇故事集了解西班牙语。我的清单上还罗列了希腊语、阿拉伯语和意大利语。如果我有足够的耐心，我可以逐一拆解它们的结构，词法的修饰以及文化和历史。通过深层次的挖掘，做到灵活运用。当人们长时间只“研究”自己双手的时候，我可以用汉语的“无聊”一词解之。法语单词“décaler”会令我产生一种不好的感觉，若近若远。西班牙语中的“involucrado”，形容两个或多个事物缠绕在一起，密不可分。如此等等，每一个单词都能带给我未知的欣喜和兴奋。
在《物种起源》一书中，达尔文惊叹自然生命的力量，“endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful”。对我而言，语言无穷的变幻，让我心生敬畏。我应该把我的一生奉献给语言，就像达尔文对鸟雀、藤壶以及甲虫的感情一样。我主要研究语言种类的变化，沿袭着它们自己的方式，积累变异，与其他群体杂交，漂洋过海，挣扎着存留下来。我觉得我会非常乐意追随着计算机内存储的海量的语言的轨迹，借着人类最伟大的科技成果逐一认识它们。
释义
1. Syllepsis：双关，是指一个动词引出两个宾语，看似完全没有联系的两个词，经过“一语双叙”修辞手法，连个词组构成很自然的连接，合情合理。如：He lost the game and his temper.（他输了比赛大发脾气。）
2. Villanelle:十九行诗 A poem composed of an uneven number (usually five) of tercets rhyming aba, with a final quatrain rhyming abaa. 英文十九行诗由五个三行体和最后一个四行体组成，三行体的韵式为aba， 四行体的韵式为abaa。
3. 闪族语：包括阿拉伯语和希伯来语、巴比伦语、亚述语（亚述人是主要生活在西亚两河流域北部（今伊拉克的摩苏尔地区）的一支闪族人，或者更确切地说是与非闪族人融合了的闪族人。）
4. 赫尔波斯：阿根廷诗人、小说家兼翻译家。在剑桥读大学。掌握英、法、德等多国文字。
5. "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."
ESSAY赏析
通常招生官不建议申请者在写ESSAY时，使用一些自己不太了解的不擅长的大词汇，就如本文作者所写的开头。但是，作者故意这样写就是希望给招生官展示出自己的优势：能说会说。
开头介绍吸引了读者，而更不可思议的是作者不但明白这些词语而且深深的崇拜它们。写作中恰如其分的将语言与进化生物学结合比较。为了让大家更清楚的明白作者想要表达的意思，作者引用了达尔文的物种起源说形象的描绘出了一幅语言图解。
作者将进化论与未来语言研究、语言的掌握与理解以及学习的渴望相连系。她一边引用“芝麻”讲述芝麻史，引出达尔文中的句子紧扣ESSAY。
这篇ESSAY并不是一篇完美的ESSAY。作者在芝麻和“physiology”两例中，浪费了太多的笔墨。不管怎样，这篇ESSAY是成功的，因为透过作者讲述的事件，作者鲜明的有点儿古怪的人物性格跃然纸上，令人无法忘怀。
—Alissa D’Gama
原文参考
ENDLESS FORMS MOST BEAUTIFUL
Syllepsis. Propinquity. Villanelle. Caprice. Of all my accomplishments, I think I am most proud of being able to speak. How wonderful that my mouth can shape sounds and dispatch syllables on command. To be sure, I don’t deserve all the credit, or maybe any credit, for this achievement. I owe it to millions of years of evolution pushing my vocal tract open and stuffing my head with a frontal cortex the consistency of toothpaste. I owe it to the parents and caregivers who poured a catalog of sounds into my infant ears until I started babbling back.
Perhaps the greater feat is not that I have a command of language but that language has arrived to meet me. What an epic journey it has made, evolving alongside its human carriers, spreading and mutating into countless local variants and dialects. And now I change it, too, with my willfully split infinitives and my stubborn use of the gender-neutral singular “they.”
As far as I can remember, my love of language began in seventh grade, when I studied some 10,000 words for the National Spelling Bee and climbed to sixteenth place before “ginglymus” fooled me with its pretentious “y.” My mom maintains that the love affair began before then, when I spelled “physiology” for a few amused grad students at the age of two. Whatever the case, words have come alive for me like organisms in so many dynamic species, each of them holding a story about ancestors I’ve never met.
Take “sesame,” for example. Like many others, it came to English through Latin and Greek, but for millennia it traveled through Semitic languages, Babylonian and Assyrian, whose civilizations grew sesame for its oil before English even existed. Now “sesame,” a survivor among so many dead species and forgotten fossils, recapitulates in three syllables the entire illustrious history of sesame cultivation west of the Indus River.
I think this is why I collect languages—English in school, Chinese at home, French for Camus’s plays, and Spanish for Borges’s short stories; Greek, Arabic, and Italian remain on my wish list. It’s because if I am patient, each will give up its structural skeleton, its lexical ornaments, and its cultural history to me; with each one I come closer to having the right label for every situation and need. Chinese gives me wú liáo, for people with too much time on their hands. French gives me décaler, for the awful feeling of being “off,” either too far forward or backward in time. Spanish provides involucrado, for things inextricably bound up in one another. And so on, each new word bringing me the joy of finding something I didn’t know I lacked.
In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin marveled at the “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful” that he saw in the life around him. For me, words, with their seemingly infinite variety, inspire that same reverence. I should like to spend my life with words as Darwin did with his finches and barnacles and beetles, studying how linguistic species can diverge from each other, go their own way and accumulate mutations, hybridize with other populations, cross oceans and mountains, struggle to survive invasions. I think I would be happy tracing the vast network of language even as it changes constantly before us, knowing that every word I speak adds to such a breathtaking human accomplishment.
