○  英语演讲:全世界的通用语言  ○

　　but why english? there are no clear linguistic reasons for its suggested global dominance, certainly the grammar is complicated, the spelling peculiar and the pronunciation eccentric, to say the very least. one would need only look through the dictionary to find the vast list of amusing paradoxes in the english language—quicksand that works slowly, a boxing ring that is in fact square and a guinea pig that’s really neither from guinea nor is it a pig. doesn’t it seem odd that one can make amends but not one amend. or go through the annals of history but not one annal. the reason, ladies and gentlemen, is simple. english is strange, but no where near as strange as some of our alternatives.

　　perhaps i should give you a few idiomatic examples. in english we say “once in a blue moon”. the italian choose instead “every death of a pope”. irish doesn’t like our “drop dead”, replacing it rather with the slightly more obscure “you should lie in the earth.” and if you wanted to tell someone off in spanish our relatively obvious “go fly a kite” would be better served by the phrase “go fry asparagus”. english’s primary advantage is that of flexibility. on the one hand it has the largest vocabulary of all modern languages, allowing us, as its users, to say exactly what we want in exactly the words we choose to use. on the other, globalization has insured the introduction of a business english, a sort of trimmed down variety of the language we’ve all come to know and love.

　　it’s interesting to know that the simple list of just ten words, words like “a”, “and”, “have” and “the”, combined to form one quarter of all those ever used in modern communication. perhaps the real test is: will the global adoption of english as a master language insure the eradication of any misunderstandings that happen today? the answer is not as simple. russell hoven once asked: “how many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?” but o

上一页  [1] [2] [3] [4] 下一页