英語競賽演講全世界的通用語言英語演講

1、第 PAGE5 頁 共 NUMPAGES5 頁英語競賽演講:全世界的通用語言 - 英語演講 - The arrival of the year 1999 has brought with a near perfect opportunity to take a look back at the last one thousand years, assess mans successes and failures, and look forward with our predictions of the third millennium.Already this afternoon youve

2、heard many assessments and youve heard a variety of predictions. A variety so vast, ranging from Lewis Carols depiction of celebratory life, to the Irish celebration of death. So vast a variety that its difficult to find any mon ground amongst the contestants here today. Perhaps the only thing that

3、we all share is that we are indeed discussing millennia, the old and the new and the turn of the millennium, and were all discussing it in the same language.A few hundred years ago to have held an event like this it would have been imperative that we were all fluent in a number of different tongues,

4、 for the approach of bating the language barrier was simply to learn many different languages. Of course people back then had an ulterior motive: that was to ensure that different languages held their different societies or positions, or as King Charles V of Spain put it, “ I speak Spanish to God, I

5、talian to women, French to men and German to my horse.”Today our approach is somewhat different. Instead of trying to vastly spread our verbal ability across the board, weve chosen rather to focus it, concentrating on our ability to master one particular language, the English language. Time magazine

6、 recently suggested that by the turn of the millennium, English will be the Lingua Franca for one quarter of the worlds population. Already today sixty percents of the worlds television and radio broadcasts are produced and delivered in English. Seventy percents of the worlds mail addressed in Engli

7、sh. And it is the language of choice for almost every bite of puter data sent across the globe.Perhaps I should give you a few idiomatic exles. In English we say “once in a blue moon”. The Italian choose instead “every death of a Pope”. Irish doesnt like our “drop dead”, replacing it rather with the

8、 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”. Englishs primary advantage is that of flexibility. On the one hand it has the largest vocabulary of a

9、ll 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 weve all e to know and love.Its interesting to know that t

10、he simple list of just ten words, words like “a”, “and”, “have” and “the”, bined to form one quarter of all those ever used in modern munication. 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

11、answer is not as simple. Russell Hoven once asked: “How many people speak the same language even when they speak the same language?” But one can only hope that our only aim and our only chance of insuring that we municate effectively with each other is to make sure that we do speak one universal lan

12、guage. In a thousand years time Western clocks will hopefully have ticked onto the year 2999 and we can be assured that scientists, academics and futurists will convene, much like weve done today to look back at the third millenium and offer their predictions for the successes of the forth.Its impossible to imagine what they might say, impossible to imagine what technology theyll have available or even which pla theyll hold the meeting on. In fact, quite possibly the only thing we can say for su