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1、Book One,Unit 4,Book One,Content,Warming-up,Reading,Writing,Text A,Text B,Book One,Lead-in questions,2. India Iraq Jordan Kuwait Yemen Libya Nigeria Philippines Singapore Sudan Tanzania Uganda,Book One,Lead-in questions,British English aeroplane booking office carat Christian name exhaust pipe trous
2、ers queue railway station motorway ground floor,American English airplane ticket office karat given name tailpipe pants,slacks line train station freeway, expressway first floor,Book One,Questions: 1) Which kind of English are you studying now, American English or British English? What are the diffe
3、rences between them?2) In which aspests does American English attracts you? Through what channels does American English spread to the rest of the world? Offer some examples.3) Chinese is increasingly popular outside China, do you see any possibility that Chinese will become the most prevailing langu
4、age throughout the world in the future? Why/why not?,Group discussion,Book One,THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH H. L. Mencken,Book One,ReadingText A,Text Study,Main Idea on the contrary, the vast reaches of the vocabulary naturally alarm him. The thing that really wins him is the succinctness and simplicity of
5、 the language. We use, for all our store of Latin polysyllables, a great many more short words than long ones, and we are always trying to make the long ones short. What was once puniligrion is now pun; what was gasoline only yesterday is already gas. No other European language has so many three-let
6、ter words, nor so many four-word sayings. “First come, first served”that is typically English, for it is bold, plain, and short. 6 The English psychologist, Dr. Ogden believes, indeed, that 850 words are sufficient for all ordinary purposes, and he has devised a form of simplified English, called by
7、 him Basic, which uses no more. Of his 850 words no less than 600 are the names of things, which leaves only 250 for the names of qualities and actions, and for all the linguistic hooks and eyes that hold sentences together.,Book One,Para.7-8,7 Does this seem too few? Then it is only to those who ha
8、ve forgotten one of the prime characteristics of Englishits capacity for getting an infinity of meanings out of a single word by combining it with simple modifiers. Consider, for example, the difference between the verbs to get. To get going, to get by, to get on to, to get wise, to get off, to get
9、ahead of, and to get over. Dr. Ogden proposes to rid the language of a great many verbssome of them irregular, and hence difficultby substituting such compounds for them. Why, for example, should a foreigner be taught to say that he has disembarked from a ship? Isnt it sufficient for him to say that
10、 he has got off? And why should he be taught to say that he has recovered from the flu, or escaped the police, or obtained a job? Isnt it enough to say that he has got over the first, got away from the second, and simply got the third? 8 But as English spreads, will it be able to maintain its presen
11、t form? Probably not. But why should it? Every successful effort at standardization seldom succeeds. The schoolmaam has been trying since the Revolution to bring American English to her rules, but it goes on sprouting, and it will eventually conquer the English of England.,Book One,Para. 9-10,9 This
12、 guess indeed is rather too easy to be quite sporting. English has been yielding to American for fifty years past, and since the turn of the century it has been yielding at a constantly accelerated rate. The flow of novelties in vocabulary, in idiom, even in pronunciation, is now overwhelmingly east
13、ward. We seldom borrow an English word or phrase any more, though we used to borrow many; but the English take in our inventions almost as fast as we can launch them. The American movie, I suppose, is largely responsible for this change, but there are unquestionably deeper causes too. English is sti
14、ll a bit tight, a bit stiff, more than a little artificial. But American has gone on developing with almost Elizabethan prodigality. All the processes of word-formation that were in operation in Shakespeares England are still in operation here, and they produce a steady stream of neologisms that he
15、would have relished as joyfully as he relished the novelties actually produced in his time. 10 The English, from the Age of Anne onward, have resisted the march of American with a mixture of patriotic watchfulness and moral indignation, albeit with steadily decreasing effectiveness.,Book One,Para.11
16、-12,11 The English travelers who began to swarm in America after 1800 gave willing aid in this benign work, and scarcely one of them failed to record his horror over the new American words that he encountered, and the unfamiliar American pronunciation. Captain Basil Hall, who was here in 1827 and 1828, went to the length of making a call upon Noah Webster, then over 70 years of age, to lodge his protest. “Surely,” he said, “such innovations are to be deprecated.” “I dont
