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1、英语演讲:全世界的通用语言the english language 英语语言mr. chairman, adjudicators, ladies and gentlemen,good afternoon.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
2、 of the third millennium.already this afternoon youve 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 th
3、e contestants here today. perhaps the only thing that 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 tha
4、t we were all fluent in a number of different tongues, 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
5、charles v of spain put it, “ i speak spanish to god, italian 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 pa
6、rticular language, the english language. time magazine recently suggested that by the turn of the millennium, english will be the lingua franca for one quarter of the worlds population. already today si_ty percents of the worlds television and radio broadcasts are produced and delivered in english.
7、seventy percents of the worlds mail addressed in english. and it is the language of choice for almost every bite of puter data sent across the globe.but why english? there are no clear linguistic reasons for its suggested global dominance, certainly the grammar is plicated, the spelling peculiar and
8、 the pronunciation eccentric, to say the very least. one would need only look through the dictionary to find the vast list of amusing parado_es in the english languagequicksand that works slowly, a bo_ing ring that is in fact square and a guinea pig thats really neither from guinea nor is it a pig.
9、doesnt 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 e_les. in english
10、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 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 bett
11、er served by the phrase “go fry asparagus”. englishs primary advantage is that of fle_ibility. on the one hand it has the largest vocabulary of all modern languages, allowing us, as its users, to say e_actly what we want in e_actly the words we choose to use. on the other, globalization has insured
12、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 the 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 t
13、he 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 one can only hope
14、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 language. 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
15、 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, qu
16、ite possibly the only thing we can say for sure is that theyll be discussing the issues in one mon universal language. and that will be the language of the third millennium. and that language without any doubt looks set to be english. thank you.全世界的通用语言-英语主席先生诸位评判员女士们先生们：下午好。1999年的到来给我们带来了一个回顾过去千年的好机会评价人类的成与败展望第三个千年的前景。今天下午大家已经听到了许多评价和不同的展望。这些评价和展望是如此之多从刘易斯-卡罗对幸福生活的描绘到爱尔兰人的死亡庆典。这些评价和展望是如此之多以致今天的比赛上很难发现任何相同之说。也许唯一的相同点就是我们的确在讨论千年期新千年旧千年以及新旧之
