研究生英语复习摘要.docx

PAGE8 / NUMPAGES8 Lesson 1 Make the following assertion as editor of the book Language in Britain and Ireland. For English is a killer. It is English that has killed off Norn. There are still parts of these islands where sizeable communities speak languages that were there before English. Yet English is everywhere in everyday use and understood by all or virtually all, constituting such a threat to three remaining Celtic languages. an English academic 一位英国学者 In it, he argued that the major English-speaking countries, the worldwide English-language teaching industry, and notably the British Council pursue policies of linguistic aggrandizement. He also associated such policies with a prejudice which he calls linguicism(a condition parallel to racism and sexism). As someone sees it 在某人看来 predominantly white English-speaking world主要的白人讲英语国家 the hegemonic spread of English英语的大肆扩张 economic and colonial expansion经济和殖民扩张 point up the dangers of English as a world language the internationalization of English has in the last few decades been widely discussed in terms of three groups. Since the 1980s, when such terms became common, this third circle has in fact expanded to take in the entire planet. By and large, we now view them as more or less benign, and often talk with admiration and appreciation about the cultures associated with them and what they have given to the world. And it is fairly safe to do this, because none of them poses much of a threat. English however is probably too close for us to be able to analyze and judge it as dispassionately as we may now discuss the influence of Classical Chinese on East Asia or of Classical Latin on Western Europe. The jury is still out in the trial of the English language, and may take several centuries to produce its verdict. But even so we can ask, in this European Year of Language, whether Price and Phillipson are right to warn us all about the language that I am using at this very moment. It certainly is not hard to lo