英語(yǔ)演講-全世界的通用語(yǔ)言.doc

演講稿范文/英語(yǔ)演講稿 英語(yǔ)演講:全世界的通用語(yǔ)言 the english language 英語(yǔ)語(yǔ)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 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 common ground amongst the 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 that we were all fluent in a number of different tongues, for the approach of combating 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, 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 particular 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 sixty percents of the worlds television and radio broadcasts are produced and delivered in english. seventy percents of the worlds mail addressed in english. and it is the language of choice for almost every bite of computer data sent across the globe.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 languagequicksand that works slowly, a boxing ring that is in fact square and a guinea pig thats really neither from guinea nor is it a pig. 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 examples. 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 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 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 weve all come to know and love.its 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 one can only hope that our only aim and our only chance of insuring that we communicate 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 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 planet theyll hold the meeting on. in fact, quite possibly the only thing we can say for sure is that theyll be discussing the issues in one common 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.全世界的通用語(yǔ)言-英語(yǔ)主席先生，諸位評(píng)判員，女士們，先生們：下午好。1999年的到來(lái)給我們帶來(lái)了一個(gè)回顧過(guò)去千年的好機(jī)會(huì)，評(píng)價(jià)人類的成與敗，展望第三個(gè)千年的前景。今天下午大家已經(jīng)聽(tīng)到了許多評(píng)價(jià)和不同的展望。這些評(píng)價(jià)和展望是如此之多，從劉易斯-卡羅對(duì)幸福生活的描繪，到愛(ài)爾蘭人的死亡慶典。這些評(píng)價(jià)和展望是如此之多，以致今天的比賽上很難發(fā)現(xiàn)任何相同之說(shuō)。也許唯一的相同點(diǎn)就是我們的確在討論千年期，新千年，舊千年以及新舊之交，而且我們都在用同一種語(yǔ)言對(duì)論。幾百年前，舉辦一次像這樣的活動(dòng)是十分麻煩的，我們得流利地說(shuō)許多種不同的語(yǔ)言，因?yàn)榭朔Z(yǔ)言障礙就是學(xué)習(xí)多種不同的語(yǔ)言。當(dāng)然，那時(shí)候的人們有一個(gè)心照不宣的觀念：不同的語(yǔ)言顯示著社會(huì)地位，就如西班牙國(guó)王查爾斯五世說(shuō)的：“我對(duì)上帝說(shuō)西班牙語(yǔ)，對(duì)女人說(shuō)意大利語(yǔ)，對(duì)男人說(shuō)法語(yǔ)，對(duì)馬兒說(shuō)德語(yǔ)?！苯裉煳覀兊哪康挠行┎灰粯?。我們不用將學(xué)習(xí)精力分散于多種語(yǔ)言的學(xué)習(xí)上，而是集中在一種特別的語(yǔ)言英語(yǔ)的掌握上。時(shí)代雜志最近說(shuō)，在世紀(jì)之交，英語(yǔ)將會(huì)成為世界四分之一人口的通用語(yǔ)言。今天已經(jīng)有60%的電視和廣播在用英語(yǔ)制作和傳輸。70%的信件是用英語(yǔ)寫(xiě)的。英語(yǔ)還是全球傳送的電腦資料的幾乎每個(gè)字節(jié)所選擇的語(yǔ)言。但為什么是英語(yǔ)？對(duì)于它的全球化沒(méi)有明確的語(yǔ)言學(xué)的原因。誠(chéng)然它的語(yǔ)法是復(fù)雜的，拼寫(xiě)是獨(dú)特的，發(fā)音是古怪的。就拿最基本的說(shuō)，只要查一，你就能發(fā)現(xiàn)一大串逗人的似非而是的雋語(yǔ)quicksand反而慢騰騰，boxing ring 原來(lái)是方的，guinea pig不是來(lái)自幾內(nèi)亞，也不是豬。一個(gè)人可以說(shuō) “make amends”，但卻不能說(shuō) “one amend”，這不是很奇怪嗎？你可以翻閱一本史冊(cè)，但卻不能把“一本史冊(cè)”說(shuō)成 “one annal”。其中的原因，女士們，先生們，是很簡(jiǎn)單的，英語(yǔ)夠奇怪的了，但是對(duì)于另外一些說(shuō)法就更奇怪了。也許我該給大家舉出幾個(gè)成語(yǔ)例子?！扒лd難逢”用英語(yǔ)我們說(shuō)“once in a blue moon” 。在意大利語(yǔ)中則成了“every death of a pope”。愛(ài)爾