英语演讲-全世界的通用语言.doc

演讲稿范文/英语演讲稿 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 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，旧千年以及新旧之交，而且我们都在用同一种语言对论。几百年前，举办一次像这样的活动是十分麻烦的，我们得流利地说许多种不同的语言，因为克服语言障碍就是学习多种不同的语言。当然，那时候的人们有一个心照不宣的观念：不同的语言显示着社会地位，就如西班牙国王查尔斯五世说的：“我对上帝说西班牙语，对女人说意大利语，对男人说法语，对马儿说德语。”今天我们的目的有些不一样。我们不用将学习精力分散于多种语言的学习上，而是集中在一种特别的语言英语的掌握上。时代杂志最近说，在世纪之交，英语将会成为世界四分之一人口的通用语言。今天已经有60%的电视和广播在用英语制作和传输。70%的信件是用英语写的。英语还是全球传送的电脑资料的几乎每个字节所选择的语言。但为什么是英语？对于它的全球化没有明确的语言学的原因。诚然它的语法是复杂的，拼写是独特的，发音是古怪的。就拿最基本的说，只要查一，你就能发现一大串逗人的似非而是的隽语quicksand反而慢腾腾，boxing ring 原来是方的，guinea pig不是来自几内亚，也不是猪。一个人可以说 “make amends”，但却不能说 “one amend”，这不是很奇怪吗？你可以翻阅一本史册，但却不能把“一本史册”说成 “one annal”。其中的原因，女士们，先生们，是很简单的，英语够奇怪的了，但是对于另外一些说法就更奇怪了。也许我该给大家举出几个成语例子。“千载难逢”用英语我们说“once in a blue moon” 。在意大利语中则成了“every death of a pope”。爱尔