大学英语演讲稿：ENGLISH

1、大学英语演讲稿：ENGLISHGd afternn.The arrival f the year 1999 has brught with a near perfect pprtunity t take a lk back at the last ne thusand years, assess mans successes and failures, and lk frward with ur predictins f the third millennium.Already this afternn yuve heard many assessments and yuve heard a variety f predictins. A variety s vast, ranging frm Lewis Carls depictin f celebratry life, t the Irish celebratin f death. S vast a variety that its difficult t find any cmmn grund amngst the cntesta

2、nts here tday. Perhaps the nly thing that we all share is that we are indeed discussing millennia, the ld and the new and the turn f the millennium, and were all discussing it in the same language.A few hundred years ag t have held an event like this it wuld have been imperative that we were all fluent in a number f different tngues, fr the apprach f cmbating the language barrier was simply t learn many different languages. f curse peple back then had an ulterir mtive: that was t ensure that dif

3、ferent languages held their different scieties r psitins, r as King Charles V f Spain put it, “ I speak Spanish t Gd, Italian t wmen, French t men and German t my hrse.”Tday ur apprach is smewhat different. Instead f trying t vastly spread ur verbal ability acrss the bard, weve chsen rather t fcus it, cncentrating n ur ability t master ne particular language, the English language. Time magazine recently suggested that by the turn f the millennium, English will be the Lingua Franca fr ne quarter

4、f the wrlds ppulatin. Already tday sity percents f the wrlds televisin and radi bradcasts are prduced and delivered in English. Seventy percents f the wrlds mail addressed in English. And it is the language f chice fr almst every bite f cmputer data sent acrss the glbe.But why English? There are n clear linguistic reasns fr its suggested glbal dminance, certainly the grammar is cmplicated, the spelling peculiar and the prnunciatin eccentric, t say the very least. ne wuld need nly lk thrugh the d

5、ictinary t find the vast list f amusing parades in the English languagequicksand that wrks slwly, a bing ring that is in fact square and a guinea pig thats really neither frm Guinea nr is it a pig. Desnt it seem dd that ne can make amends but nt ne amend. r g thrugh the annals f histry but nt ne annal. The reasn, ladies and gentlemen, is simple. English is strange, but n where near as strange as sme f ur alternatives.Perhaps I shuld give yu a few idimatic eamples. In English we say “nce in a blu

6、e mn”. The Italian chse instead “every death f a Ppe”. Irish desnt like ur “drp dead”, replacing it rather with tre bscure “yu shuld lie in the earth.” And if yu wanted t tell smene ff in Spanish ur relatively bvius “g fly a kite” wuld be better served by the phrase “g fry asparagus”. Englishs primary advantage is that f fleibility. n the ne hand it has the largest vcabulary f all mdern languages, allwing us, as its users, t say eactly what we want in eactly the wrds we chse t use. n the ther, g

7、lbalizatin has insured the intrductin f a business English, a srt f trimmed dwn variety f the language weve all cme t knw and lve.Its interesting t knw that the simple list f just ten wrds, wrds like “a”, “and”, “have”bined t frm ne quarter f all thse ever used in mdern cmmunicatin. Perhaps the real test is: will the glbal adptin f English as a master language insure the eradicatin f any misunderstandings that happen tday? The answer is nt as simple. Russell Hven nce asked: “Hw many peple speak the same language even when they speak the same language?” But ne can nly hpe that ur nly aim and ur nly chance f insuring that we cmmunicate effectively with each ther is t make sure that we d speak ne universal language. In a thusand years time Western clcks will hpefully have ticked nt the year 2999 and we can be assured that scientists, academics and futurists will cnvene, much like weve dne tday t lk back at the third millenium and ffer their predictins fr the successes f the frth.

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