THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE 为什么一定要学英语？

F小编导读：本篇演讲选自１９９９年５月１４日在伦敦举行的１９９９年国际英语演讲比赛决赛（International Public Speaking Competition）中来自南非的一名选手的演说，本次比赛的主题是＂这到底是谁的千年？＂（Whose Millennium Is It, Anyway?）

幽默风趣的演讲是很受欢迎的，也是最难把握的．幽默不仅仅是讲一个笑话这么简单，幽默的使用不能过火．留意这篇演说中列出的许多有趣的语言现象和大量语言习语，同时注意演讲者在说到这些时如何利用语调的变化来表达不同的情感．

此篇文章英式发音，适合精读，模仿，精听。

Mr. Chairman, adjudicators, ladies and gentlemen, Good afternoon.

The arrival of the year 1999 has brought with it a near perfect opportunity to take a look back at the last one thousand years, assess man’s successes and failures, and look forward with our predictions of the third 1)millennium. Already this afternoon you’ve heard many assessments and you’ve heard a variety of predictions. 

A few hundred years ago to have held an event like this it would have been 2)imperative that we were all fluent in a number of different 3)tongues, for the approach of combating the language barrier was simply to learn many different languages. Of course people back then had an 4)ulterior motive: that was to ensure that different languages held their different societal positions, or as King Charles V of Spain put it, “I speak Spanish to God, Italian to woman, French to men and German to my horse.” 

Today our approach is somewhat different. Instead of trying to vastly spread our 5)verbal ability 6)across the board, we’ve 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, ----------------------------听写此句------------------------------------. Already today sixty percent of the world’s television and radio broadcasts are produced and delivered in English. Seventy percent of the world’s mail addressed in English. And it is the language of choice for almost every byte 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 8)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 language- 9)quicksand that works slowly, a 10)boxing ring that is in fact square and a 11)guinea pig that’s really neither from Guinea nor is it a pig. Doesn’t it seem odd that one can make 12)amends but not one 13)amend. Or 14)go through the 15)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 16)alternatives.

Perhaps I should give you a few 17)idiomatic examples. In English we say “once in a blue moon.” The Italians choose instead “every death of a Pope.” Yiddish doesn’t like our “drop dead,” replacing it rather with the slightly more obscure “you should lie in the earth?” And if you wanted to 18)tell someone off in Spanish our relatively obvious “19)go fly a kite” would be better served by the phrase “go fry 20)asparagus.” English’s 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 21)trimmed down variety of the language we’ve all come to know and love. 

In a thousand years time, Western clocks will hopefully have ticked onto the year 2999 and we can be assured that scientists, academics and 22)futurists will 23)convene, much like we’ve done today to look back at the third millennium and offer their predictions for the successes of the forth. 

It’s impossible to imagine what they might say, impossible to imagine what technology they’ll have available or even which planet they’ll hold the meeting on. In fact, quite possibly the only thing we can say for sure is that they’ll 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.