英语演讲：全世界的通用语言

2021年1月26日发(作者：heaven)

英语演讲：全世界的通用语言


英语语言



an, 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 man
’
s successes and failures, and look forward with our
predictions of the third millennium.


Already
this
afternoon
you
’
ve
heard
many
assessments
and
you
’
ve
heard
a
variety
of
predictions.


A
variety
so
vast,
ranging
from
Lewis
Carol
’
s
depiction
of
celebratory
life,
to
the
Irish
celebration of death.


So vast a variety that it
’
s 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 we
’
re 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, Ita
lian 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, 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, English will be the
Lingua Franca for one quarter of the world
’
s population.