1、Several Languages Called English（幾種語言稱之為英語）English isnt managing to sweep all else before it-and if ever does become the universal language, many of those who speak it wont understand one another.在此之前，英語不能支配其他的全部，如果當(dāng)初就成為通用的語言，那么那些說話人也是不能夠相互理解的。Much of what will happen to English we can only speculat

2、e about. But lets pursue an idea that language researchers regard as fairly well grounded: native speakers of English are already outnumbered by second-language and foreign-language speakers, and will be more heavily outnumbered as time goes on. 關(guān)于英語將會發(fā)生的許多變化我們僅僅只能作出推測。但是，讓我們來追尋被語言研究者們認(rèn)為是相關(guān)的背景：將英語作為

3、第二語言或外語的人，在數(shù)量上超過了以英語作為母語的人；并且隨著時間的推移，還將超出更多。One obvious implication is that some proportion of the people using English for business or professional purposes around the world arent and neednt be fluent in it. Recently I talked with Michael Henry Heim, a professor of Slavic literatures at the Univers

4、ity of California at Los Angeles and a professional translator who has rendered into English major works by Milan Kundera and Gunter Grass. By his count, he speaks ten or so languages. He told me flatly, English is much easier to learn poorly and to communicate in poorly than any other language. Im

5、sure that if Hungary were the leader of the world, Hungarian would not be the world language. To communicate on a day-to-day basis - to order a meal, to book a room - theres no language as simple as English. Research, though, suggests that people are likely to find a language easier or harder to lea

6、rn according to how similar it is to their native tongue, in terms of things like word order, grammatical structure, and cognate words. As the researcher Terence Odlin noted in his book HYPERLINK /exec/obidos/ISBN=0521378095/theatlanticmonthA/ t outlink Language Transfer (1989), the duration of full

7、-time intensive courses given to English-speaking U.S. foreign-service personnel amounts to a rough measurement of how different, in these ways, other languages are from English. Today the courses for foreign-service employees who need to learn German, Italian, French, Spanish, or Portuguese last tw

8、enty-four weeks. Those for employees learning Swahili, Indonesian, or Malay last thirty-six weeks, and for people learning languages including Hindi, Urdu, Russian, and Hungarian, forty-four weeks. Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean take eighty-eight weeks. Note that all the worlds other commones

9、t native languages except Spanish are in the groups most demanding of English-speakers. It might be reasonable to suppose that the reverse is also true - that Arabic- and Chinese-speakers find fluency in English to be more of a challenge than Spanish-speakers do. 一個顯而易見的含義就是：在世界上，一部分人們出于商業(yè)和職業(yè)的目的而使用英

10、語，他們的英語不流利，也不需要流利。最近我和麥克爾亨利交談，他是洛杉磯加利福尼亞大學(xué)的斯拉乎文學(xué)教授，也是一位專職翻譯，他曾將米蘭和甘特的主要著作翻譯成英語。以他的計算，他能說出大約十種語言。他平和地跟我說：“英語較其他語言更能草草地學(xué)會，簡單交流，我確信，假如匈牙利是這個世界的領(lǐng)導(dǎo)者，匈牙利語也不能成為世界性的語言。在日?；窘涣髦?，如點餐、定房，沒有語言象英語一樣的簡單?！北M管，研究表明人們認(rèn)為一種語言的簡單與困難與否，是根據(jù)這種語言相對于其母語的語序、語法結(jié)構(gòu)和同根詞語的相似度而言的。根據(jù)Terence Odlin的研究在語言的演變一書中提到，為使英語會話及涉外服務(wù)人員開設(shè)一段時間的全日

11、制強化課程，當(dāng)作一個粗略的度量，用這種方法來比較英語與其他語言之間的不同。今天，這類為涉外服務(wù)人員需要學(xué)習(xí)德語、意大利語、法語、西班牙語和葡萄牙語設(shè)置的課程為期24周。而那些員工學(xué)習(xí)斯瓦西語、印度尼西亞語或馬來語的課程，為期為36周。還有那些學(xué)習(xí)北印度語、烏爾都語、匈牙利語的則為44周。阿拉伯語、漢語、日語、韓語的則達88周。我們注意到，在世界范圍內(nèi)除了以西班牙語為母語的人們以外，大部分人說英語都比較難。這個反推可能也是正確的，說阿拉伯語和漢語的人們相對與說西班牙語的人們學(xué)好流利的英語更富挑戰(zhàn)性。A variety of restricted subsets of English have b

12、een developed to meet the needs of nonfluent speakers. Among these is HYPERLINK /special/ t outlink Special English, which the HYPERLINK / t outlink Voice of America began using in its broadcasts experimentally some forty years ago and has employed part-time ever since. Special English has a basic v

13、ocabulary of just 1,500 words ( HYPERLINK /61/ t outlink The American Heritage Dictionary contains some 200,000 words, and the HYPERLINK / t outlink Oxford English Dictionary nearly 750,000), though sometimes these words are used to define non-Special English words that VOA writers deem essential to

14、 a given story. Currently VOA uses Special English for news and features that are broadcast a half hour at a time, six times a day, seven days a week, to millions of listeners worldwide. 為適應(yīng)說不大流利英語的人，各種特定形式的英語得到了發(fā)展。慢速英語就是其中之一，它早在40多年前，“美國之音”電臺就開始了試驗性的廣播，并一直用到現(xiàn)在。慢速英語的基本詞匯只有1500個單詞（美國傳統(tǒng)字典里囊括了20萬詞，牛津英語

15、字典收入將近75萬個詞），盡管有時這些單詞常被用于闡述非慢速英語的詞，而這些詞對于美國之音的作者講故事是必要的。因為近來，美國之音利用慢速英語面向的是世界各地數(shù)以百萬的聽眾，進行每周7天，每天6次，每次30分的新聞和特寫的報道。But restricted forms of English are usually intended for professional communities. Among the best known of these is Seaspeak, which ships pilots around the world have used for the past d

16、ozen years or so; this is now being supplanted by HYPERLINK .hk/mardep/comphrase/comphrase.htm t outlink SMCP, or Standard Marine Communication Phrases, which is also derived from English but was developed by native speakers of a variety of languages. Airplane pilots and air-traffic controllers use

17、a restricted form of English called Airspeak. 但是，特定形式的英語通常通常供專業(yè)團體使用，其中有為大家所熟知的航空用語，它是大約在12年前，在世界范圍內(nèi)飛行員所采用的語言，現(xiàn)在已經(jīng)被SMCP即標(biāo)準(zhǔn)航空用語所替代。SMCP也是起源于英語，但卻是由不同以不同母語的說話使用者那里得到發(fā)展的。飛機領(lǐng)航員和空中交通指揮員所使用的特定形式的英語叫做航空語言。Certainly, the worlds ships and airplanes are safer if those who guide them have some language in commo

18、n, and restricted forms of English have no modern-day rivals for this role. The greatest danger language now seems to pose to navigation and aviation is that some pilots learn only enough English to describe routine situations, and find themselves at a loss when anything out of the ordinary happens.

19、 當(dāng)然，如果操縱船和飛機的人在采用統(tǒng)一的語言，那么這世界上的船和飛機將更加地安全，而對于這個角色，特定形式的英語在現(xiàn)代具有突出的優(yōu)勢?，F(xiàn)在由語言所引起航海和航空的最大的威脅在于，一些領(lǐng)航員只學(xué)習(xí)了描述航線形式的英語，而出現(xiàn)一些意外情況時就使領(lǐng)航員們感到不知所措了。Something else obviously implied by the ascendance of English as a second and a foreign language is that more and more people who speak English speak another language a

20、t least as well, and probably better. India may have the third or fourth largest number of English-speakers in the world, but English is thought to be the mother tongue of much less than one percent of the population. This is bound to affect the way the language is used locally. Browsing some Englis

21、h-language Web sites from India recently, I seldom had trouble understanding what was meant. I did, however, time and again come across unfamiliar words borrowed from Hindi or another indigenous Indian language. On the site called India World the buttons that a user could click on to call up various

22、 types of information were labeled samachar: Personalised News, dhan: Investing in India, khoj: Search India, khel: Indian Cricket, and so forth. When I turned to the HYPERLINK /index.html t outlink Afternoon Despatch & Courier of Bombay (some of whose residents call it Mumbai) and called up a gossi

23、py piece about the romantic prospects of the son of Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi, I read, Sources disclose that before Rahul Gandhi left for London, some kind of a swayamvar was enacted at 10, Janpath with family friend Captain Satish Sharma drawing up a short list of suitable brides from affluent, well-k

24、nown connected families of Uttar Pradesh. 作為第二語言和外語的英語，它隱藏著非常明顯的支配地位，越來越多的人能夠很流利的說英語，而且越說越好。在印度說英語的人數(shù)在世界上排第三或第四，但是只有1的人是以英語為母語的。這必定影響當(dāng)?shù)卣Z言的使用方式，最近我瀏覽印度的英文網(wǎng)站，我似乎有困難去理解它的意思；但是，我卻時常發(fā)現(xiàn)那些不常用的源自印地語或印度當(dāng)?shù)氐钠渌恍┩琳Z的詞。在一個叫印度世界的網(wǎng)站，為了收集各種信息使用者可以點擊一些按鈕，這些按鈕標(biāo)有“samachar：Personalised News” “dhan：Investing in India”“kh

25、oj：Search India” “khel： India Cricket”等許多。當(dāng)我在看孟買快遞下午信使報時，看到關(guān)于Gandhui兒子的隱私和浪漫方面的閑話，我讀到了這么一句“”O(jiān)f course, English is renowned for its ability to absorb elements from other languages. As ever more local and national communities use English, though, they will pull language in ever more directions. Few in

26、 the world will care to look as far afield as the United States or Britain for their standards of proper English. After all, we long ago gave up looking to England - as did Indians and also Canadians, South Africans, Australians, and New Zealanders, among others. Today each of these national groups

27、is proud to have its own idioms, and dictionaries to define them. 當(dāng)然，英語以其吸收其他語言中的成分而著稱。由于有更多的地區(qū)和全國性的社團在使用英語，英語將向不同的方向推進，世界上很少有國家偏離美式和英式英語的標(biāo)準(zhǔn)，盡管我們很久以前就不注意英格蘭，而是重視印度、加拿大、北非、澳大利亞、新西蘭等。目前，印度這些國家都為他們自己所有的習(xí)語，以及收錄它們的詞典而感到驕傲。Most of the worlds English-speaking communities can still understand one another we

28、ll - though not, perhaps, perfectly. As Anne Soukhanov, a HYPERLINK /issues/2000/08/wordwatch.htm t outlink word columnist for this magazine and the American editor of the HYPERLINK /exec/obidos/ISBN%3D031222222X/theatlanticmonthA/%22%3E t outlink Encarta World English Dictionary, explained in an ar

29、ticle titled The Kings English It Aint, published on the Internet last year, Some English words mean very different things, depending on your country. In South Asia, a hotel is a restaurant, but in Australia, a hotel is an establishment selling alcoholic beverages. In South Africa, a robot is a traffic light. 世界上大多數(shù)說英語的人們能夠很好