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

2、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 cntestants here tday. Perhaps the nly thing that we all share is that we are indeed discussing millennia, t

3、he 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 lear

4、n many different languages. f curse peple back then had an ulterir mtive: that was t ensure that different 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 diff

5、erent. 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

6、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 c

7、lear 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 dictinary t find the vast list f amusing parades in the English languagequicksand that wrks slwly, a

8、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 s

9、me f ur alternatives.Perhaps I shuld give yu a few idimatic eamples. In English we say “nce in a blue 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 r

10、elatively 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

11、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

12、 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 th