The Hal-Marks of American.docVIP

The Hall-Marks of American 美国的特点 By H.L. Mencken H．L．门肯 The characters chiefly noted in American English by all who have discussed it are, first, its general uniformity throughout the country; second, its impatient disregard for grammatical, syntactical, and phonological rule and precedent; and third, its large capacity (distinctly greater than that of the English of present-day England) for taking in new words and phrases from outside sources, and for manufacturing them of its own material. 所谓的特点主要是指大家所谈论的美式英语。首先是它全国通用，差别不大。其次是它不注重语法，句法和音韵规则及过去的成例。第三，它大量地（明显的大于当下英语的数量）采用外来的新词和短语，并且把它们变成自己的语言。 The first of these characters has struck every observer, native and foreign. In place of the discordant local dialects of all the other major countries, including England, we have a general Volkssprache for the whole nation, and if it is conditioned at all it is only by minor differences in pronunciation and vocabulary, and by the linguistic struggles of various groups of newcomers. No other country can show such linguistic solidarity, nor any approach to it—not even Canada, for there a large minority of the population resists speaking English altogether. The Little Russian of the Ukraine is unintelligible to the citizen of Moscow; the northern Italian can scarcely follow a conversation in Sicilian; the Low German from Hamburg is a foreigner in Munich; the Breton flounders in Gascony. Even in the United Kingdom there are wide divergences. ‘When we remember’, says the New International Encyclopedia, ‘that the dialects of the counties in England have marked differences—so marked, indeed, that it may be doubted whether a Lancashire miner and a Lincolnshire farmer could understand each other—we may well be proud that our vast country has, strictly speaking, only one language.’ There are some regional peculiarities in pronunciation and intonation, but when it comes to the words they habitually use and the way they use them all Americans,