硕士英语阅读教程(基础级第二版)110课文及课后练习题答案翻译.doc

Lesson1 READING SELECTION A World English: A Blessing or a Curse? Universal language By Tom McArthur [1] In the year 2000, the language scholar Glanville Price, a Welshman, made the following assertion as editor of the book Languages in Britain and Ireland: For English is a killer. It is English that has killed off Cumbric, Cornish, Norn and Manx. There are still parts of these islands where sizeable communities speak languages that were there before English. Yet English is everywhere in everyday use and understood by all or virtually all, constituting such a threat to the three remaining Celtic languages, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, and Welsh... that their long-term future must be considered... very greatly at risk. (p 141) Some years earlier, in 1992, Robert Phillipson, English academic who currently works in Denmark, published with Oxford a book entitled Linguistic Imperialism. In it, he argued that the major English-speaking countries, the worldwide English-language teaching industry, and notably the British Council pursue policies of linguistic aggrandisement. He also associated such policies with a prejudice which he calls linguicism (a condition parallel to(equal to/ similar to) racism and sexism). As Phillipson sees it, leading institutions and individuals within the predominantly white English-speaking world, have [by design(=deliberate) or default(=mistake)] encouraged or at least tolerated—and certainly have not opposed—the hegemonic spread of English, a spread which began some three centuries ago as economic and colonial expansion. [2] Phillipson himself worked for some years for the British Council, and he is not alone among Anglophone academics who have sought to point up the dangers of English as a world language. The internationalization of English has in the last few decades been widely discussed in terms of three groups: first, the ENL countries, where English is a native language (this group also being known as the inner circle); second, the ESL co