首页
登录
职称英语
Man is called in Creek the zoon phonanta or talking animal. What makes humani
Man is called in Creek the zoon phonanta or talking animal. What makes humani
游客
2023-11-23
6
管理
问题
Man is called in Creek the zoon phonanta or talking animal. What makes humanity different from the rest of the animal world is its capacity for constructing a system of sound signals which stand not only for its thoughts and feelings about the outside world but for the outside world itself. You will say at once that certain birds talk and some of them talk very well. Chimpanzees can be taught a number of words and a few simple grammatical structures. But only human beings are able to invent whole languages, not merely mimic parts of them or handle a few nouns and verbs. When an animal began to talk, that animal called itself man.
Speech certainly came before the discovery of fire. We still tend to use speech not for conveying messages or expressing feelings but merely for establishing and sustaining human contact.
The act of speaking serves primarily the end of sociability. It does not have to mean anything, but it has to be continuous. At dinner parties a prolonged silence is the most embarrassing thing in the world: it seems to indicate that sociability has failed. It is often broken by more than one person’s speaking at the same time -- excuse me -- sorry -- after you -- no, after you -- and what is said is far less important than the fact of somebody having said something, anything. Every body breathes a sigh of relief, especially the hostess.
We have no means of knowing what the language of, say Stone Age man, was like, but we know something of that ancient language known as Indo-European because its structure and some of its vocabulary, much changed, survive in the daughter languages, which means most of the languages of Europe. It seems to have been a complex language, with a rich grammar, not at all like Malay or Chinese, and it is fairly certain that the further back we go in our study of language the greater complexities we find.
The simplification of language is essentially a part of the modernization of language: modern English is grammatically much simpler than its ancestor Anglo-Saxon, and Italian and Spanish are much simpler than their mother Latin. It is wrong to think of the first talkers taking a few linguistic bricks, joining them together, then baking more bricks and adding them to make a more and more imposing structure. An original babble was associated with a particular feeling or thought, but it was only in the period after, say, the break-up of the Roman Empire that grammarians began to analyze the parts of this babble and come up with terms like noun, verb, adjective, and adverb.
All of us say things we never said before, and without much conscious effort; we’ re always inventing new things to say. That is the great human talent. This talent is based, however, on a very simple peculiarity of the human brain -- its capacity to think in opposed structures.
Look at it this way: the spectrum has many colors in it, and man learned to pick out colors as separable items. He did more; he learned how to make them into signs of opposed meaning. You have only to think of a traffic signal to see that this is so. Now out of the babble of noise which the human vocal system is capable of producing it is possible to separate specific sounds and oppose one to the other. Pick does not mean the same as pig, because/k/is opposed to/ g/, though those two sounds only differ (in English, anyway) in that one is breathed and the other sung. This structuralist gift of the human brain enables us to talk of tiny structures that oppose each other in doing separate jobs and, taken together, add up to a language. [br] According to the passage, which of the following is right?
选项
A、The structuralism gift of the human brain is that it can invent whole languages.
B、The structuralism gift of the human brain is that it can add tiny structures up to a language.
C、The human vocal system can, like traffic signals, produce sounds a little now and a little then.
D、To separate specific sounds and oppose one to the other is one of the structuralism gifts of the human brain.
答案
D
解析
依据第七段。文章中this structuralist gift of the human brain就是指前面所说的it is possible to separate specific sounds and oppose one to the other,后面一句(pick does not mean...and the other sung)是作者举的一个例子。
转载请注明原文地址:https://tihaiku.com/zcyy/3211541.html
相关试题推荐
Currenteconomichardshipshavehadwhatiscalledinconstitutionallawa"d
Currenteconomichardshipshavehadwhatiscalledinconstitutionallawa"d
LanguageandHumanityLanguageispowerfulanditcanhe
LanguageandHumanityLanguageispowerfulanditcanhe
LanguageandHumanityLanguageispowerfulanditcanhe
LanguageandHumanityLanguageispowerfulanditcanhe
LanguageandHumanityLanguageispowerfulanditcanhe
LanguageandHumanityLanguageispowerfulanditcanhe
LanguageandHumanityLanguageispowerfulanditcanhe
Tobecalledbeautifulisthoughttonamesomethingessentialtowomen’scha
随机试题
[originaltext]Cleanairisimportanttogoodhealth.Iftheaircontainsim
【教学过程】 (一)导入新课 回顾单项式乘单项式、单项式乘多项式的计算法则。 点明本节课学习多项式乘多项式。引出课题。 (二)讲解新知
某公路工程的建设单位通过公开招标,分别与某监理单位和施工单位签订了施工监理合同和
婴儿的智力活动为A.动作性智力活动 B.表象性智力活动 C.运算性智力活动
探诊检查引起慢性牙髓炎的深龋洞时,可以发现 A.洞底硬,不敏感 B.洞内探到
患者孙××,女性,22岁,农民。G1P0A1L0因“停经33周,食欲差、恶心呕吐
A解析本题考查的是空间重构中的面的相邻关系问题。利用相邻面的相对位置关系可以得出选项中只有A选项能够由题干中的外表面折叠而成;B、C、D选项与原图对应,相
电力电缆中间接头盒的两侧及邻近区域,应增加()等阻燃措施。(A)防火涂料
用于治疗轻型或无明显症状的阿米巴痢疾,治愈率约为80%的药物是A.伯氨喹 B.
如图2-4所示,理想气体从状态A出发经ABCDA循环过程回到初态A,则在一循环中
最新回复
(
0
)