首页
登录
职称英语
______ in British and American English have diverged very much according to the
______ in British and American English have diverged very much according to the
游客
2023-12-11
13
管理
问题
______ in British and American English have diverged very much according to the speakers. [br]
British man: What is there about this English language of ours that makes it possible for the two of us --having grown up, perhaps, 4, 000 miles apart--to be able to communicate so easily?
American man: Welt, we might begin by recognizing that a language consists of sounds, words, inflections, and the arrangement of words into phrases and sentences.
B: Let’s begin with one of these: the inflectional forms--for example, the noun plurals and verb tenses. Surely, in this aspect, British and American English have not diverged very much, have they?
A: No, not at all. Thousands of nouns form their plurals in the regular fashion in the manner of "cat"--"cats"; "dog"--" dogs" "church"--"churches". Arid this is the same on both sides of the Atlantic. Would you say the same thing for the verbs?
B: Yes, I think I would. Here again the regular forms are so overwhelming in number, aren’t they? For most of the verbs, our two forms of language are pretty well identical.
A: Well, that depends on what you mean by identity. I can think, for example, of instances where our spellings are alike but the pronunciation is different. For example, the past of the verb "eat. "
B: Yes, the past tense is spelled in both forms of English "a--t--e". But I pronounce this as [εt ] to rhyme with "get" as do most of us in Britain, and I think that we would tend to regard the American pronunciation as a relatively uneducated one. Isn’t it true that most educated people in the U.S. would rhyme "ate" with "late" regard the British pronunciation as a bit odd?
A: More than a bit odd. I would say. Actually to us, [εt] seems countrified, even uneducated. We could supply other examples here, but I think we should go on to the order of words in phrases and sentences. After all, it is through word order, rather than inflectional forms, that so much of our grammatical meaning is conveyed.
B: Yes, and I suppose this is one of the reasons why we have so little difficulty in understanding each other. It’s hard to think of any place that you and I would have arranged the principal sentence elements in a different way.
A: You are right, of course. For example, the entire English - speaking world puts the subject before the verb and the object after it in making a sentence.
B: None of these grammatical differences add up to very much, do they? Let’s talk briefly now about pronunciation. Take the difference that is probably best known: the sounding or not sounding of [r] after vowels in words like "bird" and "hurt". It’s not just a matter of saying that Americans sound the [r]s and the Britishers don’t. After all, as you know, in Scotland, Lancashire, Ireland, and the whole of the western counties of England really, the [r]s are pronounced more or less as they are with you.
A: Yes, and in the States, on the other hand, you will find a rather large area in New England, almost all of the area around New York City, and various parts of the coastal south, where the Americans don’t sound the [r]s. And it’s equally difficult to generalize about the differences in pronunciation of words like "dance", which I pronounce with the vowel in cap [ae] and you pronounce with the vowel in "father" [a:]. In the United States we vary a good deal; for example, eastern New England has the [a] type of pronunciation.
B: As you know, we don’t have [a:] at all widely either. It occurs among educated speakers and in the South and in London, but in the northern counties of England people have a pronunciation similar to yours. So I think we should insist on people not exaggerating the differences between British and American English.
选项
A、in Britain and America people speak utterly different languages
B、there are few things identical in British and American English
C、British and American English are imcomprehensible to each other
D、British and American English are understandable between the two people
答案
D
解析
四个选项的内容并未直接提及,但根据整个谈话的内容、两位谈话者的语气,可以得出结论:不要过于夸大英式英语与美式英语的差异,二者大同小异,持这两种语言的人可以相互理解、沟通。因此,正确答案为D。
转载请注明原文地址:https://tihaiku.com/zcyy/3263055.html
相关试题推荐
EnglishElizabethanagewasmostcelebratedforitsachievementsin______.A、poe
In1840,thesigningof______madeNewZealandaBritishcolony.A、theTreatyofW
TheIELTSExamIELTS:InternationalEnglishLanguag
TheIELTSExamIELTS:InternationalEnglishLanguag
TheIELTSExamIELTS:InternationalEnglishLanguag
TheIELTSExamIELTS:InternationalEnglishLanguag
TheIELTSExamIELTS:InternationalEnglishLanguag
TherighttopursuehappinessisissuedtoAmericanswiththeirbirthcerti
TherighttopursuehappinessisissuedtoAmericanswiththeirbirthcerti
TherighttopursuehappinessisissuedtoAmericanswiththeirbirthcerti
随机试题
Ratherthanusingcustommachinetoolstobuildearlymodelsofnewparts,F
[originaltext]M:Excuseme.Where’syourrockmusicsection?W:Rockmusic?I’m
Therearetwofactorswhichdetermineanindividual’sintelligence.Thefirs
The【S1】_____employer-basedhealth-insurancesystemexacerbates(加剧)concernsf
某多层办公楼,建筑高度20m,采用外墙内保温系统时,选用了B1级的保温材料,其防
关于子宫内膜异位症的临床表现,说法正确的是A.性交疼痛 B.不孕 C.月经紊
假如你漫步在唐朝长安街头,你能看到以下哪些有趣现象() ①城市规划科学,
保存移植器官的灌注液的温度是A:-4℃ B:0℃ C:4℃ D:20℃
对于断路器两侧均配置有TA,断路器本体发生故障时该断路器保护和母差保护均会动作,
铁路工程项目的关键测量科目实行彻底换手测量时,须更换( )。A.测量人员
最新回复
(
0
)