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  3. Think of the solitude felt by Marie Smith before she died earlier this year

Think of the solitude felt by Marie Smith before she died earlier this year

游客2024-12-15  21
问题     Think of the solitude felt by Marie Smith before she died earlier this year in her native Alaska, at 89. She was the last person who knew the language of the Eyak people as a mother-tongue. Or imagine Ned Mandrell, who died in 1974 — he was the last native speaker of Manx, similar to Irish and Scots Gaelic. Both these people had the comfort of being surrounded, some of the time, by enthusiasts who knew something precious was vanishing and tried to record and learn whatever they could of a vanishing tongue. In remote parts of the world, dozens more people are on the point of taking to their graves a system of communication that will never be recorded or reconstructed.
    Does it matter? Plenty of languages — among them Akkadian, Etruscan, Tangut and Chibcha — have gone the way of the dodo, without causing much trouble to the descendants. Should anyone lose sleep over the fact that many tongues — from Manchu(spoken in China)to Hua(Botswana)and Gwich’in(Alaska)— are in danger of suffering a similar fate?
    Compared with groups who lobby to save animals or trees, campaigners who lobby to preserve languages are themselves a rare breed. But they are trying both to mitigate and publicize an alarming acceleration in the rate at which languages are vanishing. Of some 6,900 tongues spoken in the world today, some 50% to 90% could be gone by the end of the century. In Africa, at least 300 languages are in near-term danger, and 200 more have died recently or are on the verge of death. Some 145 languages are threatened in East and Southeast Asia.
    Some languages, even robust ones, face an obvious threat in the shape of a political power bent on imposing a majority tongue. A youngster in any part of the Soviet Union soon realised that whatever you spoke at home, mastering Russian was the key to success.
    Nor did English reach its present global status without ruthless tactics. In years past, Americans, Canadians and Australians took native children away from their families to be raised at boarding schools where English rules. In all the Celtic fringes of the British Isles there are bitter memories of children being punished for speaking the wrong language.
    But in an age of mass communications, the threats to linguistic diversity are less ruthless and more spontaneous. Parents stop using traditional tongues, thinking it will be better for their children to grow up using a dominant language(such as Swahili in East Africa)or a global one(such as English, Mandarin or Spanish). And even if parents try to keep the old speech alive, their efforts can be doomed by films and computer games.
    The result is a growing list of tongues spoken only by white-haired elders. A book edited by Peter Austin, an Australian linguist, gives some examples: Njerep, one of 31 endangered languages counted in Cameroon, reportedly has only four speakers left, all over 60. The valleys of the Caucasus used to be a paradise for linguists in search of unusual syntax, but Ubykh, one of the region’s baffling tongues, officially expired in 1992. [br] Marie Smith’s solitude results from the fact that
选项 A、the vanishing language she spoke will never be recorded.
B、people around her could not understand her language.
C、she is the last person having Eyak as mother-tongue.
D、as a native Alaska, she lives far away from that place.
答案 C
解析 细节推断题。根据Marie Smith定位到第1段。该段首句即提示读者想象她的孤独，第2句则解释原因，即她是世上最后一个说Eyak的人．C项与此相符，故正确。下文提到有人对即将消亡的语言进行录音，故可排除A项：她虽然是最后一个会说Eyak的人，但作为土生土长的Alaska人，她不可能不能与周同的人交流，故排除B项：D项“她住在离Alaska很远的地方”在文巾并未提及，故也可排除。
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