问答题
【正确答案】Ever since the beginning of human civilization, language has been constantly of central interest and of vital importance in various aspects. Along with a better understanding of the surrounding world, people tend to pay more attention to themselves. Though there were still tremendous unknown things threatening their life or just confusing their brains, ancient people spared no effort in trying to work out satisfactory answers to the origin myth of language. Why do we speak and how is it possible? People have given a variety of explanations to this special phenomenon in human society. Of course, the very first guess made by our ancestors was by no means naive and supernatural in nature. At least, they noticed some different features related to human language. If we accepted these complex reasons and settled down with them, we would always think language is just as complex as any other difficult things in the world. For hundreds of years, people have acquired improved understanding of language. We hope through working out an ancient question, we could understand our human brain and all the related things better and better.
【答案解析】[解析]
Professor
Well, to begin today's class I'd like to quote: "In the beginning was the word. " (The Gospel according to John 1: 1) "And the Lord said, behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. " (Genesis, Chapter 11: 6)
These pieces of scripture seem to suggest some mysterious origin of the language. There are some well-known theories about the origin of language though some of them have now been discredited.
The bow-wow theory: In primitive times people imitated the sounds of the animal calls in the wild environment they lived and speech developed from that. Onomatopoeic words seem to be a convenient evidence for this theory. But in our discussion below we can find they are very different in the degree of resemblance they express with the natural sounds. This theory lacks supportive evidence.
The pooh-pooh theory: Because of the hard life of our primitive ancestors, they uttered instinctive sounds of pain, anger and joy. As for evidence, we can cite the universal use of sounds as interjections. What makes this theory problematic though is that there is only a limited number of interjections in almost all languages. Besides, interjections such as "oh, ah, and aiyo" bear little relationship with the sound system of a language and therefore are not good evidence.
The yo-he-ho theory: As primitive people worked together, they produced some rhythmic grunts which gradually developed into chants and then into language. We do have prosodic use of rhythms in languages, but rhythmic grunts are far different from language in its present sense. The theory is again at most a speculation.
We may go on with all sorts of fanciful speculations, but suffice it to say here that so far the fruitless search for the origin of language reflects people's concern with the origin of humanity. In the future we may come up with some enlightening findings. One thing we can say for certain though, language evolves within specific historical, social and cultural contexts.
Question:
Summarize the points made in the lecture you just heard and explain how they support the points made in the reading.
Professor
Well, to begin today's class I'd like to quote: "In the beginning was the word. " (The Gospel according to John 1: 1) "And the Lord said, behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. " (Genesis, Chapter 11: 6)
These pieces of scripture seem to suggest some mysterious origin of the language. There are some well-known theories about the origin of language though some of them have now been discredited.
The bow-wow theory: In primitive times people imitated the sounds of the animal calls in the wild environment they lived and speech developed from that. Onomatopoeic words seem to be a convenient evidence for this theory. But in our discussion below we can find they are very different in the degree of resemblance they express with the natural sounds. This theory lacks supportive evidence.
The pooh-pooh theory: Because of the hard life of our primitive ancestors, they uttered instinctive sounds of pain, anger and joy. As for evidence, we can cite the universal use of sounds as interjections. What makes this theory problematic though is that there is only a limited number of interjections in almost all languages. Besides, interjections such as "oh, ah, and aiyo" bear little relationship with the sound system of a language and therefore are not good evidence.
The yo-he-ho theory: As primitive people worked together, they produced some rhythmic grunts which gradually developed into chants and then into language. We do have prosodic use of rhythms in languages, but rhythmic grunts are far different from language in its present sense. The theory is again at most a speculation.
We may go on with all sorts of fanciful speculations, but suffice it to say here that so far the fruitless search for the origin of language reflects people's concern with the origin of humanity. In the future we may come up with some enlightening findings. One thing we can say for certain though, language evolves within specific historical, social and cultural contexts.
Question:
Summarize the points made in the lecture you just heard and explain how they support the points made in the reading.