Bricks from the Tower of the Bab

Bricks from the Tower of the BabelAccording to the Bible story, there was a time when the whole earth was of one language and of one speech. But when it occurred to the people to build a tower that would reach unto Heaven itself, the Lord was angry and said, “Let us go down, and there confound their language that they may not understand one another's speech.” And the building was stopped and the people scattered because they could no longer understand one another.　　Is it possible that the people of the world today could agree upon a single international language that everyone would be able to speak and understand? This has been the dream of many linguists over the centuries, and almost a thousand languages have been invented for this, not to replace the native languages but to provide a second language for worldwide communication.　　For about a thousand years -- from about the fifth century through the fifteenth -- Latin was the second language of educated people all over Europe and all scholarly works were written in Latin. For, before the invention of the printing press, reading and writing were skills known only to scholars. Most of the scholars were priests and clergymen, and Latin was the language of the church. Latin was a subject required in schools and in colleges, and all educated people had some familiarity with it.　　The number of people who study Latin has not grown smaller, but proportionately it has become very much smaller. As ordinary people all over the world began to be able to read and write their own languages, and as scientific work of the sixteenth and later centuries came more and more to be written in living languages, a knowledge of Latin was not so essential. Thus, although Latin might once have been claimed as the most suitable of possible international languages （at least for Europeans）, this time has definitely passed.　　The earliest attempts to invent a simplified language for international use came in the seventeenth century, but it was not until the late nineteenth century that any sizable group of people did actually attempt to speak and write an artificial language. Esperanto, which was published in 1887, was the first language really to take hold. At one time or another as many as eight million people have learned Esperanto. It has been taught in a great many schools and colleges in Europe, and the study of Esperanto was even made compulsory in some high schools in Germany.　　Five-sixths of Esperanto words have Latin roots; the remainder are Germanic. Verbs are still inflected for tense, and nouns have separate forms for use as subject and object in a sentence.　　Ido and Interlingua followed Esperanto and improved it, by cutting out some of the cumbersome Latin grammar that still remained.　　In 1928, Otto Jespersen, the famous Danish linguist who is known as the greatest authority on the English language, put forth a concoction of his own called Novial. It was an improvement on Esperanto but still had the same basic approach. Jespersen thought that the best type of international language was one that offered the greatest ease of learning to the greatest number of people. But when Jespersen thinks of the “greatest number of people” he is referring to Europeans or people of other continents whose language and culture derives from Europe. This completely excludes native populations of the continents of Asia and Africa and of the Pacific Islands, for whom Novial would be totally unfamiliar.　　Still, if the language is a well-constructed one and not too complicated, perhaps it could nevertheless be adopted by those unfamiliar with its roots and structure.　　Interglossa, the most recent of the proposed artificial languages, uses basically the Chinese structure, which is that of the isolating language where each word stands alone and there are no inflections at all. The rules of grammar in Interglossa are largely rules of word order, as in English and more strictly in Chinese. The roots are basically Latin and Greek because these have been the roots of most scientific words and are therefore--to some extent—familiar to scientists all over the world.　　The use to Latin and Greek roots is a big help to readers of Indo-European languages. While this is of no help to the people who speak non-Indo-European languages, the use of Latin roots has at least the advantage of straightforward rules for spelling and pronunciation. The Latin, and all of the sounds of Latin are represented by its letters.　　Why must an international language necessarily be a made-up language? Why can’t one of the existing languages be chosen as the best one to try to internationalize?　　In the United Nations, for example, there are five official languages — English, Chinese, Russian, French, and Spanish — and at all official meetings simultaneous translation is carried on, so that it is possible to listen to the speeches in any one of the five languages. If a delegate does not know at least one of these languages, he or she must learn one. How about making one of these into an international language? Of these, Chinese and Russian are not likely to gain many supporters because of the difficulties of these alphabets. The Russian alphabet stems from the Greek but is like that of very few other languages in the world today. The Chinese alphabet is not an alphabet at all. Its characters represent ideas, not sounds, and would therefore require someone to learn two separate languages -- the written and the spoken. The fact that Chinese characters are associated with idea, not sound, would make it a fine written international language, since each reader could apply the symbol to the appropriate word in his or her own language.　　French was once the language of international diplomats, and a great many people involved in international relations had to learn French. But it has never been a language of science. Its spelling is difficult for foreigners and some of the sounds in French, being unlike those of other Latin-based Languages, are hard for non-French speakers to master. Spanish comes off well in both spelling and pronunciation, for its rules are simple and there are almost no exceptions to those rules, but it is highly inflected and even adds such complications as having two different forms for the verb “to be”, depending upon whether the state of being is permanent or temporary. In simplified form, it might do very well, but no one has tried to promote Spanish as the international language.　　English, on the other hand, has been worked on for this purpose. C.K. Ogden and I. A. Richards set themselves the task of discovering what is the smallest number of words we need to have in order to be able to define all of the other words in English. They came up with the answer of eight hundred and fifty and made a basic word list of eight hundred and fifty English words, which they named Basic English. These are the only verbs in the entire list: “come, go, get, give, keep, let, do, put, make, say, be, seem, take, see, may, will, have, send.”　　Writing in Basic English may require you to use a greater number of words -- as in having to say “it came to my ears” instead of “I heard” -- but you can still say anything you want to with just 850 different words and a few suffixes: “-ed, -ing, -ly” and the prefixes “in-, and un-” for “not”. This is a much smaller number of words to have to memorize than is ordinarily offered to the student of a foreign language.　　Basic English and most of the other languages that have been proposed as international languages have one great disability for their acceptance as a world language: they all assume that the structure of Indo-European languages is　generally understood worldwide. （Interglossa is the only important exception, as it makes the attempt to use Chinese isolating structure instead.） As Benjamin Whorf, an expert on American Indian languages pointed out, "We say ‘a large black and white hunting dog' and assume that in Basic English one would do the same. How is the speaker of a radically different tongue supposed to know that one cannot say ‘hunting a white and black large dog'?”　　Finally, in considering the merits of any proposed international language it's important to remember what it can and cannot be expected to do. If it is to be used for anything other than basic understanding between people of different nationalities in their daily lives, in international affairs, and in the exchange of scientific information, all proposals are likely to be rejected. If you think of it as a way of internationalizing literature -- especially poetry -- forget it.　　Admittedly, translations of the “Gettysburg Address”, of “Treasure Island”, “Black Beauty”, and other books of fiction into Basic English came out remarkably well, but no one who could read the original would accept the Basic English version instead.　　If language were for nothing but the communication of warnings and weather reports, an artificial international language would do nicely. But people have always had a need to do more than simply “tell it like it is”. Language is for reporting not merely one’s work. In our language we define ourselves. For this, a language needs idioms, needs all the oddities of grammar and style that reflect its history and development, all the poetic turns of phrases that have enriched it over the centuries. The language needs these? Well, perhaps not. Does a person need eyebrows? If you were to construct a human being, would you provide eyebrows? Is there some special reason why our lips should be a different color from the rest of our face? Perhaps not, but this is how people — real people — are.Artificial language is recommended highly for artificial people. The computers need it to simplify communication among themselves. For communication between people, languages in all their diversity will remain and grow as mirrors of the growth and soul of the societies that speak them.Decide whether the following statements are true （T） or false （F） according to the information given in the text.10. The author does not agree that International languages can make successful translations of fictions.
A、True
B、False
【正确答案】：A
【题目解析】：P229