首页
外语
计算机
考研
公务员
职业资格
财经
工程
司法
医学
专升本
自考
实用职业技能
登录
外语
Man is called in Creek the zoon phonanta or talking animal. What makes humanity different from the rest of the animal world is i
Man is called in Creek the zoon phonanta or talking animal. What makes humanity different from the rest of the animal world is i
admin
2009-02-10
43
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.
What makes human beings different from the rest of the animal world is their ability to ______.
选项
A、learn a number of words
B、be taught a few grammatical structures
C、invent whole languages
D、to express their thoughts and feelings
答案
C
解析
依据第一段。人类与其他动物的不同就在于人类能建立一种声音符号系统,能发明完整的语言。
转载请注明原文地址:https://kaotiyun.com/show/D96K777K
0
专业英语四级
相关试题推荐
PASSAGETHREEWhatarepeople’sworriesaboutGMplants?
PASSAGEONEAccordingtoexperts,whydopeoplefeelthepressureofhavingaperfectmarriage?
IntheInformationAge,themassmediahavebeenplayinganevermoreimportantroleinshapingoursociety.Inthefollowingex
Thecentralproblemoftranslatinghasalwaysbeenwhethertotranslateliterallyorfreely.Theargumenthasbeengoingsincea
PASSAGETHREEWhatistheauthor’sattitudetowardsAmericanhealth-caresystem?
ThepresentdayAfrican-Americanpopulation,likemanyotherethic【M1】______groups,isseveralgenerationsremovedfromtheir
HowtoFightDepressionWithoutOutsideHelpDepressionisacommonfeeling,butsometimesitcanbecome【T1】______.【T1】____
A、Trainmoremedicalpersonnel.B、Establishmoreunitstotreatepidemics.C、Providepropertreatmentforpatients.D、Strengthen
(1)Howlivingcreaturesevolvehasbeenprettywellunderstoodforthepast150years.Howtheycametoexistinthefirstplace
OnJuly4,1776,asecretmeetingofinsurgentcolonistsinAmericapassedtheDeclarationofIndependence.WaragainsttheBrit
随机试题
科技战略是企业的一个重要职能战略,科技战略的地位和作用表现在()
一般不通过垂直传播的病毒是
咽—结合膜热的病原体为
A.猩红热B.水痘C.麻疹D.幼儿急疹E.风疹皮疹为皮肤上同时存在斑疹、丘疹、水疱疹和结痂疹,可能的诊断是()
某市环保局应当地居民的举报对排放烟尘超过国家规定指标的某化工厂作出了罚款4万元的行政处罚。并责令其限期改正。化工厂对环保局的行政处罚决定不服,于2008年3月向法院提起行政诉讼。诉讼期间,原告找到被告要求协商解决,被告同意,遂变更了原行政处罚决定,对原告只
每年年初,除了财产物资明细账和债权债务明细账不必更换新账外,总账、日记账和大部分明细账,都必须更换新账。()
长江上游的A港与下游S港相距270千米,一轮船以恒定速度从A港到S港需6.75小时,返回需9小时,如果一只漂流瓶从A港顺水漂流到S港,则需要的时间是()。
螺丝刀:螺丝
在VisualFoxPro的命令窗口中键入MODIFYDATA命令以后,屏幕会出现数据库设计器,要想完成同样的工作,还可以采取如下步骤()。
下面选项中不属于面向对象程序设计特征的是
最新回复
(
0
)