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  3. Culture, Language and Equality Culture is the sum total of all the traditions, customs, belief and ways of life of a given

Culture, Language and Equality Culture is the sum total of all the traditions, customs, belief and ways of life of a given

admin2010-01-14  80
问题                              Culture, Language and Equality
     Culture is the sum total of all the traditions, customs, belief and ways of life of a given group of human beings. In this sense, every group has a culture, however savage, undeveloped, or uncivilized it may seem to us.
     To the professional anthropologist, there is no intrinsic superiority of one culture over another, just as to the professional linguist there is no intrinsic hierarchy among languages.
     People once thought of the languages of backward groups as savage, undeveloped form of speech, consisting largely of grunts and groans. While it is possible that language in general began as a series of grunts and groans, it is a fact established by the study of “backward” languages that no spoken tongue answers that description today. Most languages of uncivilized groups are, by our most severe standards, extremely complex, delicate, and ingenious pieces of machinery for the transfer of ideas. They fall behind the Western languages not in their sound patterns or grammatical structures, which usually are fully adequate for all language needs, but only in their vocabularies, which reflect the objects and activities known to their speakers. Even in this department, however, two things are to be noted: 1. All languages seem to possess the machinery for vocabulary expansion, either by putting together words already in existence or by borrowing them from other languages and adapting them to their own system. 2. The objects and activities requiring names and distinctions in “backward” languages, while different from ours, are often surprisingly numerous and complicated. A western language distinguishes merely between two degrees of remoteness (“this” and “that”); some languages of the American Indians distinguish between what is close to the speaker, or the person addressed, or remote from both, or out of sight, or in the past, or in the future.
     This study of language, in turn, casts a new light upon the claim of the anthropologists that all cultures are to viewed independently, and without ideas of rank or hierarchy.  
Judging from the passage, the author might be______.
选项 A、an American Indian
B、a Canadian
C、an African
D、a Japanese
答案B
解析 根据文章内容判断，作者在文中所用的“our languages”和“Western languages”所指相同，因此作者应当是西方人；而从作者以美国印第安人语言举例情况来看，作者不是美国印第安人，所以B的可能性最大。
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