英语演讲-全世界的通用语言.docx

英语演讲:全世界的通用语言
the english language 英语语言
mr. chairman, adjudicators, ladies and gentlemen,
good afternoon.
the arrival of the year 1999 has brought with a near perfect opportunity to take a look back at the last one thousand years, assess man’s esses and failures, and look forward with our predictions of the third millennium.
already this afternoon you’ve heard many assessments and you’ve heard a variety of predictions. a variety so vast, ranging from lewis carol’s depiction of celebratory life, to the irish celebration of death. so vast a variety that it’s difficult to find mon ground amongst the contestants here today. perhaps the only thing that we all share is that we are indeed discussing millennia, the old and the new and the turn of the millennium, and we’re all discussing it in the same language.
a few hundred years ago to have held an event like this it would have been imperative that we were all fluent in a number of different tongues, for the approach bating the language barrier was simply to learn many different languages. of course people back then had an ulterior motive: that was to ensure that different languages held their different societies or positions, or as king charles v of spain put it, “ i speak spanish to god, italian to women, french to men and german to my horse.”
today our approach is somewhat different. instead of trying to vastly sprea