Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition
parts of it. English can indicate different parts of the
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parts of it. English can indicate different parts of the continuum, as follows: I used to go swimming, when I was little. I had been swimming before I went there. I went there yesterday. I am here now. I will have my lunch at 1 o’clock. After I have had my lunch I will go on working. By 8 o’clock I will have been working for two hours. There are many such continua which language treats as distinct units for communication purposes. They range through (i) aspects of the world around us, e.g. time, place, quantity; (ii) activities we are involved in, e.g. action, assertion, commitment and (iii) our own moods, emotions and attitudes, e.g. belief, anger, concession. On any of these dimensions there is in fact a gradient, but language imposes divisions in it. Thus, the gradient of anger is divided, in English: irritation…annoyance…anger…exasperation… rage…fury…blind fury… Translatability There is nothing necessarily \universal about these divisions in reality, though to the native speaker of any one language Language and Communication 29 his own categories are so familiar that he finds them the only logically possible ones and can hardly imagine that other languages segment reality in different ways. But a naive view of languages as all conveying basically the same meanings overlooks fundamental differences and is vitiated by learners’ errors; witness ‘I am here since 5 o’clock’ (from a French speaker whose language has a different cut-off point between near past and present). Not only do different languages cut up the same continuum in different ways, but, perhaps even more significant, different languages emphasise different kinds of continua. Hopi, a North American Indian language, has a view of time that concentrates on the aspect of duration. Events of short duration which can be nouns in English, e.g. ‘flash’, ‘wave’, ‘wind’, must be verbs in Hopi. Hopi verb forms express different relations in time, also. They do not refer to the position of the events along a time-line as in English, but rather to their relation to the observer. This is not to say that either language cannot express the meanings of the other, but rather that there is a distinction between the meanings built-in, and the meanings that must be thought about and expressed. In this sense, different languages predispose their speakers to ‘think’ differently, i.e. to direct their attention to different aspects of the environment. Translation is therefore not simply a matter of seeking other words with similar meaning, but of finding appropriate ways of saying things in another language. Very often, the segments of reality which are structurally built-in to one language may have to be ignored in another language. Thus, dual number, though it can be expressed (‘both’, ‘couple’, etc.) has no place in the grammatical structure of English. But there are many languages (e.g. Arabic) in which the form of words (of the nouns, pronouns, or verbs) has to be appropriate to singular, dual or plural number and speakers are unable to avoid observing the distinctions. Therefore, a speaker of English learning a language with dual number built in will have to learn to pay attention to it. Different languages, then, may categorise reality differently or may express similar categories by different linguistic forms. But the forms are only one aspect of the difference between two language systems. The second major Language and Communication 30 aspect pertains to the ways in which language is used as part of behaviour in the numerous contexts of everyday life. In order to communicate effectively, a speaker must be able to express himself in the right ways on the right occasions. It is not enough to be able to use the linguistic forms correctly. One must also know how to use them appropriately. Download 0.82 Mb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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