历年考研英语翻译2004年
[00:05.27]2004
[00:07.59]The relation of language and mind
[00:09.70]has interested philosophers for many centuries.
[00:13.13](1)
[00:13.88]that the structure of language had some connection
[00:16.61]with the process of thought,
[00:18.42]which took root in Europe long before people realized
[00:21.16]how diverse languages could be.>
[00:23.67]Only recently did linguists begin the serious study of languages
[00:28.31]that were very different from their own.
[00:30.95]Two anthropologist-linguists,
[00:33.06]Franz Boas and Edward Sapir,
[00:35.48]were pioneers in describing many native languages
[00:38.62]of North and South America
[00:40.24]during the first half of the twentieth century.
[00:43.07](2)
[00:44.44]because some of these languages have since vanished,
[00:47.27]as the peoples who spoke them died out or became assimilated
[00:50.70]and lost their native languages.>
[00:53.22]Other linguists in the earlier part of this century,
[00:56.14]however, who were less eager to deal with bizarre data
[00:59.44]from "exotic" language, were not always so grateful.
[01:03.11](3)
[01:04.72]were often so strikingly different
[01:06.95]from the well studied languages
[01:08.39]of Europe and Southeast Asia
[01:10.22]that some scholars even accused Boas and Sapir
[01:13.19]of fabricating their data.>
[01:15.51]Native American languages are indeed different,
[01:18.43]so much so in fact that Navajo
[01:20.68]could be used by the US military
[01:23.02]as a code during World War II
[01:24.94]to send secret messages.
[01:27.13]Sapir's pupil, Benjamin Lee Whorf,
[01:29.92]continued the study of American Indian languages.
[01:33.24](4)
[01:36.87]Whorf developed the idea
[01:38.17]that the structure of language determines
[01:40.39]the structure of habitual thought in a society.>
[01:43.53]He reasoned that
[01:44.21]because it is easier to formulate certain concepts
[01:47.54]and not others in a given language,
[01:49.65]the speakers of that language think along one track
[01:52.37]and not along another.
[01:54.09](5)
[01:55.97]linguistic determinism which,
[01:57.98]in its strongest form,
[01:59.30]states that language imprisons the mind,
[02:01.82]and that the grammatical patterns
[02:03.43]in a language can produce far-reaching consequences
[02:06.36]for the culture of a society.>
[02:08.57]Later, this idea became to be known
[02:10.57]as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,
[02:13.08]but this term is somewhat inappropriate.
[02:15.70]Although both Sapir and Whorf emphasized
[02:18.12]the diversity of languages,
[02:19.85]Sapir himself never explicitly supported
[02:22.55]the notion of linguistic determinism.
