综合一区欧美国产,99国产麻豆免费精品,九九精品黄色录像,亚洲激情青青草,久久亚洲熟妇熟,中文字幕av在线播放,国产一区二区卡,九九久久国产精品,久久精品视频免费

Domestic Affairs

English and Chinese make a thoughtful blend

By Patrick Mattimore (chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2010-12-28 09:08
Large Medium Small

Last week, China's General Administration of Press and Publication issued several bans on the expanding use of English in the media. The media is banned from randomly mixing foreign languages with Chinese, required to provide Chinese translations when it is necessary to use foreign words, and prohibited from creating new meanings or new words by combining Chinese with another language. The regulations are aimed at English incursions into the Chinese language which authorities believe are damaging linguistic integrity.

The GAPP's concerns are not unfounded. Like the Chinese, the French government is hypersensitive about the English dilution of the French language, which that nation considers a national treasure on par with the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower.

Many anthropologists would certainly agree that the dilution of a group's language results in the diminution of that group's culture.

From a moral and legal standpoint, a government has every right to ban language which it feels might be detrimental to society. The U.S. Supreme Court, for example, decided over thirty years ago that the government could regulate obscene speech broadcast over the radio in ruling against a station that aired comic George Carlin's "7 Dirty Words" monologue.

Finally, the Anglicization of Chinese is not particularly a two-way street. That is, few Chinese terms are being adopted and incorporated by the English-speaking world, suggesting that there is little cultural give-and-take.

Still, on balance, it seems that there is an important scientific reason to encourage, rather than discourage, the proliferation of new language, even if today it is largely an English by-product.

Benjamin Whorf was a linguist who helped develop the concept that language determines how we think- linguistic determinism. While Whorf's Hypothesis is a radical view, most behavioral scientists today would agree that language influences our thinking to a large extent. That concept has important implications.

Multilingual speakers and foreign language students will readily recognize the fact that their thinking processes change and expand when they switch languages. Simply put, they think about things differently.

To Eskimos, who have many different words for snow, it is important to think about snow in different ways. That is not to suggest that cultures that have only one word for snow are incapable of thinking about different types of snow, merely that within those cultures, people simply do not have any reason to think about broad-based definitions of snow.

By allowing and even encouraging the development of language and new words to describe new ways of thinking, governments are fostering the development of peoples' minds. As Chinese increasingly make their marks in the world, technologies, scientific thought, and the arts will inevitably reflect a Chinese way of thinking. At a time when the Chinese are increasingly contributing to our world's culture, it is important to leave open the world of thinking to China.

Patrick Mattimore is a former AP psychology teacher and an adjunct instructor of law at Tsinghua/Temple Law School LLM Program in Beijing.

霍城县| 乌兰察布市| 梨树县| 阳城县| 华容县| 大厂| 玛沁县| 定州市| 绩溪县| 德化县| 瑞金市| 石景山区| 酉阳| 黔西县| 乌拉特前旗| 元谋县| 宁城县| 沂南县| 五寨县| 聂荣县| 买车| 平邑县| 邛崃市| 阿拉尔市| 集安市| 铁岭县| 绥棱县| 漳州市| 卢湾区| 木兰县| 铜陵市| 南京市| 日照市| 榆树市| 翼城县| 山丹县| 北流市| 新巴尔虎左旗| 辽宁省| 清镇市| 商都县|