new book of lectures USA Новик Н,А.... new book of lectures USA Новик Н,А... Учебное пособие по дисциплинам Страноведение иЛингвострановедение
 Скачать 3.6 Mb.
|
|
f). English of American Blacks. In his book “The English Language,” David Crystal writes that it was common that the slave-traders brought people of different language backgrounds together in their ships on purpose: when the slaves spoke different languages and could not communicate efficiently, they were less likely to start planning rebellions. The result of this was that several pidgin forms (mixtures of two or more languages) developed. When the slaves arrived in the Caribbean or somewhere along the coast of North America, they continued to use the pidgin language among themselves and communicate with the landowners. Hendrickson wrote: “Pidgin Portuguese was the first of these lingua francas, but Pidgin English replaced it by the17th century, when the slave trade to America began. The small vocabulary and simple syntax of Pidgin English was ideal for ordering the polyglot slaves about, and since when the long voyage ended, most slaves had a rudimentary knowledge of it, its use was reinforced among many of the slaveholders to whom they were sold”. According to David Crystal, the Black English Vernacular(просторечье) is the variety spoken by some 80 % of present-day black Americans. Nowadays, Black English Vernacular has become widely accepted as a rule-governed linguistic system. Some of the most striking grammatical differences are, for example, the use of double negation (e.g., I ain’t afraid of nothin’ or I ain´t see nothin´ like dat no place) and the omission of the -s in the third person singular form of the present tense (e.g., he walk). Moreover, the verb to be can be used in a quite different way than in other forms of English. Cases in point are the use of be done in the sense of will have and the use of been to express that something happened in the past, as in I been know your name. The use of negative words to express positive ideas (e.g., You ugly! which means just the opposite), which is common especially among young black Americans. Black English has several specific features when used in a social context. A device called sweet talk also appears in Black English. This means that new forms are often created to fit a particular setting or situation. In the rules of Standard English grammar sweet talk would be considered bad English because of its ignorance of grammatical rules. Another device is known as eye dialect, “, e.g., “Where r u?” This refers to changing the spelling of words without changing their sound. Black English also often simplifies or weakens consonant clusters at the ends of words. This tendency is quite strong; some words are regularly pronounced without the final consonant, such as jus´ and roun.’ Nouns that end in a cluster such as -s, -p,-t or -k in Standard English will change in Black English so that those clusters are dropped and an -es is added in the plural. Thus desk becomes des’ and the plural form becomes desses; test becomes tes’ and the plural becomes tesses. The most common is the loss of the schwa in word-initial position, as in ´bout (about), ´gree (agree), ´low (allow). The unstressed word-initial syllables themselves may be lost, as in ´bacco (tobacco), ´cept (accept) and ´member (remember). The use of invariant ‘be’ refers to repeated actions over a considerable extent of time, and the distinction between he walk, he walkin´, he be walkin´ has no exact parallel in Standard English. These three verb forms have different negatives: He don´t walk, he ain´t walkin´, he don´t be walkin´. The dropping of the inflectional plural suffix is another feature of Black English (He hab two dog). The number two carries the plural. Speakers of Black English make mooses (the plural of moose), or fishes (the plural of fish). Words like childrens, foots or womens are also not unusual in Black English. Black slaves had no social status whatsoever in the 18th century America. Therefore, it is easy to see why the languages used by African Americans had comparatively little influence on the vocabulary of American English. A few examples borrowing follow: okra, zombie, goober (peanut), chiggers (клещ), voodoo, massa, buckra (a white man), jukebox (музыкальный автомат), sweet talk/sweet mouth, mumbo jumbo (an African God, Mama Dyumbo, idol). Some words used by speakers of Black English are used in every day speech as slang words: Barbie = barbeque, roo =kangaroo, mozzie = mosquito, chook = chicken, dunny = toilet, bludger = lazy, jumbuck = sheep, maccas = Mcdonalds, lollie = candy, grouse = fantastic, drog = booze, tellie = TV, thongs = slippers, bikie = motorcyclist, dag = nerd, ute = pickup, yobbo = uncouth. Perhaps one day the U.S. will officially become a multidialectal nation. This would finally give a well-deserved recognition to Black English, among other dialects, so that it would no longer be described as a Non-Standard language. g). Yiddish Borrowings. Among the three Jewish languages (Yiddish, Hebrew, Dzhudezmo) that have had any influence in the U.S., Yiddish is the one with the most native speakers nowadays. Some words of Yiddish origin adapted into AE include: kosher - ritually pure, approved, acceptable nebish (nebbish) - a nonentity, a loser shlemil (schlemiel) - a fool, a loser bagel - a hard, doughnut-shaped roll chairlady - a female chairman mish-mash/mish-mosh - a mix up, a mess; confusion pastrami - seasoned, smoked or pickled beef, served as a cold cut schlock - cheaply made, defective (slang) schnapps - brandy; intoxicating spirits Most of the loans from Yiddish into American English are productive morphemes such as -nik, found in words like beatnik, peacenik, noisenik, no-goodnik, etc. Another common productive morpheme, shm-, is used to negate or deride the meaning of a word by repeating the word with shm- prefixed to the repetition, as in “Doctor says she has a serious virus? Virus-shmirus, as long as she’s healthy.” Some loans are syntactical patterns (with attendant intonation), which have become part of at least passive repertoire of American expressions. Examples include: I should have such luck. Great art it isn't! It shouldn't happen to a dog! With friends like you, who needs enemies! For this I drove five miles! I need it like a hole in the head! Some characteristics peculiar to Yiddish are presented in the use of already for now at the end of a sentence Let's go, already! in answers to a question with a question How is it going? How should it go? in the use of thedeclarative form in questions This is America?, in the use of double negatives He don’t know nothin’ h). Slavic / Russian Borrowings Slavs can be found in large settlements in the Pennsylvanian, Colorado, and New Mexican mining regions. There are also a lot of Slavic immigrants in industrial towns. Slavic immigrant groups living in the U.S. have challenged the assimilation in the great American melting pot through all times, because they see themselves as belonging to a distinct group with its own language, culture and traditions. Because of this restrain to assimilate not many Slavic and Russian words were borrowed into AE, e.g. babushka, pirogi, Russian roulette. Russian words (5.5 min Russians live in the U.S. at present) are used in the U.S. to exemplify terms that have come into the English language because optional terms simply did not exist: sable, samovar, polka, robot, troika, Bolshevik, commissar, sputnik, perestroika. Conclusion: As the U.S. is the country of immigrants and virtually a multicultural society, its language (AE), no doubt, has developed under a strong influence coming from a variety of languages and cultures of various ethnicities populating the country. AE today carries in itself many peculiar characteristic features of region, social and economic class, and level of education. AE is the most powerful instrument which cements the persistence and the strength of the national American idea and serves as a powerful tool for globalization. SUMMARY
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION 1. What influences did the English language in America fall under? 2. What is the general definition of Americanisms? 3. What characterized the process of word formation in AE? 4. What does the comparative analysis of ranges of meanings of the same words in AE and BE (e.g., store, cracker, corn, etc.) show? 5. What are most striking differences between BE and AE? 6. What is the backward influence of AE on BE? 7. What languages and cultures did AE borrow from? LECTURE 11. U.S. EDUCATION This lecture will describe the U.S. education system, and types of schools. It portrays:
Key Words and Proper Names: alumni, athletic prowess, civics, college-bound students, community college, compulsory education, crèche, curriculum, elementary school, freshman, junior, grade, guidance counseling, middle school, high school, electives, postgraduate study, proficiency, senior, sophomore, standardized testing, state commissioner of education, superintendent of public instruction, tertiary, top tier, transcript, undergraduate study, vocational and technical education; Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate courses, the Ivy League, the No Child Left Behind Act; ACT (American College Testing Program), ETS (Educational Testing Service), GRE (graduate schools in general), the LSAT (test for law school), SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test); the GMAT (test for business school), or the MCAT (test for medicine school). Statistics: Among the U.S. adult population, over 85% have completed high school, and 30% have received at least a bachelor’s degree. The average salary for college graduates is $51,000, exceeding the national average by more than $23,000. Literacy is estimated at 99%. The 2011 unemployment rate for high school graduates was 7.6%; the rate for college graduates was 4.9% with weekly earnings more than $400. From the U.S. Census Bureau, the median salary of an individual who has only a high school diploma is $27,967. The median salary of an individual who has a bachelor's degree is $47,345. Certain degrees, such as in engineering, typically result in salaries far exceeding high school graduates, whereas degrees in teaching and social work fall below.] The 2011 U.S. statistics: there were 74.1 million students, of them: 35 million - pre-kindergarten through Grade 8 students; 14.8millon - Grades 9-12 students; 5.8 million - private school students; 18.5 million - college and university students (10.5 million women, 8 million men). Of them engineers - 10% women, computer science - 18% women. U.S. education history: When colonists from Europe first arrived in America, they had to decide upon a means which would preserve their cultural heritage. The answer was the town school. 30 years after founding the first settlement in Massachusetts in 1620, all towns were required to hire a schoolmaster to teach reading, writing and arithmetic, as well as religion; larger towns were required to establish grammar schools to prepare children for the university. At the university level, Harvard (Massachusetts) was founded in 1636, and William and Mary college (Virginia) in 1693. In 1776, on the eve of the American Revolution, America had 14 colleges. The whole idea of schooling developed with the passing time, schooling meant not only preserving parts of classical education, but also teaching the skills necessary to build a new North American nation/statehood. Americans freely borrowed from English, French and German schools. The result was that by the mid-19th century the same school would offer its students Latin and animal husbandry, arithmetic and home economics. As Americans moved west, their belief in schooling remained unchanged, but the new settings on the Midwestern prairies and the Southwestern deserts called for adaptation. Each state, with its own constitutional jurisdiction over schools, determined each school’s own curricula, standards and purposes. Each community raised funds for school buildings and teachers. Although these factors led to a considerable diversity, the role of the school in America was similar in all parts of the country. The Merrill Act of 1862 passed by Congress revolutionized American higher education. The Act granted public lands to states for the sites of institutions teaching agriculture and mechanics, to prepare students for “the ordinary pursuits and professions of life.” These colleges legitimized vocational and technical education and grew much more rapidly than liberal arts colleges created in imitation of the older private universities of the East Coast. Today’s great state universities have grown from these pragmatic roots. In 1834, Pennsylvania established a completely free, publicly supported, and publicly controlled state school system. By the end of the Civil War in 1865, education from primary school through university was becoming available to all, and had attracted to its service many of the best-trained members of society. The public school became the vessel in which a distinctive American civilization was shaped. On the 19th-century frontier, the school, along with the church and jail, was a key public building in the community. It was the settlers’ social center used outside school hours for community meetings, adult education, farmer training, youth recreation and social gatherings. School unified rural and village communities. Town pride was associated with the town school’s athletic valor. Attendance at athletic contests brought the whole population into the school’s life, helping to integrate a diverse population into one community. Colleges and universities also served the purpose of social integration. State universities bear the name of their state, and their achievements were recognized as state achievements. The work of their technical and agricultural faculties was to facilitate the state’s development. In fact, schools became an Americanizing agent for the massive numbers of new immigrants who arrived in great waves during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The schools, which taught exclusively in English, required students to take courses in grammar and literature, American history, civics (government) and civilization. Indeed, 21st century America is the product of a well-schooled affection for technology. American education today reflects national and social problems. Because it is principally supported by public monies, it reflects economic stresses. And because it is one of the vessels in which “America” is molded, it reflects contradictory theories of how to choose the right pattern for the future. E.g., one of the most important issues in American education during the past decades has been the curriculum reform. So, in the late 1960’s, academic curricula were changed to suit student interests and tastes. On high school level, the “3 R’s” — reading, writing and arithmetic — were badly neglected in favor of experimentation and more “relevant” elective courses. Resulting national test scores showed an alarming decline in student proficiency. Thus, during the mid-70’s, there was a marked departure from experimentation and a return to the basics. Many states began to administer proficiency tests for graduating high school students. This emphasis on the basics was supplemented in the 80’s by a realization of the need for training (or at least orientation) in more technologically based fields like computer science and communications. Traditional courses in science and the humanities were also reemphasized. At the turn of the 21st century, most states increased the number of courses required for graduation. |