unit-4 Mother_Tongue

Mother Tongue 1. I am not a scholar of English or literature. I cannot give you much more than personal opinions on the English language and its variations in this country or others.

我既不是英语语言专家，也不是文学专家，我只能就英语及其在美国和其他国家的变化谈些个人观点，仅此而已。

2. I am a writer. And by that definition, I am someone who has always loved language. I am fascinated by language in daily life. I spend a great deal of my time thinking about the power of language -- the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth. Language is the tool of my trade. And I use them all -- all the Englishes I grew up with.

我是个作家，按照作家的定义，我是那种一直热爱语言的人。我着迷于日常生活中的语言。我花费了很长时间来思考语言的力量---语言是如何唤起情感、视觉景象、复杂思想或简明真理的。语言是我的执业工具，我应用所有的英语---与我一生相伴的所有英语形式。

3. Recently, I was made keenly aware of the different Englishes I do use. I was giving a talk to a large group of people, the same talk I had already given to half a dozen other groups. The nature of the talk was about my writing, my life, and my book, The Joy Luck Club. The talk was going along well enough, until I remembered one major difference that made the whole talk sound wrong. My mother was in the room. And it was perhaps the first time she had heard me give a lengthy speech, using the kind of English I have never used with her. I was saying things like, "The intersection of memory upon imagination" and "There is an aspect of my fiction that relates to thus-and-thus"-a speech filled with carefully wrought grammatical phrases, burdened, it suddenly seemed to me, with nominalized forms, past perfect tenses, conditional phrases, all the forms of standard English that I had learned in school and through books, the forms of English I did not use at home with my mother.

最近发生的一些事情使我对我使用的不同形式的英语有了更为深刻的认识。我当时正为很多人做讲座。同样的讲座已经搞过很多次了，内容是关于我的写作、生活及小说《喜福会》。讲座进行得很顺利，直到我突然意识到了一个重要的不同之处，这个不同使整个讲座变得不对味了，我的母亲来了。这可能是她头一次听我用一种从未跟她讲过的英语做这么长的讲座。我在讲，比如“记忆与想象的交错”、“我作品的一个侧面反映了….”等等等等，言辞中充满了精心雕琢的语法词组，也重负着，我突然感觉到，所有那些我在学校和教科书上学到的诸如名词形式化、过去完成时、条件词组等标准语法形式。这些英语形式我在家从未曾与母亲使用过。

4. Just last week, I was walking down the street with my mother, and I again found myself conscious of the English I was using, the English I do use with her. We were talking about the price of new and used furniture and I heard myself saying this: "Not waste money that way." My husband was with us as well, and he didn't notice any switch in my English. And then I realized why. It's because over the twenty years we've been together I've often used that same kind of English with him, and sometimes he even uses it with me. It has become our language of intimacy, a different sort of English that relates to family talk, the language I grew up with.

就在上个星期，我与母亲一起沿街散步，这期间我再次发现自己对所用英语形式的意识，那是种只跟母亲才说的英语。我们当时正在聊新家具和二手家具的价格，我听见自己这样说道“别浪费钱那样。”我先生也在，可他并没有意识到我语言上的任何变化。于是我找到了原因，那是因为在我们共处的二十多年中，我经常用这种英语与他交流，有时甚至他也用。这种英语已经成了我们的亲密语言，一种与家庭谈话相关的、不同的英语，是伴我成长的语言。

5. You should know that my mother's expressive command of English belies how much she actually understands. She reads the Forbes report, listens to Wall Street Week, converses daily with her stockbroker, reads all of Shirley MacLaine's books with ease-all kinds of things I can't begin to understand. Yet some of my friends tell me they understand 50 percent of what my mother says. Some say they understand 80 to 90 percent. Some say they understand none of it, as if she were speaking pure Chinese. But to me, my mother's English is perfectly clear, perfectly natural. It's my mother tongue. Her language, as I hear it, is vivid, direct, full of observation and imagery. That was the language that helped shape the way I saw things, expressed things, made sense of the world.

应该让你们了解一下我母亲富于表现力的英语运用掩盖了多少她真实的理解。她读的是《福布斯》报告，听的是华尔街每周论坛，每天都和她的股票经纪人通话，可以轻松地阅读雪莉.麦克兰尼的所有的书----而所有这些我还没弄明白是怎么回事呢。可我的一些朋友跟我说，母亲的话他们只能听懂一半。有些说听懂了十之八九，有些什么也没听懂，就好像她完全在说中文。但对我而言，母亲的英语非常清楚、非常自然。这就是我的“母语”。她的语言，在我听来，既生动、率直，又充满了观察和意象。就是这种语言帮我形成了看待事物、表达思想、了解世界的方法。

6. Lately, I've been giving more thought to the kind of English my mother speaks. Like others, I have described it to people as "broken" or "fractured" English. But I wince when I say that. It has always bothered me that I can think of no way to describe it other than "broken," as if it were damaged and needed to be fixed, as if it lacked a certain wholeness and soundness. I've heard other terms used, "limited English," for example. But they seem just as bad, as if everything is limited, including people's perceptions of the limited English speaker.