11.It can be learned from one of the books how to.
A. repair your digital camera for yourself B. work out the expenses before
going to a restaurant
C. get the
latest information about natural disasters D. learn a lot about historian
Alan Brinkley
D
Doors and windows can’t keep them out; airport immigration officers
can’t stop them and the Internet is a complete reproduction soil. They seem harmless
in small doses, but large imports threaten Japan’s very uniqueness, say
critics. “They are foreign words and they are infecting the Japanese language”.
“Sometimes I
feel like I need a translator to understand my own language, ”says Yoko
Fujimura with little anger, a 60-year-old Tokyo restaurant worker. “It’s
becoming incomprehensible”.
It’s not only
Japan who is on the defensive. Countries around the globe are wet through their
hands over the rapid spread of American English. Coca-Cola, for example, is one
of the most recognized terms on Earth.
It is made
worse for Japan, however, by its unique writing system. The country writes all
imported utterances(言论) except Chinese-in a different script called katakana (片假名). It is the only country to keep
up such a difference. Katakana takes far more space to write than kanji-the
core pictograph (象形文字)
characters that the Japanese borrowed from China 1,500 years ago. Because it
stands out, readers complain that sentences packed with foreign words start to
look like extended strings of lights. As if that weren’t enough, katakana terms
tend to get puzzling.
For example,
digital camera first appears as degitaru kamera. Then they became the more ear-pleasing digi kamey. But kamey is also the Japanese word for turtle. “It’s very
disappointing not knowing what young people are talking about,” says humorously Minoru Shiratori, a 53?year?old bus
driver. “Sometimes I
can’t tell if they’re discussing cameras or turtles.”
In a bid to
stop the flood of katakana, the government has formed a Foreign Words Committee
to find suitable Japanese replacements. The committee is slightly different
from French-style language police, which try to support a law that forbids
advertising in English. Rather, committee members and traditionalists hope a
non-stop campaign of persuasion, gentle criticism and leadership by example can
turn the tide.