Вступительный письменный экзамен по английскому языку. Учебные материалы, методические указания и рекомендации. Пособие для абитуриентов
.pdfno-goodnik does not rate inclusion in most British dictionaries, but that’s their loss.
The -nik suffix should be used with restraint (The New York Times was going over the top to call lovers of Bach cantatas Bachniks), or it becomes a mannerism. Nevertheless, -nik remains on standby for anyone who can make good use of it.
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‘Black Speech’ and ‘White Speech’
in America
An experiment was carried out in the USA in which a number of people acting as judges were asked to listen to tape-recordings of two different sets of speakers. Many of the judges decided that speakers in the first set were black, and speakers in the second set white — and they were completely wrong, since it was the first set which consisted of white people, and the second of Blacks. But they were wrong in a very interesting way. The speakers they had been asked to listen to were exceptional people: the white speakers were people who had lived all their lives amongst Blacks, or had been raised in areas where black cultural values were dominant; the black speakers were people who had been brought up, with little contact with other Blacks, in predominantly white areas. The fact was that the white speakers sounded like Blacks, and the black speakers sounded like Whites — and the judges listening to the tape-recordings reacted accordingly. This experiment demonstrates two rather important points. First, there are differences between the English spoken by many Whites and many Blacks in America such that Americans can, and do, assign people with some confidence to one of the two ethnic groups solely on the basis of their language — this might happen in a telephone conversation, for instance — which suggests that ‘black speech’ and ‘white speech’ have some kind of social reality for many Americans.
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Punctuation Marks
Punctuation is mainly used to separate units of grammar (sentences, clauses, phrases, words) from each other. The various marks are organized in a broadly hierarchical manner: some identify large units of writing, such as paragraphs; others identify small units, such as words or word parts; others identify units of intermediate size and complexity.
The main English-language conventions are as follows:
— space: separates words; identifies paragraphs — the first sentence begins a new line, with the first word usually indented; extra space
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may also be inserted between paragraphs, especially to mark a break in the discourse.
—period (full stop): identifies the end of a sentence, along with question and exclamation marks; sometimes followed by a wider space than is usual between words (printing and typing conventions differ); also used to mark abbreviations (though practice varies); a sequence of (usually three) periods indicates that the text is incomplete.
—semi-colon: identifies the coordinate parts of a complex sentence, or separates complex points in a list (as in the previous paragraph).
—colon: used mainly to show that what follows it is an amplification or explanation of what precedes it — as in the present sentence.
—comma: a wide range of uses, such as marking a sequence of grammatical units, or a unit used inside another; displays a great deal of personal variation (such as whether it should be used before and in such lists as apples, pears, and plums).
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Germanic Tribes and Their Languages
The tribes which threatened the Celtic chiefs of Britain were essentially Germanic, another branch of the Indo-European migration. After the Celts, the movement of the Germanic people into the Baltic region, Northern Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands produced two more massive branches in the great language tree of Europe. To the north, there were the Norse tongues of Scandinavia; to the south, the family of West Germanic languages. This second branch divided into the High German and the Low German. The first serious historian of these Germans was the Roman writer Tacitus, who gives us the earliest picture of the tribes that became the first Englishmen.
Tacitus was writing near the zenith of the Roman Empire. The armies of Rome were garrisoned across Europe from Britannia to Bucharest, throughout the known world. There was an obvious fascination with the unruly peoples of the North, especially the troublesome ones like the Germans. In his Germania, ‘On the Origin and Geography of Germany’, Tacitus makes a colourful evaluation of the character and customs of the tribes that absorbed so much of Rome’s political and military power. The Germans, he says, have the virtues Rome has lost. They love freedom; their women are chaste; there is no public extravagance. He characterizes the various tribes. One of these seven barbarous tribes was ‘the Anglii’, known to history as the Angles, who probably inhabited the area that is now known as Schleswig-Holstein.
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Text 7
The Story of Old English
Before the Anglo-Saxon invasions, the languages of Britain were Celtic, spoken in many dialects by people who had themselves invaded the islands several centuries before. Many Celtic tribes had in turn been subjugated by the Romans, but it is not known just how much Latin — if any — was spoken in daily life in the provinces. When the Roman legions left, in the early fifth century (to help defend other parts of the Roman Empire), the only permanent linguistic sign of their presence proved to be the place names of some of their major settlements — such as the towns now ending in -chester (derived from the Latin word for camp, castra), and a small number of loan words, such as straet (street, road).
The linguistic effects of Anglo-Saxon wars were just as clear-cut. Many Celtic communities were destroyed, assimilated, or gradually pushed back westwards and northwards, into the areas we know as Cornwall, Wales, Cumbria, and perhaps also Scotland. Here the Celtic dialects were to develop in separate ways, resulting in such modern languages as Welsh and Gaelic. We do not know if many Celts stayed in the east and south, but if they did, they would soon have lost their identity within the dominant Anglo-Saxon society. One thing is clear: the Celtic language of Roman Britain had hardly any influence on the language spoken by the Anglo-Saxons. Only a handful of Celtic words came into English at the time — such as crag, combe, bin, cross, brock (badger), and tor (peak). And there are even very few Celtic place names in what is now southern and eastern England (though these are much more common in Cornwall and Devon, and of course in Wales and Scotland). They include such river names as Thames, Avon (from the word for river), Exe, Usk, and Wye. Town names include Dover (water), Pendle (pen is ‘top’ in Welsh), and Kent (whose meaning is unknown).
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The Novel as a Genre
The novel may be the last form of literature to establish itself, but since the eighteenth century its success has been almost alarming. In the ‘circulating libraries’, fiction had its own methods of distribution, and already in the eighteenth century there are frequent complaints about the excessive amount of time spent in novel-reading. Yet this attachment of a large public to the novel is not surprising. For many, it is the only outlet to a large experience. For others, it is an indirect satisfaction of some need for a philosophical or moral guidance, not
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set out in rules, but worked out, experimentally, in conduct. Apart from all this, the novelist’s art is a great one, touching life everywhere, and using not only description, but the dramatist’s gift of dialogue. It is the form in literature which has explored most fully the life of the ordinary man, and found it worthy of portrayal. For some reason, it is the form of literature in which women have competed successfully with men, and the novel of the future may lie more with woman than with man. It is probable that the reading public for the novel today contains a majority of women. Yet in the middle of the twentieth century it must be admitted that the popularity of the novel seems in decline. One cannot successfully read a novel and watch television, and many of the readers of even the more intelligent novels have been lost in that way. It would be excessive to suggest that the best in the novel is becoming the province of a minority audience, yet for the future this does not seem an impossible conclusion.
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On Tolstoy’s Stories
In Tolstoy’s masterpieces all is probable and typical of human life. These are the sort of things that might happen to anyone. Things like them have probably happened to thousands. These are such people as we might meet any day. We can say without reservation, ‘This is what life is like.’
But we cannot help noticing that until quite modern times nearly all stories were of a different type. Just as all except bores relate in conversation not what is normal but what is exceptional, so earlier authors told of the exceptional. Earlier audiences would not have seen the point of a story about anything else. Faced with such matters as we get in War and Peace they would have said ‘But this is all perfectly ordinary. This is what happens every day. If these people and their fortunes were so unremarkable, why are you telling us about them at all?’ We can learn the world-wide attitude of man to stories from noticing how stories are introduced in conversation. Men begin ‘The strangest sight I ever saw was —,’ ‘I’ll tell you something even queerer than that,’ or ‘Here’s something you’ll hardly believe.’ Such was the spirit of nearly all stories before the nineteenth century. The deeds of heroes were told of because they were exceptionally and improbably heroic; the saint’s life, because he was exceptionally and improbably holy.
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Shakespeare and the Bible
All textbooks on the history of English agree that the two influences which dominate the final decades of the Renaissance are the works
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of William Shakespeare (1564−1616) and the King James Bible (the ‘Authorized Version’) of 1611. Dominate, that is, from a linguistic point of view. The question of their literary brilliance and significance is not an issue for this book. Our question is much simpler yet more far-reaching; what was their effect on the language?
This isn’t just a matter of the way these works use language in a memorable way — the ‘quotability,’ as some say. Certainly, extracts from both sources predominate in any collection of quotations. But quotations are different. ‘To be or not to be’ is a quotation, but it had no subsequent influence on the development of the language’s grammar or vocabulary. On the other hand, Shakespeare’s use of obscene is not part of any especially memorable quotation, but it is the first recorded use in English of this word, and it stayed in the language thereafter.
Of course, to say that Shakespeare, or anyone, is ‘the first’ to use a word, or to use it in a particular way, does not mean that this person actually invented the word or usage. It may already have been present in the spoken language, but never written down. However, this is really beside the point. Whether Shakespeare was the first to use a word or not, the fact remains that his use of it put the word into circulation, in a way that had not happened before.
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On Charles Dickens
(by Peter Ackroyd)
Charles Dickens is perhaps the greatest of the English novelists because, in his fiction, he manages to combine all the resources of prose narrative. He called it the ‘streaky-bacon’ effect, because he adopted tragedy and pantomime, sentimental pathos and Gothic horror, lyricism and comedy, all within the same frame of his expansive and elaborate novels. In the process, he managed to capture the full force of his age, and of his age’s concerns, so that on many occasions he was as much a social observer or commentator as he was a novelist. He became the conscience of his period, but at no stage did he ever forget that the roots of his fiction lay in the fine art of telling stories. That is why his work has remained so popular, and why his books will last as long as the English language itself.
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Jane Austen
The nineteenth century was to produce works of fiction of far greater significance than the ‘terror’ tales. Seldom has the novel been conceived with such deliberate and successful art as in the novels of
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Jane Austen (1775−1817), daughter of the Rector of Steventon. Her brother served at the Nile and Trafalgar, but her own life was spent in a narrow world at Steventon, Bath and Chawton. From the first she seems to have realized the scene which she could portray, and nothing can tempt her outside. For the past she had no curiosity, and the events which stirred the Europe of her day left no impression on her pages. In the same manner she detached herself from the weaknesses of her predecessors. To the ‘terror’ tale she presented the assault direct, in Northanger Abbey (not published until 1818), and she combined with her satire of the ‘Gothic’ school a deeply studied picture of imaginary horror working in the human mind. The moral outlook of Richardson left her unimpressed, and her art is the more detached for its absence. Sentimentalism found her equally unmoved. Her observation, with whatever difference of scale, has the ‘negative capability’ of Shakespeare. More than anyone since Fielding, she regarded the novel as a form of art which required a close and exacting discipline. The resulting narratives are so inevitable in their movement, so precise in their realism, that they give the impression of ease, but the facility is a gift to the reader, exacted from the fundamental brainwork of the author. Her integrity as an artist is shown by the fact that she had continued to write and to revise novels even when her work seemed unlikely to find acceptance from the publishers.
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Walter Scott as an Inventor
of the Historical Novel
Scott, though he had some antecedents, including Maria Edgeworth’s picture of Irish life in Castle Rackrent (1800), may be said to have invented the historical novel. Instead of the contemporary scene, and the detailed study of middle-class life, he steps back into the past, frequently using well-known characters, and constructing narrative which is at once an adventure and a pageant of an earlier world. Where Fielding and Jane Austen had been content with characters and their immediate surroundings, Scott invented a background for his scene, with landscape and nature descriptions, and the picturesque details of past ages. Though the central theme often introduces the leading personalities, the most secure element lies in his pictures of ordinary people, particularly the Scottish peasants whom he knew so well, and in whose portrayal his notable gift for comedy had free exercise. In variety of scene and in the wealth of characters he equals Shakespeare, and yet when their art is compared much is found missing in Scott. The continual impoverishment of English speech, in its frank description of the passions and the crudities of life, deprives his style of the
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range which Shakespeare possessed. Nor did he penetrate into the hidden places of his characters’ minds. Their conduct and emotions are governed by simple motives.
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Walter Scott’s Work
Scott soon discovered that he could not write poetry as good as Byron’s, and so he turned away from it; but as a historical novelist he has no rival. He read the older novelists, and himself began to write Waverley in 1805. It appeared in 1814, and for the next eighteen years Scott wrote novel after novel. In 1826 he lost all his money through the business failure of his publisher and printer. He owed £ 100,000, but refused the money with which his friends offered to help him. He sat down to pay the immense debt by writing, but died before he could do so. In spite of that, his books brought in enough money after his death to pay the last pound.
The modern world is very different from Scott’s world. It does not admire glory in battle as much as the men of Scott’s day, partly because there are so many other dangerous events to remember. Spacetravel is more exciting to us than fighting with swords. These facts have lessened the attraction of Scott’s novels; yet we must admire his powers of description. His characters, especially the unusual ones, are well drawn. His historical studies were long and deep, and his stories have the force of careful detail. He has left so much that few people can read all of it.
Scott is rather difficult to read, especially in those places where his characters speak dialect. Though the stories themselves are good, the books are long for the modern reader. His hard work and his knowledge of history continually astonish the reader; yet the love interest in the stories often lacks depth, and his heroes and heroines — especially the heroines — are weak when compared with the violent scenes in which they live. Scott’s style is sometimes heavy and much influenced by the old and flowery ways of speech. But he loved people, as Chaucer and Shakespeare did, and he could tell stories well.
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On Olivia Manning
(by Susan Hill)
Last year, a friend accompanied her parents on a cruise and wanted me to suggest some good fiction she could get stuck into. ‘Of course, you’ve already read Olivia Manning?’ But surprisingly, she hadn’t. Problem judiciously solved. What treats, to discover such a fine novelist whose complete works you could encompass in a fortnight, and from
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which you would get so much. She wrote so well and wisely, covered so much ground, taking you into so many teeming, utterly absorbing milieus. Olivia Manning gives you an extraordinary picture of how it was in the Europe of World War II. The best books are those of The Balkan Trilogy: The Great Fortune, The Spoilt City and Friends And
Heroes. They tell the story of newly married Guy and Harriet Pringle, exiled in Bucharest, and later Greece, among other expatriates and a motley assortment of locals and hangers on.
Manning’s second series of books, The Levant Trilogy, moves the war and the Pringles on to Egypt, Syria and Jerusalem, and introduces the young officer Simon Boulderstone. It is also remarkable for the convincing eyewitness accounts of battle.
I read both trilogies every ten years, and each decade discover new insights and depths, perceptions and subtleties. Manning is the most readable of intelligent, many-faceted novelists.
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On Anthony Powell
(by Antonia Fraser)
I strongly recommend reading Anthony Powell’s brilliant, absorbing, racy sequence A Dance To The Music Of Time on holiday on the grounds that I do it myself every year. There are twelve volumes, taking us from schooldays at Eton, through World War II, to the post-war Britain of the Labour government. They centre around the narrator Nick Jenkins (often equated in a gossipy way with the author, but not always accurately, I fancy). The great charm of reading the series, apart from the wonderful humour and wicked observation of the social comedy, is that it is rather like painting the Forth Bridge, if less arduous. You become so involved with the characters that you cannot resist opening Volume One again as soon as you finish Volume Twelve. And then you’re hooked…
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Art and Society
Most artists of the past had to overcome great difficulties, but being understood was not one of them. What stood in the way of immediate fame, and caused many of them to die in poverty, was not their incomprehensible language and form so much as their personal independence and boldness of ideas. Shakespeare’s plays and Beethoven’s symphonies were produced almost as they came from the master’s hand. Rembrandt’s difficulties came from the failure of his paintings to flatter a money-smug Dutch middle class. Mozart remained poor
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because even a most popular composer who insulted aristocratic patrons and scorned back-door politics found little money coming his way. New styles were often hotly discussed and debated, but because of their break with authority and tradition rather than because of their incomprehensibility. Often new artists were attacked, not because they were not understood, but because their ground-breaking ideas were too well understood and not welcomed.
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Basic English
The language barrier has also been attacked by several proposals to simplify the structure of a natural language, usually by reducing the complexity of its grammar or the size of its vocabulary. All the main Western European languages have been modified in this way, the most famous approach being that of Charles Kay Ogden (1889−1957), known as Basic English (1930). Basic is an acronym for ‘British American Scientific International Commercial’. It consists of 850 words selected to cover everyday needs: 400 general nouns, 200 picturable objects, 100 general qualities, 50 opposites, and 100 operations (adverbs, particles, etc.). The working principle is that all words not on this list can be replaced by those that are (permitting several inflectional variations). The basic vocabulary is supplemented by several international and scientific words.
The system was strongly supported in the 1940s by such people as Churchill and Roosevelt, but there were also many criticisms. The simplification of the vocabulary is achieved at the expense of a more complex grammar and a greater reliance on idiomatic construction. The replacement forms are often unwieldly, involving lengthy circumlocutions. And although Basic proved easy to learn to read, it proved very difficult to write in the language in such a way that meaning was clearly preserved. The system is now largely of historical interest, though analogous principles can be found in several spheres of foreign and remedial language teaching.
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The Image of Women in the Mass Media
Is this the end of pictures of attractive girls advertising cars or soap on the walls of European cities? Recently the European Council of Ministers under the Spanish Presidency adopted a resolution on the image of Women in Advertising and in the Mass Media. The European Council of Ministers called upon the European Commission and the European Union Member States to promote a more diversified and realistic picture of the skills and potentials of women and men
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in society and to take appropriate measures to forbid discrimination on the grounds of sex. The stereotypes based on sex which he media often convey may affect relations between men and women, particularly among young people. Therefore the mass media and advertising agencies are especially targeted by this resolution.
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The Moth and the Star
(by James Thurber)
A young and impressionable moth once set his heart on a certain star. He told his mother about this and she counselled him to set his heart on a bridge lamp instead. ‘Stars aren’t the thing to hang around,’ she said; ‘lamps are the thing to hang around.’ ‘You get somewhere that way,’ said the moth’s father. ‘You don’t get anywhere chasing stars.’ But the moth would not heed the words of either parent. Every evening at dusk when the star came out he would start flying toward it and every morning at dawn he would crawl back home worn out with his vain endeavour. One day his father said to him, ‘You haven’t burned a wing in months, boy, and it looks to me as if you were never going to. All your brothers have been badly burned flying around street lamps and all your sisters have been terribly singed flying around house lamps. Come on, now, get out of here and get yourself scorched! A big strapping moth like you without a mark on him!’
The moth left his father’s house, but he would not fly around street lamps and he would not fly around house lamps. He went right on trying to reach the star, which was four and one-third light years, or twenty-five trillion miles, away. The moth thought it was just caught in the top branches of an elm. He never did reach the star, but he went right on trying, night after night, and when he was a very, very old moth he began to think that he really had reached the star and he went around saying so. This gave him a deep and lasting pleasure, and he lived to a great old age. His parents and his brothers and his sisters had all been burned to death when they were quite young.
M o r a l. Who flies afar from the sphere of our sorrow is here today and here tomorrow.
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The Very Proper Gander
(by James Thurber)
Not so very long ago there was a very fine gander. He was strong and smooth and beautiful and he spent most of his time singing to his wife and children. One day somebody who saw him strutting up
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