【人文科学-语言】 Singapore has almost wiped out its mother tongues （706字 精读 必做篇）
When Sandy, a young Chinese Singaporean, learned that her grandmother was terminally ill, she signed up for a workshop in the Hokkien language run by LearnDialect.sg, a social enterprise founded to help Singaporeans communicate with the city-state’s older Chinese residents—including within their own families. Sandy is fluent in English and Mandarin, the official “mother tongue” of Chinese Singaporeans. Her grandmother spoke little of either. Before she died, Sandy thrilled her by asking in Hokkien, “What was your childhood like?” She was even able to understand some of the answer.
Their language barrier was the product of decades of linguistic engineering. English has been the language of instruction in nearly all schools since 1987, to reinforce Singapore’s global competitive edge. But, depending on ethnicity, pupils study a second language—typically Mandarin, Malay or Tamil. These are intended, as Lisa Lim of the University of Sydney puts it, to add “cultural ballast” vis-a-vis English. In the case of Mandarin, its acquisition has been reinforced by the government’s annual “Speak Mandarin Campaign”, started in 1979.
Mandarin is a standardised version of the language spoken by the people of the vast plains of northern China. Yet hardly any of the Chinese from whom Singaporeans are descended hailed from there. They came instead from the southern provinces of Fujian, Guangdong and Hainan, and so spoke different languages: Hokkien, Cantonese and Hakka, along with two Hokkien-related tongues, Teochew and Hainanese.
The Speak Mandarin Campaign sought to destroy Chinese Singaporeans’ real mother tongues, first by demeaning them as provincial “dialects” of Mandarin when they are in fact mutually unintelligible languages as different as English, German and Danish. Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding father, who started learning Chinese in his 30s, promoted the now discredited notion that humans have a tightly limited capacity for language: Hokkien and all the rest undermined the official bilingualism by hogging chunks of children’s memories. Further, the great tidier disliked the diversity embodied in these languages and wanted to forge a single Chinese identity—reason enough to foist on Chinese Singaporeans an alien language. Lee also thought that China’s opening promised riches to those who could speak its official language.
So dialects were disparaged. In the early 1980s television and radio programming in these languages all but disappeared, cutting many people adrift. “To speak dialect with your child,” the government warned, “is to ruin his future.” By the campaign’s own yardsticks, the success is striking. The use of Chinese vernaculars at home has collapsed, from 76% of Chinese households in 1980 to 16% in 2015. Over the same period, the use of Mandarin rose, from 13% of Chinese households to 46%. But the linguistic engineering has had an unintended consequence: the use of English is now increasing faster, especially among younger families: over 70% of households with children at primary school use it as their main language, undermining Mandarin and vernaculars.
And so a debate about the costs of language policies has grown since Lee’s death in 2015. The same year, the 50th anniversary of the nation’s founding was accompanied by an outpouring of sentimentality over Singapore’s roots. These days officials are a bit readier to tolerate Singapore’s linguistic variety. Lee Kuan Yew once called Singlish, the country’s vibrant mash-up of English, Malay and Chinese vernaculars, a “handicap”. Lee’s son, the prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, claims to be proud of Singapore’s unique form of Mandarin. For instance, the Malay for “market”, pasar, has been imported as ba sha. That would be unintelligible to a mainland Chinese. Yet that only highlights a paradox Mr Lee does not acknowledge. On the one hand, he praises Singaporean Mandarin because it supposedly reinforces a Chinese Singaporean identity. On the other, he frets about others stealing a march in China because of their more fluent Mandarin.
Meanwhile, younger Singaporeans are embracing former mother tongues. Ski Yeo and Eugene Lee were motivated to found LearnDialect.sg upon seeing an elderly Cantonese-speaker in a nursing home struggle to communicate that she was cold. Health workers have signed up to their courses, while others want to say the right things at family gatherings over the lunar new year. There is an uptick in Hokkien television programming. And everyone admits that effete Mandarin is useless for swearing.
Source：The Economist
【人文科学-艺术】 Computers Confirm Beethoven's Influence （399字 2分59秒 精听 必做篇）
先做精听再核对原文哦~
Beethoven is a giant of classical music. And the most influential, too—at least, when it comes to piano compositions. That’s according to a study in the journal EPJ Data Science.
If you’re wondering how data analysis could determine something as intangible as cultural influence, it’s worth remembering this:
“The great thing about music is that it’s the most mathematical of the art forms we actually can deal with. Because a lot of it is symbolic; it’s temporal. So we have symbols. The music is written using symbols that are connected in time.”
Juyong Park is a theoretical physicist by training and associate professor of culture technology at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.
Park and his colleagues collected 900 piano compositions by 19 composers spanning the Baroque, Classical and Romantic periods, from 1700 to 1910.
Then they used that mathematical quality to their advantage by dividing each composition into what they called “code words,” a group of simultaneously played notes—in other words, a chord.
They then compared each chord to the chord or note that came after it ...
... which allowed them to determine how creative composers were at coming up with novel transitions.
The composer with top marks for novelty? Rachmaninoff.
But when the researchers looked at those chord transitions across all 19 composers, it was Beethoven who was most heavily borrowed from—meaning, at least among the composers in this analysis, his influence loomed the largest.
Their study does come with a couple caveats. Again, the researchers only considered piano compositions in this work—not orchestral works. And by only studying chord transitions, their conclusions wouldn’t capture artists who were influential in other ways.
“It’s well understood that Mozart’s contribution to evolution of music comes from the musical forms that he devised. And that was not very well captured by our mathematical modeling.”
As for Park, the results convinced him he has some listening to do.
"Of course, I do, I like Rachmaninoff’s music but I have to confess that I have listened to Beethoven way more than Rachmaninoff. So after this work came out, I ended up buying his whole complete collection from Amazon, I’m waiting for this collection to arrive.”
Seems that Park turned a minor interest into a major commitment—in a key way.
[CLIP: Rachmaninoff sample]
Source: Scientific American
【人文科学-艺术】 Billionaire Will Raffle Away Picasso for Charity （420字 4分7秒 精听 选做篇）
先做精听再核对原文哦~
Billionaire art collector David Nahmad cannot remember why he bought “Nature Morte,” a small oil painting by Pablo Picasso.
Nahmad owns about 300 of Picasso’s works. So, his forgetfulness is understandable.
“We bought so many Picassos now, I don’t remember the… reason,” Nahmad said to Associated Press reporters from his home in Monaco.
The 72-year-old started dealing art with his brothers in the 1960s, paying as little as $5,000 for pieces by Picasso and building the collection of works that made them into billionaires.
“Nature Morte” is the smallest painting Nahmad has. And it is about to belong to someone else. It will be sold to raise money for charity later this month.
Raffle tickets will be sold online and are 100 euros each. The winner of a similar Picasso raffle in 2013 was a 23-year-old worker from Pennsylvania.
Nahmad is one of the art world’s most important art dealers. He will receive over $1 million for “Nature Morte.” But he said the piece is worth “at least two, three times” that.
“This raffle would not have succeeded if the name was not Picasso. I tried to propose other artists’ names. But it would not work, because they wanted a name that would appeal to everybody. It has to be Picasso. Picasso is the magic name,” he said.
The value of Nahmad’s collection is estimated to be about $3 billion. But he himself will not say what the exact value is.
“I don’t think people care about the number of works, but about their quality,” he said.
Nahmad said the possibility of giving up “Nature Morte” has made him look more closely at the small still life painting. It shows a newspaper and a glass of alcohol on a wood table.
“I think this painting is extremely chic,” Nahmad said.
The raffle will be held in Paris on March 30. The organizers hope to sell 200,000 tickets. The money the event raises will help provide water for villagers in Cameroon, Madagascar and Morocco.
Nahmad believes that Picasso, who died in 1973, would have liked the raffling of his works to the public.
“Picasso was very generous," Nahmad said. “He wanted his art to be collected by all kinds of people, not only by the super-rich.”
Nahmad’s hope is that the winner of “Nature Morte” will be someone who loves the work. If not, “I will be very unhappy” and “would like to buy it back,” Nahmad said.
“There’s nothing worse than to own something without understanding that thing,” he said.
Source: VOA
【笔记格式要求】
精读笔记格式要求： 1.总结文章中心大意 2.总结分论点或每段段落大意 3.摘抄印象深刻或者觉得优美的句子 4.总结文章中的生词 5.记录阅读时间、总结时间、总时间
精听笔记格式要求： 1.逐句听写整篇文章 2.对照原文修改听写稿，标记出错原因 3.总结文章中心大意 4.总结精听过程中的生词 5.记录听写时间、总结时间、总时间
这里也给大家两点学习小建议哦~ 精读：如遇到读不懂的复杂句，建议找出句子主干，分析句子成分，也可以尝试翻译句子来帮助理解~ 精听：建议每句不要反复纠结听，如果听 5 遍都没听出来，那就跳过，等完成后再回听总结原因，时间宝贵，不要过于执着哦~
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发表于 2020-5-17 22:24:33
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