英语听力精选进阶版 11228

 

Estuary¹ 

Professor David Crystal 

Words based on locations² don't become part of the general 

language very often. You do get a few – I mean people talk about 

"Whitehall" meaning the government, or "the White House" in 

America, meaning the American government, but not very often, 

and certainly part of a river  – 'estuary'! I think that's a first; I don't 

remember hearing that before ever.  

Now the estuary in question is the River Thames, and during the 

1980s the word estuary came into the language referring to the 

kind of speech that people are using around the estuary of the 

River Thames, in places like Essex, in the north of Kent, and it 

was a new kind of accent: a sort of cross between Cockney and 

Received Pronunciation.  

And if somebody said he speaks estuary, it would mean he speaks this kind of 

mixed accent. In RP, in Received Pronunciation, you'd say that the word was 'wall' 

– the thing that holds a house up – a wall; in Cockney of course it's a 'wall', a 'wall' 

and in estuary English of course it's a sort of mixture of the two: a 'wall', a 'wall', 

with a 'l' sort of sound. It's one of the fastest moving accents of modern times. 

1 estuary   

n.河口，江口

参考例句：

• We live near the Thames estuary.我们的住处靠近泰晤士河入海口。
• The ship has touched bottom.The estuary must be shallower than we thought.船搁浅了。这河口的水比我们想像的要浅。

2 locations   

n.位置，场所( location的名词复数 )；发现[找出]…的位置[地点]；外景（拍摄地）

参考例句：

• The massive-head buttress dam has some attractive features for certain locations. 大头支墩坝对于某些地区仍有其值得注意的特色。 来自辞典例句
• Knowing which one of 4096 date memory locations is not so simple. 要想访问4096个数据存储单元中的某一个绝非易事。 来自辞典例句