英语听力精选进阶版 6247（在线收听）

How Is the Internet Changing English? 网络如何改变英语语言？

Twenty years ago this week the British inventor Tim Berners-Lee created the world’s first webpage. It is worth pausing to consider the extraordinary impact that his invention has had on the English language.

Everyday words like google, unfriend and app simply didn't exist in 1990.

Even more words have had unexpected shifts in meaning in those two decades. If you had mentioned tweeting to an English-speaker a few years ago, he would have assumed you were talking about bird noises, not the use of the microblogging site Twitter.

Long ago, if someone lived online, it didn't mean they spent every waking minute on the internet, but that they travelled around with the rail network.

And wireless still means, to anyone of a certain age, a radio - not the system for retrieving internet pages without wires.

"The internet is an amazing medium for languages," said David Crystal, honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Bangor. "Language itself changes slowly but the internet has speeded up the process of those changes so you notice them more quickly."

English is a remarkably inclusive language, and if words continue to be used for at least five years they generally end up in the Oxford English Dictionary.

But less accepted are the peculiar dialects that have sprung up amongst some users. For example, 'LOLcat' is a phonetic, grammatically-incorrect caption that accompanies a picture of a cat, like "I'm in ur bed zleeping".

In an article called "Cats Can Has Grammar" the blogger Anil Dash referred to LOLcat as "kitty pidgin". But does something like LOLcat have the staying power to become an accepted form of English?

Not according to Professor Crystal. "They are all clever little developments used by a very small number of people - thousands rather than millions. Will they be around in 50 years' time? I would be very surprised."

Glossary 词汇表

to unfriend 删除好友 

app 应用程序 

microblogging 微博 

every waking minute 醒着的每一分钟 

of a certain age 中年的，不算年轻的 

to retrieve 找回 

medium 媒介 

linguistics 语言学 

to speed up 加速 

inclusive 包容广泛的 

to end up 最终成为 

to be accepted 被接受 

dialect 方言 

to spring up 涌现 

phonetic 语音学的 

caption （图片、照片等）说明文字 

to accompany something 伴随、陪伴某物 

blogger 写博客的人 

kitty pidgin 像猫语言的混杂语 

staying power 持久力