A类雅思阅读模拟练习题

You are advised to spend about 20 minutes on Questions 26-39 which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.

THE ORIGINS OF INDO-EUROPEAN LANGUAGES

The traditional view of the spread of the Indo-European languages holds that an Ur-language, ancestor to all the others, was spoken by nomadic horsemen who lived in what is now western Russia north of the Black Sea near the beginning of the Bronze Age. As these mounted warriors roamed over greater and greater expanses, they conquered the indigenous peoples and imposed their own proto-Indo-European language, which in the course of succeeding centuries evolved in local areas into the European languages we know today. In recent years, however, many scholars, particularly archaeologists, have become dissatisfied with the traditional explanation.

The starting point of the problem of the origins of Indo-European is not archaeological but linguistic. When linguists look at the languages of Europe, they quickly perceive that these languages are related. The connections can be seen in vocabulary, grammar and phonology (rules for pronunciation). To illustrate the numbers from one to ten in several Indo-European languages. Such a comparison makes it clear that there are significant similarities among many European languages and also Sanskrit, the language of the earliest literary texts of India, but that languages such as Chinese or Japanese are not members of the same family (see figure 1).

ENGLISH OLD GERMAN LATIN GREEK SANSKRIT JAPANESE

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN AINS

TWAI

THRIJA

FIDWOR

FIMF

SAIHS

SIBUM

AHTAU

NIUN

TAIHUM UNUS

DUO

TRES

QUATTOUR

QUINQUE

SEX

SEPTEM

OCTO

NOVEM

DECEM HEIS

DUO

TREIS

TETTARES

PENTE

HEKS

HEPTA

OKTO

ENNEA

DEKA EKAS

DVA

TRYAS

CATVARAS

PANCA

SAT

SAPTA

ASTA

NAVA

DASA HITOTSU

FUTATSU

MITTSU

YOTTSU

ITSUTSU

MUTTSU

NANATSU

YATTSU

KOKONOTSU

TO

FIGURE 1 Words for numbers from one to ten show the relations among Indo-European languages and the anomalous character of Japanese, which is not part of that family. Such similarities stimulated interest in the origins of Indo-European languages.

The Romance languages served as the first model for answering the question. Even to someone with no knowledge of Latin, the profound similarities among Romance languages would have made it natural to suggest that they were derived from a common ancestor. On the assumption that the shared characteristics of these languages came from the common progenitor (whereas the divergences arose later. as the languages diverged),it would have been possible to reconstruct many of the characteristics of the original proto-language. In much the same way it became clear that the branches of the Indo-European family could be studied and a hypothetical family tree constructed, reading back to a common ancestor roto-Indo-European.

This is the tree approach. The basic process represented by the tree model is one of divergence: when languages become isolated from one other, they differ increasingly, and dialects gradually differentiate until they become separate languages.

Divergence is by no means the only possible tendency in language evolution. Johannes Schmidt, introduced a "wave" model in which linguistic changes spared like waves, leading ultimately to convergence; that is, growing similarity among languages that were initially quite different.

Today, however, most linguists think primarily in terms of linguistic family trees. It is necessary to construct some explicit models of how language change might occur according to a process-based view. There are four main classes of models.

The first is the process of initial colonization, by which an uninhabited territory becomes populated; its language naturally becomes that of the colonizers. Second are processes of divergence, such as the linguistic divergence arising form separation or isolation mentioned above in relation to early models of the Indo-European languages. The third group of models is based on processes of linguistic convergence. The wave model, formulated by Schmidt in the 1870’s, is an example, but convergence methods have not generally found favour among linguists.

Now, the slow and rather static operation of these processes is complicated by another factor: linguistic replacement. That factor provides the basis for a fourth class of models. In many areas of the world the languages initially spoken by the indigenous people have come to be replaced, fully or partially, by languages spoken by people coming from outside. Were it not for this large complicating factor, the world’s linguistic history could be faithfully described by the initial distribution of Homo Sapiens, followed by the gradual, ling-term workings of divergence and convergence. So linguistic replacement also has a key role to play in explaining the origins of the Indo-European languages.