Chapter 18 Part Three: Our Golden Key Our Golden Key

Our Golden Key our golden key How amazing is language!All kinds of languages ​​in the world express our thoughts, worries and desires, and also describe our joy and happiness, as well as pain and sorrow, so that people far away thousands of miles away will shed tears for us, let Stories from long ago touch people's heartstrings. Language conveys the most secret and delicate emotions of human beings, making words and sentences like mountain springs flowing from dense pine forests, nourishing our lungs, washing our souls, filling our emotional ponds, and making them ripple and waves.Language has accumulated all the scientific achievements since its birth, from the slight changes in the stars deep in the sky, to the medicinal value of a small grass in the mountains, language has preserved the hardships and joys of exploring scientific truths from generation to generation our everlasting wealth.

Language keeps us in touch with every corner of the world through letters, radios, telephones, faxes, and the Internet, and sends family affection, friendship, care, and greetings to the inaccessible Antarctic and North Pole, and to the astronauts who are traveling in space. In the ears... Language makes thinking more and more exquisite and meticulous, so that we can appreciate the mystery and beauty of snow-capped mountains, the vastness and depth of grasslands, the vastness and broadness of oceans even in a small room... Our thoughts multiply Travel to the deepest part of the sky with the spaceship of language, and go back to the era of the prehistoric universe through the tunnel of language, to imagine the loneliness and desolation in the past, where hot dust and gas are condensing into huge galaxies at the edge of the universe , The gushing magma collided with the monstrous flood, the air waves burst out, the sky was dark, and the organic molecules that make up life were born in the whistling roar of the sky...

People say, Language is the uniquely human possession. (Some people say, Language is the uniquely human possession.) Linguists have written monographs on linguistics that fill the shelves of libraries one after another, discussing every subtle structure of language; lexicographers have worked hard to compile dictionaries as thick as stones, ancient and modern. Of, of epigraphy, of phonology, of etymology...there are countless, piled up like a mountain.Paleographers have devoted their whole lives to speculating, guessing, textual research, and research on the oracle bones, clay tablets, sheepskin, and papyrus fragments with illegible handwriting, to interpret the astronomical mysteries left by the ancients.And the Internet is creating new words every day, and we use these words as fresh as tasting freshly picked fruit.

I don't know how the ancestors survived the long night of the soul in the age without language and writing, how to confide their passionate emotions to their loved ones, how to share the joy of life with their companions, let alone how they kept their last words in mind and survived in the harsh natural environment. survive tenaciously. I-- The first syllable from the clumsy mouth, that indistinct but shocking syllable, once made our ancestors surprised and maddened?How far that moment is from us!Tens of thousands of years ago, in the African jungle, when human ancestors first carved a V-shaped mark on a beast bone, they did not know that they had created a miracle that opened up the world.Five thousand and five hundred years ago, on the plains of Mesopotamia, human beings had the first batch of enlightenment teachers, who worked hard to teach students to write and calculate on clay tablets; after that, about three thousand years ago, the Chinese nation Ancestors carved their initial respect to gods on oracle bones; almost at the same time, in ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, and ancient India, words led the people there to usher in the dawn of civilization.Words have become the key to unlocking the treasure house of human wisdom, the most powerful witness to the development of human civilization, and the most important tool for the dissemination of knowledge, information and ideas.

We have all the excellent writing achievements created by our predecessors.We read the poems left by the ancients to spend our childhood, we use the chapters and books written by the predecessors to spread the wings of youthful imagination, and we use all the literature that can be retrieved to engage in difficult scientific research... We learn foreign languages ​​- English, Japanese, Russian, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Korean (Korean), Serbian (Serb), Flemish (Flemish), Italian (Italian), Yiddish (Yiddish), Hindi (Hindi), Hebrew (Hebrew), Swahili Swahili, Urdu...we absorb thoughts, emotions, science, philosophies, concepts, beliefs, habits and traditions contained in different languages ​​and cultures...we chant Shelley , Keats, Byron, Heine, Goethe's poems, we read the works of Shakespeare, Balzac, Proust, Kawabata Yasunari, Borges, we browse the Bible, (Alcoran) , "Diamond Sutra" (Diamond Sutra)... Language can easily cross thousands of mountains and rivers, cross vast oceans, and make the most remote corners of the world our close neighbors.

How rich are the treasures stored in language!Since the ancient Egyptians built the first library in history in Alexandria, human knowledge and civilization suffered catastrophe time and time again in wars and natural disasters. Lost and recovered, it has finally become an inexhaustible and inexhaustible treasure house like the ocean today. Some people say, Language, like other aspects of human culture, is constantly changing. In just 1,500 years, it has evolved from a backward, even barbaric, tribal language to a language spoken by civilized societies.Today, on the Internet, the advantages of English are obvious in disseminating scientific and technological knowledge and delivering information.

We want to go out to the world, and we need to talk, communicate, understand and communicate with people of all nationalities in the world, and English is the most important tool of communication—it is a golden key for us to open the door to the world.