2019수능특강 영어 25강 본문

수능특강 영어 25강.hwp

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수능특강 영어 25강

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Communication is not merely a matter of producing effects on other communicators; it is one of actually engaging with them. Communicating is a kind of sharing. When two people communicate (rather than “talk at each other”), they come to have something in common. They must start with something in common, too, even if this is only the language they share. Communication does not demand complete agreement or acceptance, but it does demand understanding. When put into language, my thoughts, ideas, notions, and beliefs are no longer mine alone (assuming they ever were). They have been put into a form in which they can be shared. The primary aim of language use is understanding; all of the other effects my linguistic actions may have on other people (getting my listeners to agree with me, to obey my orders, to trust me, or whatever) only come about because what I have tried to communicate has been understood.

 

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Human memory limits which cultural variants can be remembered and transmitted successfully. People are unlikely to retain information that is easily forgotten or misremembered, particularly in cultures relying on an oral tradition. David Rubin, a professor at Duke University, provided a brilliant account of how the cognitive structure of memory affects the content of oral traditions such as epic ballads or counting-out rhymes. As one example of his approach, he used work on imagery in cognitive psychology to argue that epic ballads such as the Iliad or Odyssey tend to focus on concrete, easily visualized actions because people find it easier to remember events that are concrete and easy to visualize. Homer is filled with concrete action, not because the Greeks had trouble with abstraction but because the constraint of human memory makes concrete images more likely to survive generation after generation of oral transmission.

 

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Even the peasant family defines its own identity at the table. “To live on one bread and one wine,” that is, to share food, is in medieval language an almost technical way of signifying that one belongs to the same family. Even today in different dialectal expressions, the house is identified with the food that allows the domestic community to live there together: “Let’s go home” (andiamo in casa) in the traditional vocabulary of the Romagna region meant, “Let’s go into the kitchen.” On all social levels sharing a table is the first sign of membership in a group. That might be the family but also a broader community—each brotherhood, guild, or association reasserts its own collective identity at the table. Every monastic community demonstrates its intimacy(affinity) in the refectory where all are supposed to share the meal from which are temporarily excluded only the excommunicated—those who are impure because they have some guilt.

 

4

The Arabic language doesn’t have a single word for compromise, which some have said is the reason that Arabs seem to be unable to reach a compromise. Yet, the Arabic language does provide several ways to articulate the concept of compromise, the most common being an expression that translates in English to “we reached a middle ground.” This example illustrates codability, which refers to the ease with which a language can express a thought. When a language has a convenient word for a concept, that concept is said to have high codability. Thus, the existence of the word compromise gives that idea high codability in English. When a concept requires more than a single word for its expression, it possesses lower codability. It is accurate, then, to say that the idea of compromise has lower codability in Arabic than in English. However, having a phrase rather than a single word to express an idea does not mean that the idea is nonexistent in a given culture, only that it is less easily put into the language code.