【題組】47. Which is the best title for this passage?
(A) Firefighters’ Best Friend
(B) A History of Dalmatian dogs
(C) Dalmatians’ Popularity
(D) How to Train Dalmatians
(C) In 1992 linguists raced to Turkey to make an emergency recording. They wanted to hear a man read the words on hisgravestone before he died. Tevfik Ensec was the only man who could read these words properly. He was the last living P. 5speaker of a language called Ubykh.Ubykh is just one of the languages that die out every year. This happens because languages are living things. About 6,000languages exist in the world today, the number of which, however, is getting smaller all the time due to the steady growth ofbigger languages. Currently, the Celtic languages such as Irish and Welsh are nearly extinct. What’s to blame? English. And inSouth America, Spanish and Portuguese are replacing other regional languages found there.Linguists predict that at least half of the world’s languages will become extinct in the next hundred years. The world’smost dominant languages such as English, Mandarin, and Spanish are growing at an amazing speed. But is this necessarily abad thing? Wouldn’t it be better if we all spoke the same language?The death of a language is never a good thing. Languages are not simply words which confuse people who speak differenttongues. Instead, they are connected to the culture in which they are created. As different cultures experience the world indifferent ways, their languages reflect this. Therefore, when we lose a language, we lose that bit of knowledge that is connectedto it.Although it would be convenient to be able to express oneself anywhere in the world, it would come at a great cost. Ifsome day we all end up speaking the same language, we can be assured that a huge amount of wisdom will be lost.