托福阅读真题+题目+答案：The Language of Iceland

托福阅读真题+题目+答案：The Language of Iceland

Paragraph 1: Most languages have changed considerably over the centuries, but Icelandic, spoken on the island of Iceland, is an exception. Its history goes back to the ninth century, when Iceland was settled by speakers of Old Norse. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Icelandic authors wrote the magnificent prose narratives known as the sagas. Extraordinarily, present-day Icelanders can still read these stories, and many do. Not “read” as in “decipher” but actually read for enjoyment. Compare it to reading nineteenth-century English novels: some words and phrases are quaint but understandable for English speakers today. That’s how close modern Icelandic is to its early form.

1. Why does the author compare reading the sagas to “reading nineteenth-century English novels”?

O To show how similar the styles of the sagas and some English prose narratives are

O To explain how some modern scholars are able to decipher the sagas

O To emphasize how enjoyable it is to read literature of the past

O To illustrate how little Icelandic has changed since the sagas were written

Paragraph 2: Of course, the language has expanded its vocabulary to keep up with the times, so the saga authors would have trouble understanding a modern newspaper. Also, there’s more to language than the written word, and pronunciation has definitely changed somewhat in the interim. Nonetheless, Icelandic has remained remarkably stable for 800 years — or even 1,100, given that the first settlers are thought to have spoken a similar language. One reason for this stability is suggested by even a quick glance at the map: Iceland is extremely isolated from other population centers. The distance to mainland Europe (not counting smaller islands) is roughly 1,000 kilometers, while Denmark, which ruled Iceland for centuries and was Iceland’s gateway to the world, is about twice that far. Until the nineteenth century, most Icelanders would go through their entire lives without encountering a foreign language.

2. According to paragraph 2, which TWO of the following aspects of Icelandic have changed the most over time? To receive credit, you must select TWO answers.

O The number of words in Icelandic

O The way that words in Icelandic are pronounced

O The written form of Icelandic

O Icelandic’s influence on languages in mainland Europe

Paragraph 3: This can’t be the whole story though, because languages are prone to change even without outside influences. It takes exceptional conditions to prevent them from doing so. What is required in particular, according to sociolinguists, is that many of the people known to any one speaker should also know each other, as this maintains a consensus on linguistic norms. Icelandic society before the nineteenth century, with fewer than 50,000 people, may have been small enough to allow such close-knit networks. Another glance at a map suggests an objection to this hypothesis: Iceland is very thinly inhabited, and it’s very difficult to travel across, with mountains to climb and fast-streaming rivers to cross. This is true, but historians argue that in spite of these obstacles the Icelandic elites used to travel and intermingle much more than one might think: local leaders visited the yearly national council (Althing); wealthy families travelled between their various estates; elite children attended one of only two schools; and clergymen (Christian ministers) were dispatched to districts far from both their birthplace and their former districts. The occasional volcanic eruption, moreover, forced hundreds and sometimes thousands of people to move to a different region. All these contacts may have kept the language stable — so stable in fact that even dialects were practically non-existent.

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