单项选择题

Passage Four

Today the study of language in our schools is somewhat confusing. It is the most traditional of scholastic subjects being taught in a time when many of our traditions no longer fit our needs. You to whom these pages are addressed speak English and are therefore in a worse case than any other literate people. People pondering the origin of language for the first time usually arrive at the conclusion that it developed gradually as a system of conventionalized grunts, hisses, and cries and must have been a very simple affair in the beginning. But when we observe the language behavior of what we regard as primitive cultures, we find it strikingly elaborate and complicated. Srefansson, the explorer said that "in order to get along reasonably well an Eskimo must have at the tip of his tongue a vocabulary of more than 10,000 words, much larger than the active vocabulary of an average businessman who speaks English." Moreover these Eskimo words are far more highly inflected than those of any of the well-known European languages, for a single noun can be spoken or writ- ten in several hundred different forms, each having a precise meaning different from that of any other. The forms of the verbs are even more numerous. The Eskimo language is, therefore, one of the most difficult in the world to learn, with the result that almost no traders or explorers have even tried to, learn it. Consequently there has grown up, in intercourse between Eskimos and whites, a jargon similar to the pidgin English used in China, with a vocabulary of from 300 to 600 uninflected words, most of them derived from Eskimo but some derived from English, Danish, Spanish, Hawaiian and other languages. It is this jargon which is usually referred to by travelers as "the Eskimo language". And Professor Thalbitzer of Copenhagen, who did take the trouble to learn Eskimo, seems to endorse the explorer’s view when he writes: "The language is polysynthetic". The grammar is extremely rich in flexional forms, the conjugations of a common verb being served by about 350 suffixes, equivalent to personal pronouns and verb endings. For the declension of a noun there are 150 suffixes (for dual and plural, local cases, and possessive flexion. Tim demonstrative pronouns have separate flex- ions. The derivative endings effective in the vocabulary and the construction of sentences-like words amount to at least 250. Notwithstanding all these constructive peculiarities, the grammatical and synthetic system is remarkably concise and, in its own way, logical.

Tile size of the Eskimo language spoken by most whites is （）

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