Enunciados de questões e informações de concursos
Text V
Ages ago, I acquired two recordings that inspire a feeling of weirdness whenever I listen to them, or even think about them. Both are performances of the great Lerner and Loewe musical My Fair Lady in languages other than English. Each of them has a special twist of irony. At the core of the original story is how the coarse Cockney girl Liza Doolittle is as a challenge, taken in by the insufferably smug but utterly enthralled professor Henry Higgins, and through painful exercises — “The rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain” — acquires such an impeccably upper-class Oxbridge way of speaking English that at her (and his) ultimate test, a posh ball that she attends incognito, drifting among the cream of British society, the keenest linguistic sleuth in the land dances with this mysterious beauty and in the end declares her too good to be true, and hence not English elite at all, but Hungarian!
The whole idea of de-anglicizing this story strikes me as really nutty — and yet there they are, those recordings on my shelf. And so, on what wet plains do those heavy, drenching rains mainly fall, in Mi Bella Dama? And in the Hungarian version, to what elite nationality is the too-good to-be-true unrecognized Cockney girl assigned? Of course, the truly strange part in both cases is that the whole time she is speaking Spanish or Hungarian, the charade is maintained that she is actually speaking English, and, unlike most plays or movies where one language is made to pass for another, the linguistic medium here is not just an incidental fact, but the very crux of the entire plot. I suppose the suspension of disbelief involved is no more strained than our willingness to accept as “reality” a story that is occasionally interrupted by the actors’ breaking into lyrical song, and then, as suddenly as it started, the singing is over and apparent normalcy resumes on stage.
Douglas R. Hofstadter. Le ton beau de Marot: in praise of the music of language. New York: Basic Books, 1997, p. 198 (adapted).
Considering the grammatical and semantic aspects of text V, decide whether the following items are right C or wrong E.
The word “sleuth" is used in a disparaging way.
Outras questões do mesmo concurso: IRBr / Diplomata / 2018
