2014年北京外国语大学翻译硕士专业考研参考书-考研招生人数-考研报录比-考研重点笔记
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官方网址 www.yumingedu.com 北大、人大、中财、北外教授创办 集训营、一对一保分、视频、小班、少干、强军 To all the world, nothing seems more completely American than the cowboy. Yet the truth is that the cowboy’s horse, clothes, and trade are all part of the rich heritage contributed by Mexico to her northern neighbor. Even the word cowboy is a translation of the Mexican term vaquero. The word cowboy was unknown to the American settlers who first headed west to Texas in the 1820’s. These people thought of themselves as farmers. In fact, the only cattle most of them brought were a cow or two for milk and a yoke of oxen to draw their plows. It was their Mexican neighbors—the Tejanos whose herds had roamed the open ranges since the early 1700’s—who introduced them to cattle raising, taught them to use the lariat, the branding iron, and the horned saddle, and showed them how to break the wild mustangs and round up the free-ranging longhorns. So well did the new Texans take to Tejano ways that soon you spoke fighin’ words if you referred to them as anything as ordinary as mere “farmers.” They had been changed into saddle-proud ranchers. Later, as the cattle industry spread all over the West, its Mexican origins were largely forgotten. But even today the language of the rangeland clearly shows how great were the cowboy’s borrowings. Corral, pinto, palomino, mesquite, bronco, rodeo, mesa, canyon, arroyo, loco, plaza, fiesta, pronto—by the hundreds Mexican words slipped
官方网址 www.yumingedu.com 北大、人大、中财、北外教授创办 集训营、一对一保分、视频、小班、少干、强军 into English with only a change in accent. Borrowed “by ear,” other words underwent weird alterations. From sabe came savvy, jàquima turned into hackamore, chaparajos was shortened to chaps, estampida was converted into stampede, vamos emerged as vamoose, and the juzgado gave birth to hoosegow. Even the famed ten-gallon hat got its name not from some Texan’s tall tale but from a Mexican song about a gaily decorated hat, or sombrero galoneado. In countless other ways the people of the United States are indebted to the Mexicans who once lived in the old Southwest. There were only seventy-five thousand of them when Mexico ceded the region to the United States, and these were scattered from the Gulf Coast in the east to the shores of the Pacific in the west. They had lived in the borderlands since 1598, more than twenty years before the Pilgrims sailed for the New World. In the course of more than 250 years they had left their mark on the land. Many of the western states in the United States still bear the lovely lyrical names the Mexican settlers first wrote upon their maps. So do countless rivers and mountains, and thousands of cities and towns—from Corpus Christi in Texas to all the Sans and Santas along the Pacific shore. Through trial and error, the rugged Mexicans had learned to survive and prosper in the dry, half-desert land, When English-speaking people poured into the region, the Spanish-speaking people shared their knowledge with the new settlers, making things much easier for them. Settlers in other parts of the United States did not have this advantage. In all the rest of the country, pioneers had to break their own trails. But those who
官方网址 www.yumingedu.com 北大、人大、中财、北外教授创办 集训营、一对一保分、视频、小班、少干、强军 headed west in gold rush days could follow the Santa Fe Trail from the Missouri to the Rockies. In the old settlements of New Mexico, the wagon trains could rest their oxen and replenish their supplies before moving on down the Old Spanish Trail on the Tucson-Yuma route. In the 1850’s, army engineers were sent west to survey the railroad routes that would link East with West. The northern parties had to find their own way through vast stretches of little-explored territory, but in the Southwest the surveyors merely remapped the trails that had been packed hard over the years by Mexican mule trains. Two major railroads—the Southern Pacific and the Santa Fe—and many main highways were built along the routes made by the early Spanish settlers when they first spread out into the new land. Early migrants from the East thought of the Southwest as a great desert, a land that had to be passed through, but was hardly to be settled upon. However, they changed their minds when they saw the rich green fields along the Rio Grande, fields that had been irrigated since the early 1600’s. In time the newcomers were able to turn even desert into some of the most fertile farmland in all the nation. Water laws gave the new settlers some trouble at first. They tried to use a system under which the landowners along the banks of a stream controlled its waters. This system worked well in the water-rich East, but in the dry lands of the Southwest it gave the lucky more water than they needed, while others on higher ground got none at all. In time all the western states had to switch over to the Mexican way—sharing water rights among all the owners whose land could be irrigated.
