Alone with dramatic development of science and technology, the importance of studying language fall into neglect because most people think everybody knows about their own language and it is a waste of time that to analyse the differences between different languages. However, is that really true? One way to figure out this question is to think about those problems: How many people really know about the origin of language? How many people understand their own language exactly? How many people realize that language influence every side of our human society? After considering about these questions, I think the answer is pretty obviously. Actually, language is the most fantastic and complicated thing in the world, it help people to express their emotion, pass on their knowledge and record their history. We can not imagine what the world would look like without language, maybe the world will back into chaos. And it is not excessive to say:" No language, No civilization." In brief, we should realize that the importance of studying language can never be overestimated. Therefore, it is crucial for us to analyze the differences between languages which used for different culture background and different places because it is one of important parts of studying language.
In my personal experience, I encountered the most significant differences of language usage, when entering my primary school. At that time, in my home country China is beginning to study Standard Chinese(SC). There are two main differences between SC and my hometown dialect: one is pronunciation and another one is grammar.
First, pronunciation is the most significant difference. For instance, my hometown dialect do not have cacuminal and nasal pronunciation so we speak very fast and no any change of intonation.
In contrast, SC has a very strict and complex rule on this. According to different combination of vowels in a word, SC requires us whether to pronounce cacuminal and nasal sounds or not like:
- "h" in "sheng" ,"he" and "zhang" is a very important symbol to indicate that you should have a cacuminal pronunciation there.
- "ing" in "qing" , "ong" in "xiong" and "eng" in "feng"is a another important symbol to tell you to have a nasal pronunciation here.
In addition, there are various phonetic symbol in SC to direct us where we should change our intonation. We could not explain all of them in a short time and this is only a tiny part of Chinese.( believe me, nobody can study all aspect of Chinese even though he is genius or spends his whole life)
Second, there are a few differences of SC and my hometown dialect in grammar part. However, we should still pay attention to it because it is those small differences that have big impact on the way of our reading and writing. Generally, we can divide those differences into two categories: one is the sentence structure and another one is the meaning of words.
In SC, every sentence you make should have three basic elements: subject, predicate and object. Additionally, you should put appropriate words in order to identify the tense which you want to present.
On the contrary, my hometown dialect allow us to omit predicate and tense indicators sometimes so as to make the sentence shorter and express you idea to others more quickly. I can not concrete this idea since most of you do not know Chinese at all. However, I can use English to give you an abstract idea help lessen some of your confusion.
- SC: He is going to buy some food in few minutes later HD: He go to buy some food.
- SC: We were organising an football team month ago. HD: We organise an football team.
Moreover, the meaning of words sometimes are really different between SC and my hometown dialect because one word may have different meaning in different language situation, and which has a funny effect of our daily expression. In my hometown, you may see a sentence like that:
- He is a glass.
- This event is braised.
- The boy and the girl are really cooked well.
It is ridiculous when analysing those sentence with SC, but in my hometown dialect it has a obvious meaning. Let me explain, the "glass" do not refer to the solid that we use for window. Instead, it means homosexual. The "braised" is also interpreted into "real" and "cooked well" means " familiar with each other".
Thus, we can find how magic the language is. And there are still a lot of things wait for us to dig.
