Traditional Culture Encyclopedia - Traditional stories - Differences between English and Chinese

Differences between English and Chinese

First, the meaning is different.

Chinese, the traditional language of the Han nationality, also known as Huayan, Putonghua and Tanghua, is one of the common languages in China and the world, belonging to the Sino-Tibetan language family, which is related to Tibetan, Zhuang, Dong, Li, Yi, Miao and Yao languages.

English is the language of Indo-European-Germanic family, and it is the official language of the European Union, many international organizations and Commonwealth countries. The number of native speakers of English ranks third in the world, second only to Chinese and Spanish.

Second, the development history is different.

1, English letters are derived from Latin letters, Latin letters are derived from Greek letters, and Greek letters are evolved from Phoenician letters.

English evolved from the ancient language spoken by Anglo-Saxons and white jute tribes who immigrated to the British Isles from Scandinavia, such as Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and surrounding areas, and spread to all parts of the world through active British colonization.

Due to contact with many national languages in history, vocabulary has changed from unitary to pluralistic, grammar has changed from "more inflections" to "less inflections", and pronunciation has changed regularly.

2. Chinese belongs to Sino-Tibetan language family. The origin of Sino-Tibetan language family is still inconclusive. It is said that the original language of Sino-Tibetan originated in northern China, and differentiated into various languages of Sino-Tibetan family about 6000 years ago. Another hypothesis holds that this language family came from Sichuan in the southwest of China today and began to differentiate about 10,000 years ago. Chinese is one of the languages differentiated from the Sino-Tibetan language family.

Third, different status.

1, the leading position of Britain and America in world culture, economy, military affairs, politics and science makes English an international language. Nowadays, English is used as a medium of communication in many international situations.

English is also the language most closely related to computers. Most programming languages are related to English. With the use of the Internet, English is more widely used. English is one of the working languages of the United Nations.

Chinese is the most widely used language in the world. At least 654.38+0.5 billion people in the world use Chinese, accounting for more than 20% of the world's total population. It is the official language of China, one of the four official languages of Singapore and one of the six working languages of the United Nations.

Mainly distributed in China, Singapore, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand and other Southeast Asian countries, as well as Chinese communities in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and other countries.

References:

Baidu Encyclopedia-English

References:

Baidu Encyclopedia-Chinese