Basics of Language and Dialects.docVIP

Basics of Language and Dialects 　　[Abstract] When we travel around the world, we will hear different languages from different national people; in the same way, when we have a journey round one country, we will find different people in different regions speak differently more or less. But we also can encounter this situation that people of the same language cannot understand with each other, and people from different languages can communicate with each other freely. What can we explain about this phenomenon? In this paper, I want to say something about this issue through the basic ideas of language and dialect. 　　[Key words] Basics；language and dialects；origin；standard；difference 　　I. INTRODUCTION 　　While people do usually know what language they speak, they many not always lay claim to be fully qualified speakers of that language. They may experience difficulty in deciding whether what they speak should be called a language proper or merely a dialect of some language. Such indecision is not surprising: exactly how do you decide what is a language and what is a dialect of a language? What criteria can you possibly use to determine that, whereas variety X is a language, variety Y is only a dialect of a language? What are the essential differences between a language and a dialect? 　　II. ORIGIN 　　According to Einar Haugen, the term dialect was borrowed in the Renaissance to England, as a learned word from Greek. Since the distinction written varieties in use in Classical Greece, each associated with a different area and used for a different kind of literature. Ancient Greece was actually a group of distinct local varieties descended by divergence for a common spoken source with each variety having its own literary traditions and uses, e.g., Ionic for history, Doric for choral and lyric works, and Attic for tragedy. Later, Athenian Greek, the koine ― or ‘common’ language ― became the norm for the spoken language as the various spoken varieties converged on the