英语毕业论文On-the-Cultural-Difference-of-Animal-Vocabulary-Existing-between-Chinese-and-English.doc

中英语言中动物词汇存在的文化差异

On the Cultural Difference of Animal Vocabulary Existing between Chinese and English

Contents

Abstract………………………………………………………….………….1
Key Words……………………………………………………….………….1
I. Introduction…………………………………………………….………...2
1. The importance of language………………………………………………2
2. Vocabulary and its meaning………………………………………………3
3. The conception of culture……………………………………...…………4
4. The relationship between language and culture……………………………5
II. The Comparisons of Animal Vocabulary between Chinese and English…………………………………………………………………...5
1. Same animal vocabulary and same cultural connotations………...………...6
2. Same animal vocabulary and different cultural connotations……………….7
1) Some animal vocabulary with commendatory meaning in Chinese, but with derogatory meaning in English………………………...……..…………7
2) Some animal vocabulary with commendatory meaning in English, but with derogatory meaning in Chinese………………………………..……..9
3. Same animal vocabulary without corresponding vocabulary in Chinese and in English………………………………………………………….…….9
1) Some animal vocabulary with varied cultural connotations in Chinese, but with no cultural conceptions in English……………….………..……..10
2) Some animal vocabulary with varied cultural connotations in English, but with no cultural conceptions in Chinese……...…………………….….10
4. Different animal vocabulary with similar cultural connotations…....….…..11
III. Conclusion………………………………………………………..…...12
References……………………………………...…………………………...13

On the Cultural Difference of Animal Vocabulary Existing between Chinese and English

On the Cultural Difference of Animal Vocabulary Existing between Chinese and English

Abstract: Language is the carrier of culture. Thanks to different languages, culture has been so colorful. Words, as the unit of language, play an important role in culture. Different living environments and cultural conventions have a great effect on the cultural connotations of vocabulary. Animals are friends of human-beings. Languages of all nations contain a lot of words denoting animals, and so do Chinese and English. Although animal vocabularies exist in both Chinese and English, sometimes their meanings differ from each other. In order to get a better understanding of the English culture and a more vivid and easeful way of communication, we ought to have some idea of animal vocabulary. If not, we may have difficulties in understanding the inside meaning or the intention of the speaker.
Key words: animal vocabulary; culture; language; connotation

摘 要：语言是文化的载体。由于语言的不同，文化变化多种多样。词作为语言的基本单位，在语言中起着重要的作用。不同的生活环境和文化传统对词汇的含义有很大的影响，动物是人类的朋友，包括英语和汉语在内的所有语言中都有很多表示动物的词汇。虽然动物词汇在汉语和英语中都存在，但是有时他们所包含的意义却不一样。为了更好的了解英国文化，更生动和更轻松的交流，我们应该对动物词汇有一些了解。如果不这样的话，我们将会在了解说话者的深层意思和意图的时候遇到困难。
关键词：动物词汇；文化；语言；涵义

I. Introduction

1. The importance of language
What is language? This question may firstly sounds like a simple question. Though this extremely familiar, common phenomenon, it is difficult to give a satisfactory definition. Some people probably will say “language is a tool for human communication”. Far from a definition, this only tells us what language does, or what it is used for, i.e. its function.
Modern linguists have had various definition of language, but the most generally accepted definition is: “language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication”.
Short as it is, this definition has hatched the main features of language. First of all, language is a system, elements of language is combined by rules. This explains why “iblk” is not a possible sound combination in English, and also why “Been he wounded has” is not a right sentence in English.
Secondly, language is arbitrary in the sense that there is no intrinsic connection between a linguistic symbols stands for, for instance, between the word “pen” and the thing we write with. The fact that different languages have different vocabularies for the same object is a good illustration of the arbitrary nature of language. This also explains the symbolic nature of language: vocabularies are just symbols; they are associated with objects, actions, ideas, etc. by convention. This conventional nature of language is well illustrated by a famous quotation from Shakespeare’s play “Romeo and Juliet”: “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
Thirdly, language is vocal because the primary medium for all languages is sound. All evidence points to the fact that writing system came into being much later than the spoken forms and that they are only attempts to catch sounds and meaning on paper. The fact that children acquire spoken language before they can read or write also indicates that language is primarily vocal.
For the linguist Edward Sapir, language is not only a vehicle for the expression of thoughts, perceptions, sentiments, and values characteristic of a community; it also represents a fundamental expression of social identity.
Language, of course, is knowledge, and in our world today knowledge is one of the key factors in competitiveness. Brains and knowledge are what create the prosperity and growth we tend to assume. In an advanced industrial society in an increasingly mutuality world, the knowledge of other languages becomes indispensable. Just think of how the advent of the Internet has changed our lives. For the last few years, millions of people across the world, who share common interests, are able to communicate with each other and exchange ideas. Not only are they able to do this due to the various technological advances, but also because they share a common language.
So, language is most important to human beings. We use language every day. The increasing of our lives depends on fast, applicable and successful use of language.

2. Vocabulary and its meaning
What exactly is a Vocabulary? All the words in a language get what is generally known as its vocabulary. The term “vocabulary” is used in different senses. Not only can it refer to the total number of the vocabulary in a language, but it can stand for all the vocabulary used in a particular historical period, e.g. Old English vocabulary, Middle English vocabulary and Modern English vocabulary. We also use it to refer to all the vocabulary of a given dialect, a given book, a given discipline and the vocabulary possessed by an individual person. English is one of the world’s highly developed languages. So Chinese is. Naturally the vocabulary is one of the largest and richest. The general estimate of the vocabulary is over one million words. As we may know the arbitrariness of language, there is no logical connection between meanings and words. A good example is the fact that different vocabularies are used to refer to the same object in different languages. As the conceptualists agreed, vocabulary and things are related through the mind. For example, the vocabulary “dog” is directly associated with a certain concept in our mind, i.e., what a “dog” is like, but it is not directly linked to that particular dog mentioned in the sentence “The dog over there looks unfriendly”, i.e., the referent in this particular case. Thus, the symbol or a vocabulary signifies “things” by virtue of the concept associated with the form of the vocabulary in the minds of the speaker of the language; and the concept looked at from this point of view is the meaning of the vocabulary. To study the meaning of vocabulary, we must, first of all, know its definition. Leech’s explanation is: “Connotative meaning is the communicative value and expression has by virtue of what it refers to, over and above it’s purely concept content.” The definition of connotation in the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (1993) is “the feelings or ideas that are suggested by a vocabulary, rather than the actual meaning of the vocabulary”. Complicated as it is, G. Leech in a more moderate tone recognizes 7 types of meaning are: Conceptual meaning, Connotative meaning, Social meaning, Affective meaning, Reflected meaning, Co locative meaning and Thematic meaning.

3. The conception of culture
There is consensus that culture is a complex entity which emprises a set of symbolic systems, including knowledge, norms, values, beliefs, language, art and customs, as well as habits, skills and behaviors of humanity as members of a given society. It is taken for granted and people are unconscious of it. Therefore, it has a strong appreciation on man, and it determines to a great extent man’s attitudes, thoughts, feelings, expectations and ideas.
Culture, in a broad sense, means the total way of life of a people, including the patterns of belief, customs, objects, institutions, techniques, and language that characterizes the life of the human community. As culture is so inclusive, it pervades virtually every aspect of human life and influences predominantly people’s behavior, including linguistic behavior. In a narrow sense, culture may refer to local or specific practice, beliefs or customs, which can be mostly found in folk culture, enterprise culture or food culture etc.
Generally speaking, there are two types of culture: material and spiritual. While material culture, as the term itself suggests, is concrete, substantial and observable, most of spiritual culture, the products of mind (ideologies, beliefs, values and concepts of time and space, for example), is abstract, ambiguous, and hidden. In contrast with nature in the sense of what is born and grows, culture refers to what has been grown and brought up with, in other vocabulary, what can be nurtured. Culture, especially material culture, is reproduced and preserved through the maintaining of beliefs, traditions, education and other institution mechanisms, meanwhile, it changes slowly with the development of the society.
A common view of culture is that of something learned, transmitted, passed down from one generation to the next, through human actions, often in the form of face-to-face interaction, and, of course, through linguistic communication. This view of culture is meant to explain why any human child, regardless of his genetic heritage will grow up to follow the cultural patterns of the people who raised him. A child separated from his blood relatives and brought up in society different from the one in which he was born will grow up to be a member of the culture his adoptive parents. Largely through language socialization, he will acquire the culture of the people he lives with. In anthropology a culture is the learned and shared behavior patterns characteristic of a group of people. Your culture is learned from relatives and other members of your community as well as from various material forms such as books and television programs. You are not born with culture, but with the ability to acquire it by such means as observation, imitation, and trial and error.
So, culture is not a material phenomenon, it does not consist of things, people, behavior, or emotions. It is rather an organization of these things. It is the forms of things that people have in mind, their models for perceiving, relating, and otherwise interpreting them. From this, we can say that culture is communication.

4. The relationship between language and culture
Language qualifies as an element or subsystem of culture; it is a unit of culture. It is an important expression of culture. With its ample connotation, it conveys great deal of cultural information. So the development and the spread of culture must have got the support from language. Without language, they maintain that culture would not be possible. On the other hand language is influenced and shaped by culture, it is also the outcome of culture, and it reflects culture. Every language can be considered as symbolic system to reflect a specific culture and an expression of subjective world of the culture. Culture can only be preserved by means of language handed down from generation to generation, so language is the cornerstone of culture. Language directly reflects the reality of culture. The changes of language are often caused by some cultural factors.
They influence each other. The development of culture must have enriched language. After language came into being, the content of culture became more and more complicated.
Although language plays an important role in culture, language is not a culture free with code, distinct from the way people think and act. Different people have different cultural patterns. Such differences cause differences in language.
Language is just like a skyscraper, and vocabulary are its building materials. If there is no building material, this skyscraper is only a drawing. So vocabularies occupy an important position in whole language. On the other hand, its significance also shows its various differences. And cultural meanings of vocabulary are one of the reasons. It is also a barrier to understand the meanings for English learners. Due to the different culture and social background, some of the animal vocabularies differ in Chinese and English. In order to get a further knowledge of English vocabulary and a better way of communication we ought to know what the difference really is in Chinese and English. So it’s very necessary to discuss the cultural difference of animal vocabulary existing between Chinese and English.

II. The Comparisons of Animal Vocabulary between Chinese and English
As this article mentioned before, some animal vocabularies have the same meaning in both English and Chinese, while some do not. And some even do not have corresponding vocabulary in Chinese and in English. However, some different animal vocabularies share the similar cultural conceptions in some way or another. In order to have a comprehensive understanding of this seemingly strange phenomenon, this thesis will analyze each of them.

1. Same animal vocabulary and same cultural connotations
Wolf is one kind of cruel animals which eat sheep of the shepherd specially. So, people in Chinese and English countries don’t like wolf extremely. Both Chinese and English use “wolf” (狼) to stand for “cruel” or “greedy”. In Chinese, if we want to describe a person who is vicious and ungrateful, we often use “狼心狗肺” ；if we say somebody is “有狼子野心”, we mean he is as ungrateful as wolf. We can easily find similar uses in English. For example:
A. He’s mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf, a boy’s love.（人发了疯才相信豹狼的温顺，孩童的爱情。）
B. It is madness for a sheep to treat of peace with a wolf. （羊和狼讲和平，是羊发了疯。）
C. The wolf may lose his teeth, but never his nature.（豺狼老掉牙，本性改不了。）
In Chinese, we have “如饿狼扑食”，“狼吞虎咽”and things like that to describe how fast and violent a person is when he is eating, just like a wolf. So does English.
D. You ought to see him wolf it down.（你应该看着他狼吞虎咽地把它吃下去。）
E. Pamela cut herself a piece of steak and ate it, not taking he eyes off Victor Henry as he wolfed the food.（帕