红与白-中西方的颜色词内涵对比
【Abstract】 All people live in the same material world, and the physical mechanism of perception is pretty much the same in all people. However, different peoples from different countries and with different cultural backgrounds have the different feelings to the same color term. Because of their different geographical position, history, religion, custom, psychology and ways of thinking, the implied meanings of the color words are different. There are bunches of color terms in the vocabularies of different countries. They all have deep cultural connotations, besides their literal denotations. In some important occasions, as the main expression of customs, red and white imply different cultural backgrounds. Through the analysis of symbolic meanings of red and white, this thesis puts an emphasis on the national traits of color terms. Approached from four aspects-- environment, perception, philosophy and religion, the study explores the cultural and historical roots of the differences. The purpose of this thesis is to avoid errors in cross-cultural communications based on a better awareness of cultural differences.
【Key Words】 red； white； connotation； causes； color terms； English and Chinese
【摘 要】 人们生活在同一个物质世界，其感知的生理机制使人们对颜色词的理解也不禁相同。但是，不同国家不同文化背景的人对同种颜色的理解也有所不同。这是因为不同的地理环境，历史背景，宗教信仰，文化风俗，心理以及思维方式使颜色词所蕴涵的意义产生差异。在各种语言词汇里有大量的颜色词，除了表达颜色本意之外，它们有更深刻的文化内涵。在中西方的重大场合里，红白两色作为一种重要的风俗表现形式，深刻体现了两种不同的文化背景，本文通过对红白两色基本象征意义的对比分析，强调了英汉颜色词的民族特性，并从环境、感知、哲学和宗教四个方面探索了造成这种差异的文化历史根源。本文研究是为了更好地了解民族文化差异，避免在跨文化交际中产生失误。
【关键词】 红;白;内涵;原因;颜色词;英汉
1. Introduction
To satisfy our daily necessities, people use a host of color terms to represent colors. For example, it is estimated that there are over three thousand color words in English. Our eyes are able to distinguish seven million different colors, most of which we cannot name. As we know, color is the physical appearance. Although people are in different countries, they also have the same reflections of colors. “According to the famous BK Hypothesis——Berlin and Kay consider that all languages include two to eleven basic colors, which are black, white, red, yellow, green, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, gray.” [1]
However, in addition to what we mentioned above, colors also reflect the features of different culture and society to certain extent. In our daily life, people often realize the colors by optic nerves, and also express their feelings by colors. “Since human beings have the same physical mechanism and optic nervous system, it is no differences in the feelings of colors in theory”[2] : sensory organs such as eyes, ears and nose to sense the environment, and the sensations received by them are routed through our nervous system to our brains, where they are interpreted and recorded. Therefore, the reflections in our minds of the objective world are the same, that is, they refer to things and interpret unit of meanings by means of the same concepts. However, due to the differences of custom, geographical position, history, religion, psychology, some colors have already been the obstructions in the cross-cultural communication. So learning the similarities and differences of color terms in English and Chinese has a great effect on the cross-cultural communication and translation.
For instance, in the traditional Chinese weddings, the bride, who wore red shoes, red dress, and a red veil, sat in red-painted palanquin, greeted by the bridegroom who rode a horse with a big red silk-made flower on the chest. After the ceremony, they would enter into the bridal chamber decorated with red things——red candles, red bed, red quilts, red bedsores, and red pillows. What's more, the gifts sent by the guests were enveloped in red paper packages. These red things not only show the joyful atmosphere, but also suggest that the newly married couple will have a happy life in the future. However, in the western countries, the wedding is called "white wedding", because the bride is dressed in white, wearing white gloves and shoes; the carriage of wedding is driven by white horses, the driver of which wears a white hat; what's more, the invitation cards are written with silver letters. It is so different with Chinese custom. In China, white is used to mean "funeral affairs". So the Chinese are hardly use white in celebrations and happy occasions.
It is natural that English terms of colors may have cultural associations that are not transparent to Chinese learners of English as a foreign language. The following paragraph are meant to focus on the two color terms——red and white, and to help them attain a better understanding.