Abstract
Animals are considered to be good friends of human beings. They play indispensable roles in people’s daily life. People associate animals with natural phenomena, personalities and emotions. They play very important role in the life of human beings, so do animal words in language. They are closely linked with mankind, even the human languages have been deeply influenced by animals. As far back as creating the word time, our ancestor created a lot of pictographic characters according to the appearance of the animal, such as fish, dog, bird, etc. With the development of human civilization, these animal words have been endowed with more meanings and made up more words. For example, bully people by flaunting one's powerful connections, wait for windfalls. Likewise, there are a large number of animal words in English, too. However, even if tow words refer to the same animal in Chinese and English, they have different meanings due to the influence of different factors, such as history and region. This makes animal words with rich and various cultural connotations often result in misunderstanding in cross cultural communication. So many animal vocabularies have special meanings in each language and form unique cultures of animal. and tries to reflect the cultural differences between the two ethnic groups in Chinese and English so that we can better carry out foreign language teaching and the understanding of Chinese as a foreign language.
Keywords: Cultural Comparisons, Animal words, Meanings of animals, East and West culture
Contents
Abstract I
Contents I
Introduction 1
1. The Comparisons of Animal Words in Terms of Cultural Connotations in English and Chinese 3
1.1 Same animal words with same cultural connotation 3
1.2 Same animal words have drastically different cultural connotation 3
1.3 Different animal words with similar cultural connotations 5
2. The reasons influencing connotations of two cultures 6
2.1 Different region and belief 6
2.2 Geography of animal words 7
2.3 Local custom 7
2.4 History 8
3. Conclusion 9
References 10
