Animals in Chinese and western culture


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Animals in Chinese and western culture
Abstract: animals have played an important role in human life and the cultural meaning of animals in China and the West differ from each other. Fox, sheep, bat, wild cat, fowl, peacock, phoenix, dragon, beaver, bear, bulls, doggie and so on are listed in the article, expounding their cultural connotation in China and the West. Relating idioms are also mentioned in the article to help readers deepen their understandings.
Keywords: animal; cultural connotation; idiom; dragon; cat
In the long course of the human history , animals have been always in close relation with man and thus have an impressing consequence on the existence and development of human kind. As a result, expressions concerning the animals are abundant in the sea of human language, by which people express and communicate their feelings and thoughts. It is absolutely wrong to be oblivious of the various differences lying in different languages, which embody the varieties of different cultures due to the history, custom, religion and etc.
In many cases, the vocabularies of a kind of animal often have different cultural connotations in the circumstances of different languages. Take goat for example, the clocks of the “goat” brand are very popular in China whereas no one buys this kind of clocks in Britain. The root for this phenomenon is in the brand. In China, the equivalent of goat carries a symbol of knowledgeable man. However, this stands for the obsequious and idle man in Britain. Thus we can learn from this that the images that accompany the words about animals are sometimes definitely different.
Except the phenomenon above, the words about animals that carry the same cultural connotations also exist in Chinese and western languages. The reason is obvious. Because man live in similar biological environment, they often observe the animals from their basic qualities and accordingly get the same or similar images.
Fox
For example, when an Englishman says: “ He is a fox.” , he means that the man is cunning. And a Chinese can also understand in this way. From this we can assure that “fox” is bestowed the same cultural connotations in Chinese and English. There are a l