浅析中英语言禁忌(1)(4)
2017-08-09 01:22
导读：In addition, more and more women step outside their houses to work together with men. They don’t want to depend on men any longer. However, the traditional ideas about women stifle the fulfillment o
In addition, more and more women step outside their houses to work together with men. They don’t want to depend on men any longer. However, the traditional ideas about women stifle the fulfillment of their abilities and they are often treated unfairly in work. This forces women to rise and fight for equalities with men and more and more men begin to learn to respect women, which will have an influential effect on the language. As a result, taboos on sexist language increase. Besides, in an era of peace, the relative stability of society and the fast pace of life, people don’t bother much to avoid things in the objective world. Instead, they prefer living a pleasant and harmonious life. They enjoy spiritual entertainment very much, so they try to avoid those words and behaviors that may make others feel unpleasant to keep the harmonious relationship. Those professions that were looked down upon in the past are beautified now. The substitution of “sanitation engineer” for “garbage collector” is a good example for this.
As a whole, since the third stage, people today show more respect for science and technology and human right so that the superstitious and feudal elements in linguistic taboos tend to reduce while those reflecting the advancement of human society and spiritual civilization tend to increase.
3. The similarities between Chinese and English linguistic taboo
There are taboos for religion, sex, death, disease, social bias, etc in both Chinese and English cultures and they are reflected in their respective language and become a kind of linguistic phenomenon. The similarities of Chinese and English linguistic taboo mainly embody in the following aspects:
3.1 In pronunciation
Both Chinese people and English people believe that saying words that imply misfortunes or disasters may bring them trouble, and they thought misfortunes can be prevented by replacing the words with homophones that have better meanings.
In China, many taboos have been caused by superstitions. In Shanxi province of China, there is a custom that mulberries can not be planted in front of the house and willows can not be planted behind the house, because the Chinese character “桑(mulberry)”sounds the same as “丧（mourning）and “柳（willow）”sounds the same as “绺”.They may indicate that there will be a funeral and something will be stolen.[6] Gamblers won’t say “书(book)”, because the Chinese “shu/书(book) sound the same with “shu/输(defeat)”. Chinese people will not present a clock as a gift in weddings or other ceremonies, because “ clock” pronounces “zhong (钟)”, which has the same pronunciation as “zhong/终(end)”, meaning death in Chinese. Many other examples also can be found in Chinese. Some fisherman in South China avoid saying such word as “fan/翻(turn over)” or “chen/沉(sink)” and any other words with similar sounds. Some even change their surname “chen/陈” which sounds the same as “chen/沉”. It is said that the chopsticks people in the East use when having meals were originally called “zhu/箸” in ancient China. Since it had the same sound as “zhu/住（stop）”, it was replaced later by “kuaizi /筷子” since “kuai/筷” sounds like “kuai/快（quick）”. In western countries, there are also many such kinds of examples. When a word sounds the same as a taboo word, it needs changing into another expression. For instance, “in earlier 18th century, the female in English and American countries always tried to avoid using the word ‘arse(the bottom part of the body one sits on)’, which was considered inelegant. So people called the animal ‘ass’ as ‘donkey’.”[7] Another typical example is that “fuck(a sail)”, “feck” or “fack(fact)” are seldom used or even go out of use, because they pronounce the same as “fuck”. “Neaman made a conclusion that the reason why some words disappeared were related to the fact that their pronunciation are the same as some taboo words”. [8]
