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II. Several Basic Concepts
2.1 Animals and Animal words
What are “animals”? The word “animal”, which first appeared in Middle English, derives from the Latin word “animalel”, meaning “neuter of animalis”. In fact, there are more than 150 million species of animals known by human. Animals are hierarchically classified into categories of kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and species.
According to American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, an animal is “a multicultural organism of the kingdom animalia, differing from plants in certain typical characteristics such as capacity for locomotion, non-photosynthetic metabolism pronounced response to stimuli, restricted growth, and fixed bodily structure” (119).
According to Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, the word “animal” is defined as follow: First, a living creature such as a dog or cat, that is not an insect, plant, bird, fish or person; Second, any living creature that is not a plant or person; Third, any living creature, including people: Man is a highly intelligent animal; Fourth, (informal) some one who behaves in a cruel, violent or very crude way; Fifth, (informal) something that is very different from the thing you have mentioned; Sixth, (informal) someone who is interested in politics, in meeting other people etc (89).
In addition, the author will introduce more knowledges about animal words.
In modern times, traditional linguists in China have paid more attention to this kind of words in their research and studies. In fact, animal words take up a big proportion of the total in both English and Chinese, therefore the study of animal words could be an important and meaningful subject.
Animal words are an essential component of almost all human languages. With the development of intercultural communication between English and Chinese, animal words are likely to form an area in which misunderstanding in our communication seems inevitable because of the persities of their cultural connotations.
Research on “animal words” has become a comparative hot topic of language study. More and more articles concerning animal words in English and Chinese writing have published in the past decades and this phenomenon shows that there has been a steady increase in the number of papers in this field.
The basis of animal words is also an important aspect of study. Liao Guangrong argues that the animal words are loaded with culture based on three points: First, features of animal’s appearance, attributes, habits, behavior, roles in social life, etc; Second, the cultural contents, cultural tradition, and cultural psychology of a nation, such as myths, religion, history, literature, arts, language, geographic environment, customs, morals, ways of thinking, esthetic values and so on; Third, association which connect animals with other things (5).
2.2 Language and Culture
This part consists of three aspects including language, culture and the relationship between language and culture.
The first aspect is language. What is language? Many linguists have proposed various definitions of language. There are some representative ideas and some of them are quoted below:
According to Sapir, a very famous linguist, “Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions and desires by means of voluntarily produced symbols” (77).
In Oxford Advanced Learner’s English-Chinese Dictionary, language is defined as “a system of sounds, words, patterns, etc. used by humans to communicate thoughts and feelings”. Moreover, the commonly accepted one is that “language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication” (Yang 8).
Hall, like Sapir, takes language as a purely human institution. Language is defined as “the institution whereby humans communicate and interact with each other by means of habitually used oral-auditory arbitrary symbols” (343).