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2.2 Western Culture and Eastern Culture
2.2.1 Western Culture
We usually use western culture to refer to the culture where people speak English. Cultures of UK and USA are typical representatives of western culture. Influenced by Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution, the western culture generally values free thought, human rights, the need for equality, and democracy and so on(Pekins).
2.2.2 Eastern Culture
By the thousand years of influence of Imperial China, many Chinese cultural elements derive from Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism, we pay a lot of attention to collective right, and tend to think in a Holistic way, our sense of group is strong, whereas the sense of self is relatively weak, we try to achieve harmony between people with people, society with people, nature with people.
2.2.3 Close Relationship Between Culture and Language
On one hand, Language can be taken as a verbal expression of culture. It is used to maintain and convey culture. Despite physical condition and skin color, all babies are born the same; what makes them different from each other after growing up is the culture they have been exposed to, which includes living habits, life attitudes, religions, cuisine, art, music or dance. How one speaks is his culture, so it is very likely that one man’s common sense is totally incomprehensible to people from another culture, even if there is no difficulty in understanding each words the other says. For example, most Chinese will be confused when we hear some foreigners say “he will go to the John”. For us,[John] is a man’s name, so we will wonder what on earth the speaker try to say. Actually, we can not try to understand this sentence without thinking about its related culture elements or history. The term is thought to derive from Sir John Harrington, who was a famous person in Britain who devised Britain’s first flushing toilet, as well as being Queen Elizabeth I’s god children. His invention was an innovation in Britain at the time and it was commonly thought that he was the inventor of the flushing toilet. This is why it is thought the flushing toilet today is often also called a “John”. Therefore, language is a way to express culture.