Comparative Study Of Chinese And English/Spanish Kinship

People’s interpretation of language is relative to the cultures of the specific social groups they belong to.Kinship terms vary from society to society and represent the center of basic social organization.In fact,kinship terms exist in all languages and tend to be the most widely used terms.Not only that,but they also contain cultural meanings within local ethnic and religious customs.This thesis includes six chapters.The first chapter mainly reviews Chinese,European,and American research on kinship terms.Chinese kinship records started during the Han dynasty in<Erya:Shiqin>,followed by<Boya>,<Shiming>,and the Qing dynasty’s<Kinship>.These works recorded changes in kinship terminology over time.In the early 1930s,anthropologist,archaeologist,and ethnologist Feng Hanji used Morgan’s classification method to systematically analyze Chinese kinship terms.Later,Zhao Yuanren,Rui Yifu,and Yu Min conducted more research on the differences in Chinese kinship terms across dialects.After the 1990s,China’s research on the topic reached its peak.The emerging works mainly focused on the relationship between kinship and traditional culture;dialects;the differences among other language kinship terms;semantics;and translation.Kinship research in Europe and America started with Louis Henry Morgan in the nineteenth century.His important contribution was to classify two broad categories of kinship terms--descriptive and classificatory.His theoretical concepts dominated anthropological research until the early twenty century.Friedrich Engels even based his 1884 book,"The Origin of Family,Private Ownership,and the State," on Karl Marx’s notes on Morgan’s research.Engels and Marx’s work had great influence on social development and family relations in China and the former Soviet Union.It also played an important role in the development of feminism.The study of kinship in Europe and America became intrinsically tied with pragmatic functionalism,psychology,social structure theory,alliance theory,Sapir-Wolf hypothesis,and feminism.In the West,research peaked in the middle of the twenty-century.Research topics included the types,divisions,and definitions of kinship terms;the origin of traditional conceptions of the family and marriage;the influence of the family on social economy;the relationship between kinship networks and social development;the system model of kinship;the psychological evolution of the kinship naming system;the relationship between biology and psychology;the meaning of kinship and the mobility of relationships;genealogy;the cultural relationship between kinship and the environment;kinship in a non-biological sense;the relationship between marriage and kinship status;and women’s influence on the family.The second chapter mainly compares the Chinese,English and Spanish kinship systems.Concepts like consanguinity and affinity divide the analysis of kinship into seven aspects:1.Direct consanguinity;2.Fictive kinship;3.Direct affinity;4.Collateral consanguinity;5.Collateral affinity;6.Teknonymy;and 7.Fictive kinship in social situations.This research only covers nine generations.Furthermore,this chapter excavates the feminine word "cousiness" and detail method to calculation the distance between cousin/primos and ego.It provides translations of those cousins and primos in Chinese.There are many usages of modest and fictive kinship in Chinese which are missing in English and Spanish.If a translator does not understand the culture of the language they are translating,readers may misunderstand their words.The third chapter compares Chinese,English,and Spanish kinship terms from cultures as following:1.Language and culture development;2.The influence of patriarchal law and religion;3.Culture in kinship terms as generations lived together,privileges of elders,men are superior to women,respect the old and love the young4.Name Culture;5.Personal pronouns and honorifics.The fourth chapter compares the vocabulary and grammar of Chinese,English,and Spanish.The three languages similarly classify words as male and female,especially Spanish,in which nouns can be feminine or masculine.Both English and Spanish are inflection languages.In terms of grammar,verbs change tenses when the subject changes.Nouns or pronouns are divided into singular and plural.Meanwhile,Chinese is an analytic language.There are no tense changes,and the part of speech is usually determined by word order.Singular and plural nouns are expressed by quantifiers.Next,this chapter analyzes word formation methods,including monosyllabic words,the reduplication of words,prefixes,and suffixes.Finally,this chapter analyzes the hidden structure of coordinating conjunctions in kinship terms.The collective nouns that make up kinship terms in Chinese are formed by coordinating two or more roots and concealed conjunctions.The corresponding collective nouns in English and Spanish are simply a single word,though in some cases,a conjunction word must be used to connect two words.Nevertheless,when the three languages are compared side by side,their similarities are clear.The fifth chapter focuses on the translation of kinship terms through teaching Chinese as a foreign language.The most important aspect of translation is understanding the culture.The original author,translator,and target readers must share this cultural competency.Following that,this chapter discusses questionnaire results from Spanish students in a master thesis class taught by Sun Nuo,a graduate from Dalian University of Foreign Studies.Then the results from a slightly modified questionnaire completed by English students are discussed.After comparing the two questionnaire findings,this thesis offers suggestions for teaching kinship terminology.The sixth chapter is conclusion.The thesis made conclusions from following parts:1.The difference from kinship systems.2.The difference in cultures:(a)Affected by religions;(b)Affected by other languages(c)Affected by economics;(d)Name and honorifics’ cultures.2.The difference in the vocabulary and grammar:(a)Words gender;(b)English and Spanish are inflectional languages,while Chinese is analytic language;(c)English and Spanish general use prefixes and suffixes to inform words,while Chinese are formed by coordinating two or more roots and concealed conjunctions.3.Translation and teaching Chinese as a foreign language.