A Comparative Study Of Chinese YÇ'u And English Have From The Hermeneutic Approach

This paper is, but is not only, a comparison of Chinese you and English have. It proposes a new approach-the hermeneutic approach-to language comparison in general, and tries to apply it to the comparative study of you and have.We choose to propose and to adopt the hermeneutic approach because the traditional TC (tertium comparationis) theory of comparison, subject to the conceptualized thinking, is logically a circular argument and is likely to lead us to the kind of metalanguage with no experience basis. According to the hermeneutic approach-an approach derived from the phenomenological tradition in philosophy, one has to keep to the original world experience to gain access to the possibility of comparison. That means, pre-understanding, and, as a result of horizon amalgamation on the basis of the universality of pre-understanding, effective history, play an important role in the comparative study of different objects. Ultimately, it is the historical sense inherent in the hermeneutic approach that prevents it from being subjected to a presupposed metalanguage and enables it to gain an insight hardly attainable otherwise. The hermeneutic approach to comparison, in a sense, is a phenomenological deduction with the tertium comparationis suspensed.Following this approach, we find that though Chinese you and English have display certain superficial correspondences between each other, there exists a significant difference between the experience bases they are grounded upon. The central idea of you has always been focused upon "be" and "exist"-notions attributed to its earliest written form , and ultimately, to niu . The "meat-holding" ( ) universally employed today, however, is originally a derivative of (X) and therefore does not represent the basic meaning of you at its experience foundation. In contrast with you, English have, like the other have words in the western languages, originated from the notion of "take", "hold", "keep", etc. and has always been pointed towards the notion of "be" and "exist". As a consequence of the conceptualized thinking which attempts to grasp and master "to be" as "being", this is actually a rare case in human language.As the notion of "be/exist" can often generate a temporal "relevance" meaning in which a state or an event "exists towards" or "is associated with" the reference point of time, both you and have are granted the potential to be used as the presenter of temporality. However, while English have is universally employed to express the temporal relevance between the reference time and the various states/events before or after it, Chinese you has not developed such a usage. The reason probably lies in the fact that although you could easily establish a "relevance" meaning, there is nothing like the English distinction between done and to do in Chinese to help distinguish whether the "relevance" is "past relevance", "future relevance" or anything else. Those Chinese dialects which do employ you as the presenter of temporality, indeed, are quite ambiguous where you is thus used.