Symbolic Words In Uighur And Their Cultural Significance

Language is one particular constituent of culture: if one views culture as an overarching concept, then language forms part of this overarching culture, i.e., it comes within the scope of culture. However, the role of language within the overarching culture is relatively special, and there exist certain correspondences between it and the overarching culture. Consequently, one can view language as one variety of social phenomenon, a tool for people to communicate, a medium which joins people and culture into a single body, something which has evolved along with the evolution of humanity, which develops and changes in accordance with the development and change in human society.There exists a close relationship between language on the one hand and human society and culture on the other, made up of myriads of threads of linkage. The cultural inheritance that human society has accumulated since antiquity has left a deep impression on language, which principally shows itself in the realm of vocabulary. Vocabulary is the most changeable aspect of language, one of the most direct, immediate, and complete reflections of the objective reality of things.It embodies a nation's values, philosophies, ceremonies, customs, religions, history, art, psychology, and like cultural features. Uighur symbolic words are a constituent part of the vocabulary of Uighur, capable of implicitly expressing thoughts,concepts, and feelings, capable of giving form to abstract ideas and psychological states and thereby of deepening the attractiveness and expressiveness of artistic images. The cultural content of the symbolic words of Uighur is an important constituent part the semantics of Uighur as well as a rich treasure-trove of all kinds of rhetorical devices.The dissertation takes as its data idioms, proverbs, folk-songs, epic poems, myths, other folk-literature, documents, other literary works, and first-hand materials from my own fieldwork. It studies the cultural content of Uighur symbolic words, discussing the cultural origin of these words as well as the peculiar, unique customs, religious beliefs, aesthetic values, and such expressed by them. At the same time, this dissertation, via "parallel comparative study" of symbolic words in two languages, Uighur and Chinese, points out likenesses and differences in the area of cultural meaning. The dissertation consists of the preface, the body, and an appendix ("The Comparative Cultural Study of Uighur and Chinese Vocabulary"). In the body of the dissertation, we begin with specific symbolic words in Uighur, comprehensively and minutely ascertain their cultural content, and elucidate the cultural traits of our Uighur ancestors which have accumulated in this vocabulary. This constitutes the core-content of the dissertation and one of its novel contributions.In the dissertation's prefatory part, basing ourselves an the research of earlier scholars, we discuss the relationship between language and culture, provide an introduction to fields of study bearing on language and culture, and conclude with a section concerning the state of research in this field and concerning its proper object of study and research-methodology.In our first chapter, we deal with questions of theoretical import, such as the definition of the term "symbol", the origin of symbols, certain features of symbols and of other forms of expression, and the relationship between symbols and rhetorical devices. At the same time, we also delineate the scope of Uighur symbolic words and explain their uses.In our second chapter, we study the cultural content of Uighur symbolic words that denote natural phenomena such as the sun, moon, and stars, as well as the word ot 'fire', concentrating on explaining the close relationship between these symbolic words and the early religious concepts and sky-worship of the Uighurs. We also concentrate on discussing the connection between present-day Uighur people's aesthetic consciousness of the sun, moon, stars, and the like as symbolising beauty and purity on the one hand and t...