A Comparative Study Of Human Body Part Terms Of Modern Chinese And Mongolian Language

Body part terms are a semantic field of basic vocabulary. Basic vocabulary is the most stable language unit. They carry information related to ethnic culture, history and social development.Studies on body part terms have already become a hot topic in linguistics.Previous researches on body part terms in Chinese are conducted not only in one language but also in linguistic comparison between different languages.The present special issue is the outcome of a multi-aspect study of body part terms in their semantic, cross-cultural and cognitive comparison.We are eliciting in this article our findings from detailed comparative observations of Chinese and Mongolian body part terms, presenting particularity and commonality of history, culture, social development of the countries and lifestyle, cultural thinking of these nationalities that carried in the body part terms.Our study based on theoretical and practical findings of previous lexical, semantic, intercultural and cognitive linguistic researches. In the research work we studied the terms systematically by using many different quatilitive and quantitative methods like determining, describing, explaining, analyzing.First of all we studied the terms in macro level by using some quatilitive analysis like describing, enumerating, and then we studied them in micro aspects doing some semantic research, especially did their metaphorical analysis. Finally we studied the terms in their cross-cultural meaning.As result of the researches and analysis we have found following findings:1. The complex description of the body part terms determined syntactic use of expressions and sayings with the terms, their morphological specifics, especially morphological abilities of the terms to construct new words; The quantitative analyze showed that Chinese body part terms are more than Mongolian terms and Chinese body part terms use with words like kou, zui Hb xin, fu more, but Mongolian terms use with this kind of words less than Chinese terms; As result of the morphological analyze showed that Chinese and Mongolian body part terms have some differences because of their linguistic characteristics.2. We had found that the Chinese body part terms can be divided into4groups: names of organs in head, names of internal organs, names of extremity of the body/here included only the words:arm, hand/, names of other organs in whole stature of the body/here included words:bone, hair, back, blood, skin and etc/.Our study was dedicated for analyzing their metaphorical meaning. Besides it we tried to do observation on how people use the sayings with body part terms to express their emotion, how the sayings express heart and mind of a character, how they influence on style of a discourse.As result of the analysis we have found that there are some differences between metaphorical meanings of Chinese and Mongolian body part terms, even though they don’t have much difference in their quantity. For example:If the Chinese word "mian" has only one meaning used for describing outside of a thing, Mongolian word "HYYP" has a little different meaning:it is used for describing only front side of a thing.If the Chinese word "xin" has some metaphorical meanings such as-heart, thinking, mind, bad trick, but Mongolian word "3Ypx" has only one of these meanings-heart.Chinese body part terms can be used in language styles:spoken and written languages. Most of them are used in written language than in spoken. But some of them are used only in spoken language. For example:If the Chinese word "kou" uses in written language more, but word "zui" uses in spoken language more.Mongolian body part terms are used in both styles. In addition to this, we have found an interesting language use feature of Mongolian body part terms. They have reference meaning in their spoken language use but there isn’t similar language use in Chinese.3. Besides the studies described above we did some other detailed metaphorical analysis to determine their semantic features and classified them according to their metaphorical meanings.We consider that according to their semantic features metaphors can be classified into following groups:conceptual metaphor, orientational metaphor, Container metaphor, metaphors of characters, metaphors that describe physical functions of organs of a body.Commonality of Chinese and Mongolian body part terms:Conformity of creating metaphors from the names of organs for these two languages is the same in some ways. For example:body part terms like head, internal organs create orientational metaphor, and body part terms like head, names of internal organs also create container metaphor.Particularity of Chinese and Mongolian body part terms:Depending on the national culture and cultural thinking of people some metaphors expressed by body part terms in Chinese language are different from the Mongolian terms. For example:number of some Chinese orientational metaphor, metaphors of characters with words like "kou","mian","pi","xin" more than Mongolian metaphors with that meaning. Mongolian metaphors with words like "ЭЛЭГ","уушги" create not only metaphors of characters they also mean colors. But there the meaning Mongolian metaphors of characters that describe colors isn’t in Chinese,4. On the base of our linguistic and lingua-cultural, lexical and semantic study we analyzed how Chinese body part terms carry culture of Han nationality, and how body part terms in Mongolian language carry national culture of Mongolian people.From our lingua-cultural study we came the following conclusions:there’s a direct correlation between culture of a country and language spoken by its people. Body part terms in Chinese and Mongolian languages are related to ethnic culture, history and social development:national culture differences of the countries and cultural thinking specifics of the nationalities.