A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Proverbs (Focusing On Some Major Aspects)

Francis Bacon once commented that "the genius, wit and spirit of a nation are discovered in its proverbs."Covering the widest possible range of areas from the deepest philosophic contemplation of universal significance to the commonest daily activities of every household, proverbs have long been justifiably entitled a highly condensed encyclopedia of a nation and its culture. As a special plane of language and culture, proverbs reflect almost every aspect of the features of a nation: its historical process, geographic condition, folk customs, social system, cultural heritage, national psycho-traits, philosophic trends, religious tradition and so on. Therefore the importance of proverbs is quite obvious. In addition, the frequent appearance of proverbs in newspapers, magazines, literary works, TV and radio programs, and even in daily speeches suggests that proverbs indeed have an inexhaustible life. After all they are crystallization of folk wisdom of a nation over the ages. In almost every aspect of the daily use of one's mother tongue or the foreign language one is learning, namely in such activities as listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating, proverbs are now and then involved and oftentimes play a significant role. In this sense, a good command of some fundamental proverbs of one's mother tongue and especially those of the foreign language one is learning appears to be both essential and important. Only by comparison and contrast can we find out the similarities and differences between the proverbs of different languages. We can gain a better understanding, or rather to have a better command of English proverbs by comparing and contrasting them with our native proverbs. That is why a contrastive approach is used in this thesis. Theoretically, a contrastive study of English and Chinese proverbs will broaden the horizons of contrastive linguistics and cultural-linguistics, meanwhile practically, it will also contribute to foreign language teaching and translation. So it is no exaggeration to say that a contrastive study of English and Chinese proverbs is of great practical and theoretic significance. However, such a study has not been given its due attention. So far the author of this thesis has not found any single book devoted completely to this area, which means a contrastive study of English and Chinese proverbs in a systematic way is yet to be made. Thus, the writer makes an attempt to probe into this area in a relatively systematic manner. Owing to the limitations of his capacities and the size of this thesis, he dares not to make any claim to be complete or exhaustive on this topic. Instead, he will only concentrate on some major aspects. The thesis comprises seven chapters. In the first chapter, the author made an attempt to answer the following questions. What features are essential to English proverbs? What is the relationship between yan-yu and su-yu? What is the counterpart of English proverbs in Chinese? At the end of this chapter, the author puts forward four fundamental criteria of English and Chinese proverbs, which are based on a careful study of the major features of English proverbs and their Chinese counterpart: yan-yu and su-yu. Chapter Two focuses on the definitions and principles of a contrastive study. In order to demonstrate the reason why this thesis is entitled a contrastive study instead of a comparative one, the similarities, differences and relationship between these two approaches have been explored. At the end of this chapter, four fundamental principles of a contrastive approach ar...