Bohan Taboos Comparative Study

Language is a carrier of culture, which reflects the deep implications of the national culture. Linguistic taboo, being an important part of language, in the same way can mirror a people's worldview and a values system. Taboo is both a widespread social and cultural phenomenon, and a special outcome of people's social mentality. Taboo exists in all spheres of human life. Linguistic taboo is not static, along with the continuous development of society and the language, it also can change. Although taboo is a universal phenomenon, present in both Polish and Chinese culture, but due to the differences in historical and cultural backgrounds of those two nations, linguistic taboos differ a lot in terms of the ways of expressing, the scope and the content.In order to discover the profound cultural origins for the differences in taboos found in Polish and Chinese language, deepen knowledge of another language and culture, maintain an effective intercultural communication, the author examines a large number of Polish and Chinese taboo words to choose the most universal linguistic taboos. Written and oral examples of linguistic taboo have been classified and compared. The similarities and differences in taboos, found in two languages, have also been studied. This thesis introduces and briefly elaborates different means of taboo's avoidance and the usage of euphemistic expressions. I believe that through combining a great variety of social phenomena, found in Polish and Chinese culture, and making them a complex object of research, we can achieve certain results in teaching Polish and Chinese, and moreover, we can help students or the users of those two languages, to avoid making mistakes, caused by the different social and cultural factors, coming from speaker's own culture.This thesis is divided into four parts. The first part briefly describes the reasons for and significance of the selection of the topic, research background, methods and its content. The second part, which is in fact a theoretical frame for the next chapter, introduces different definitions of the linguistic taboos, demonstrates the reasons for the appearance of taboos, reveals their characteristics and classifications. The third part functions as the core of this paper. It contains comparative and contrastive study of different linguistic taboos, found in Polish and Chinese language. In this chapter I demonstrate the similarities and differences between linguistic taboos in Polish and Chinese. I also try to explore the profound cultural origins for those differences. The last part focuses on the comparative analysis of other ways of taboo's avoidance and explores the similarities and differences in using different means of taboo's avoidance, appearing in both languages, and their causes.