Acomparative Sduty On "Ai" And Its Compound Words In Chinese And Japanese

Although Chinese and Japanese belong to deferent types of language pedigree, Japanese has borrowed Chinese characters as its main written symbols. Besides, the Chinese culture and Japanese culture have been influencing each other for a long time. The same situation happens in vocabulary level. Morpheme ai exists a lot in both Chinese and Japanese, such as aiqing, airen, ke'ai. The word ai and its Compound words, which are in the same written symbols in both languages, have different meanings and usage.This thesis, based on theories of language contact, comparative study and vocabulary development, with methods of synchronic and diachronic study, describes how the Chinese word ai has been borrowed to and changed by Japanese; compares the differences and similarities from aspects of phonetics, semantics and pragamatics, and analyses reasons that have caused the differences and similarities between the two languages. The author has referred to 14 dictionaries of Chinese and Japanese, collected 88 compound words of ai and selected hundreds of sentences from different kinds of works from ancient times, to make this thesis. The reasons vary in different aspects: different national conditions, the two nations'acceptance of Buddhism and Christianity, influence of the western culture, and so on. Furthermore, the author researches on reasons from aspects of national consciousness and culture characteristics, in order to benefit cross-cultural communication and language teaching for both Chinese and Japanese as second languages. From the study, we are able to gain a profound understanding of various factors of both languages and cultures which are related to monosyllabic word"ai"and polysyllabic words which includes ai.