A Comparative Study On The Expressive Forms Of Approximate Numbers Between Chinese And Korean

There are more than two hundred countries and many nationalities in the world. Each of them has their own languages to express their thoughts and feelings. Language serves two functions for human society. One serves as the communicative device; the other as the thinking device. Without words, there will be no communication among people. As a result, it will lead to no exchange of thoughts, which will result in the suspending of the production activity, not alone further development of the society. In general, Arabic Numbers are used to count quantities. However, when the quantities are uncertain or fuzzy, Arabic Numbers are powerless to deal with them.This kind of fuzzy quantity expression is Approximate Quantity."Approximate Quantity is a fuzzy set of quantity which is composed by some typical members and some related components". This definition can be interpreted in the following way:due to the fuzzy scopes among objects and limitations of human cognition, in addition to the unnecessary usage of an exact number in most instances even though the number is definite, Approximate Quantity shows its appearance in language.In Chinese, some certain words are used to express approximate numbers. Approximate number is the one that is close to the right number. Approximate number is not the exact one. There exists deviation between the approximate number and the exact number, which endows it with reliance and reference value. In our daily life, a fuzzy scope will be given to the quantity which can not be precisely described by an exact number. For examples, it is almost12o’clock; the average height of students in class one grade five is about140cm. these are frequently-used expressions for approximate quantities in the daily life.Since Chinese and Korean are from different language families, there exist some differences between them.This paper intends to make an analysis on the expressive forms of the approximate numbers in Chinese and Korean. In the daily learning and living, it seems that the young people in China and Korea are interested in culture and language of each other. However, there are some misusages and deviations in using the approximate numbers.