The Study And Comparison Of Linguistic Taboo Of Chinese And Japanese

Taboo of language is a prevalent phenomenon of folk customs. In the socialcommunication, people usually believe that the language has some kinds ofmagic, and there’s a real effect relationship between the language and the realcontent which it is standing for. So people for some reasons can’t or don’t wantto say some words for they are dangerous, holy and magical or vulgar, humbleand harsh. These words are taboo or avoided to use in most cases. Thisphenomenon is known as linguistic taboo. This kind of language is known astaboo words.This paper reviews and analyzes linguistic taboo in China and Japan from theviews of contrastive linguistics, social linguistics and culturology. It examinesthe social and cultural differences of taboo words by recommending the ways ofexpression, types and utilizing situation of taboo words so as to compare theculture and customs of taboo words in China and Japan.This paper has six parts. The first chapter is the introduction section.In this part,the purpose, method and present situation of research are mainly introduced. Thesecond chapter not only presents the conception of taboo and the taboo words,but also analyzes the reasons what cause it happen and introduces thecharacteristics of taboo words. The third and forth part classifies the taboo wordsof the two countries according to the content. Chapter five analyzes thedistinctions of taboo customs between China and Japan by comparing the reasonsof happening, forms of expressing and objects. The last part is the conclusion. Through the analysis, we can see that, despite there’re some differences of taboowords between the two countries as the nationalities and times to be different, thereasons of appearing are similar to each other. The two countries belong to thesame cultural circle of Chinese character. Both China and Japan are gettingedified from the thought of Buddhism and the traditional theoretical morality ofConfucianism. But because of the differences of cultural backgrounds and socialcomposition, there’re still some differences in taboo of language of the twocountries.China has independent continental culture, more plentiful resource,vaster territory, and longer history, so it creates more colorful taboo customs thanJapan, in terms of the quantity of taboo words and the method for avoiding.However, with the progress of the times and the liberation of people’s thought,the phenomenon of taboo has been gradually disappeared in China. But it isstrengthened in Japan for they are thinking highly of the culture of “gentle”.