What is Chinese Language and Culture

The three main elements of language: phonetics, vocabulary, and grammar. This seems to be correct. But I notice that phonetics comes first. And it says that speech is the material shell of language.

Next, what is writing? The definition seems to be: symbols that record language. Language is a tool for humans to express their thoughts and communicate them. That's good: that is to say: words merely record language and then express thoughts through language. That is to say, words themselves cannot express thoughts.

This would be inconsistent with the character of Chinese characters.

Europeans use writing to so-called record language, mainly to record sound. It is through the symbols of sound that can be recorded that the reader is inspired to imagine the existence of speech, and then come to understand the intent of the recorder (writer).

It is evident that Europeans took speech very seriously.

Words, writing has: character shape, character sound, character meaning. Three major elements. And the word of the Europeans, the shape of the word, not very careful. Longer, shorter, has nothing to do with word meaning. That is to say, they use the sound of the word for the meaning.

This is not the case with the Chinese. Chinese characters, which are form-based, are read differently by people in different places, but as long as the shape of the character is certain, there will not be any big difference in understanding the meaning of the character.

In this way, the definition of a Chinese character should not be defined only as "a symbol for recording language", but also as "a symbol for recording semantics in writing, and a tool for expressing thoughts in writing".

In the three elements of "character shape, character sound and character meaning", Europeans emphasized the close relationship between sound and meaning. In the case of Chinese characters, shape and meaning are closely related. In other words, among the three elements of "character shape, character sound and character meaning", the Europeans neglected the character shape, while the Chinese neglected the character sound.

In China, although the theoretical interpretation of the relationship between language and culture has not been as brilliant as in the West, the tradition of studying language in the context of culture has a long history. For example, Yang Xiong's Dialects of the Western Han Dynasty investigated and recorded the dialects of *** time, reflecting the cultural differences between different regions, such as Volume 4 Clothing, Volume 5 Silkworms, and Volume 10 Poultry. Through the names of sericulture utensils in different dialects recorded in Volume 5, one can get a slight idea of the distribution of sericulture in the south and north, which provides linguistically strong evidence for the study of the cultural geography of the Han Dynasty. Ancient exegesis originated in the Western Han Dynasty's Er Ya and the Eastern Han Dynasty's Xu Shen's Shuowen Jiezi. In both of them, a large amount of cultural information was preserved in the collection and analysis of words. For example, the kinship relationships and their titles recorded in Erya - Interpretation of Relatives are important information for understanding the ancient marriage and patriarchal systems. Another example is Xu Chong in the "into the" Shuowen Jiezi "table" summarized Xu Shen's writings "six arts and group of books of the exegesis, all the training of its meaning, and heaven and earth, ghosts and gods, mountains and rivers, grass and trees, birds and animals, insects, miscellaneous strange, the king's system of etiquette, the world's human resources, not all loaded."

It was Western scholars, such as M. Granet, H. Maspero, and B. Laufer, who at the beginning of this century explored the history of the Oriental system of names and objects, and the mutual influence of ancient civilizations in Central and Western Asia, and left a variety of writings on the subject. At the beginning of this century, they explored the history of the Oriental name system and the mutual influence between China and the ancient civilizations of Central and Western Asia, and left behind a variety of related writings. In the 1930s, some Chinese ethnolinguists also began to conduct field research on the relationship between language and culture, and Luo Xianglin, Liu Xifan, and Xu Songshi published important works one after another. In particular, Xu Songshi's Examination of the Tai, Zhuang, and Yue Ethnic Groups (Zhonghua Shubu, 1936) and History of the Peoples of the Yue River Basin (Zhonghua Shubu, 1939), which covered a lot of linguistic content, were not very accurate in recording linguistic materials because the author was not well-versed in linguistics. Pan Maoding's 1947 collection of essays, Chinese Etymology and Its Culture (Zhi Zhi Bookstore), is a monograph on word culture. He studied the "genesis of Chinese culture" and the "convergence of Chinese and foreign cultures" by examining the etymology of words.