The difference between Chinese a
Chinese and English, rooting in their respective culture and geography, demonstrate a great difference. Examples to prove the view are abundant, but the most persuasive one is the case that their different definition of culture. Culture includes material treasure in Chinese while spiritual treasure of ideas and customs are more emphazed in English.
The difference between Chinese and English
Were it not for the deep and profound influence of geography and climate, China would not be a chosen place for the birthplace of the philosophy of "unity of nature and human beings". Thus, this phiolosophy deeply mixs into the Chinese grammar and its characteristics are parataxis and covertness, which meaning requires readers thoughtful minds to dig deep into the meaning hidden behind the words and sentences.
At the same time, English develops into a totally different character like a confined and well-behaved child who sticks to regularity and rules, that is differ from the Chinese resembling a carefree child who always have a systematic and measured world view covered by a certain waywardness and incalcuability of behaviour. Either because of the violence of nature, or because of the underdevelopment of their material culture and system, the ancestors of English, confront with nature calmly for survival, formed a habit of observing and analysing nature in hope of making a subordinate of it some day that stretched its favorable length from sentences to sentences. And overtness and hypotaxis is its disposition.
There also is another explanation that the English is influenced by Renaissance which shows a thirsting curiosity for the classical literature, especially the ancient Greek and Roman culture. We know, ancient Greek and Roman have a tradition of emphasing the regularity and rule that is highly possible sneek its way into English and make English what we see today.
We can liken Chinese and English to the person who respectively from the Mars and the moon from four aspects. Initially, Chinese emphase ethnics and English cognition. The Confucius,being taken after and highly recognized as a saint, stretches a profound length over the China and the ways of thinking of Chinese people. The interpersonal relationships are highly-valued and a series of rules of communication and behaviors seep into the bottom of thinking system of Chinese people. But English turn their eyes from the things that Chinese people regarded as the most important things in their soical life,and they stare at themselves with their acute eyes and strike for making the best of themselves instead. Plato says, Human, look at yourself. This saying precisely unveils that individualism plays an important role in their thinking and behaving.
Additionally, integrity and synthenic thinking is constant company of Chinese people, while individuality and analytic thinking of English people. Numerous example can be given to demonstrate this viewpoint, but the most compelling one is the case that Chinese medical and Western medical. Chinese medical, from natural point of view, reads the syndrome as a person. It has it wax and wane, its inner cycle of growth and decay while Western medical regards the syndrome as the syndrome that need to be treated only by its dispositions and through their well-cutted and well-classified biological accumultation of knowledge.
Moreover, Chinese in possession of the character of intuition whereas evidence is English possessed character.The ideas of Confucius, Daoism and Buddhism mixs up and intertwins and leave a indelible imprint in Chinese way of things and philosophical approachings. Therefore, Chinese people approach things with their subjective feelings and their personal experience. While Enlish people's arrival at their conclusion is the result of much analyze, accumulation of knowledge of reason, a finite number of evidences.
Accordingly, figurative thinking have its unique place in Chinese while English people are emphatic about logical thinking. Firstly, every Chinese character is like a vivid picture that you can guess its meaning. Chinese people fond of using concrete words to symbolize the abstract things and there are multitudes of four-character words that use concrete images to reveal a abstract idea while English people use abstract noun to resemble concrete things in a great majority of cases.
In the aspect of script, Chinese belongs to Sino-Tibetan Family and English Indo-European. The ancient Chinese is ideographic script, mainly consisted by pictograph, but with the raising of indicative character, associative character and morpheme-phonetic chracter, it develops into ideographic-oriented syllabic script. Compared with Chinese, English is alphabetic script and can not be used alone. Thus, English has no characters but words.
From phonetic perspective, the phoneme of Chinese can be divided into final and initial and English vowel and consonant. Chinese is tonal language, which have four tones while English intonation lamguage and the requirement of intonation rules is that content word should be stressed and form words not.
In the view of words, either because of its referenial meaning or because of its connotional meaning, the words between Chinese and English, deeply rooted in its culture, historical information, metaphor and national emotion, stretches various length from reader to reader. Take pine for example, it is a symbol of a person of perseverence, resistant but there is no such meaning in English and their mind is blank when they first encounter our praise for pine trees. When talking about the forming of words, Chinese is ideographic-oriented syllabic script and can form into words freely. English is alphabetic script. Chinese and English both can form words based on following methods: compounding, affixation, sound-changing, abbreviation united with borrowing from foreign languages.What's different is that Chinese can form words based on reduplication and English conversion, back-formation coupled with clipping.
Chinese and English are so different from each other and translater should build a solid bridge to cross the seemly uncrossible gap between two culture equipped with two proficient languages.
