Chinese language and Culture

The Chinese language, which is a communication system used by the Chinese people on a daily basis to accomplish various goals in life, unavoidably carries many features reflecting some of the commonly held social beliefs in their culture. Culture can be roughly defined as socially learned patterns of behavior and interpretive practices, in which language plays a most important part. In fact, the ways in which many Chinese words, idioms, popular sayings, metaphors, and neologisms are widely used among the Chinese correspond to the cultural beliefs and experiences that have shaped China as a country over the last three millennia.

Furthermore, the Chinese people, who have been in contact with many foreign cultures and languages throughout history, have also embraced and integrated into their own culture many foreign concepts and ideas. The structures of neologisms including many Chinese words of European origin and the morpheme–syllable Chinese writing system are examined together to show the importance of meaning in coining neologisms in Chinese. For example, the modern Chinese usage of culture representing culture was adopted from Japanese as it was first extensively used in Japan as a neologized lexical item representing the European word culture in the nineteenth century. In the nineteenth century the Japanese borrowed these two Chinese graphemes to create a new word to translate the European word culture into Japanese. Later, this neologized Japanese word was reintroduced into Chinese, or returned to China, to translate the same European word.

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