English and Chinese Culture Differences from Linguistic Viewpoint/DIFFÉRENCES DE CULTURES CHINOISE ET ANGLAISE D'UN POINT DE VUE LINGUISTIQUE

Abstract: According to the idea of some Anthropologists, i.e., Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, Sapir's student, the unique organization of universe that is embodied in each language might act as a determining fact or in the individual's habits of perception and of thought, thus forming and maintaining particular tendencies in the associated nonlinguistic culture. The idea provides us with a refreshing angle in understanding one of the important underlying causes for the difference between English and Chinese people in their ways of thinking, and thus induced ways of behavior toward their surroundings and some linguistic light on the historical myth mentioned by the famous British sinologist Joseph Needham and on why Chinese science ceased its development after Middle Ages. Key words: Whorfian hypothesis, language, culture difference Resume: D'apres certains anthrologues comme Edward Sapir et son etudiant, Benjamin Lee Whorf, l'organization unique de l'univers implante dans chaque langage peut etre servie comme un determinant sur l'habititude individuelle d'observation et de la pensee, qui determine et maintient une tendance particuliere dans la culture non-linguistique. L'idee nous permet de comprendre une des raisons implicites des differences dans la pensee entre les chinois et les francais, et induit des mainieres de comportement envers leur environnement et donne une lumiere sur le mythe histoire mentione par le fameux sinologist Joseph Needham et explique pourquoi le developpement de la science chinoise a arrete apres le Moyen age. Mots-Cles: Hypothese de Whorf, langage, difference culturelle (ProQuest: ... denotes non-USASCII text omitted.) INTRODUCTION: LANGUAGE AND CULTURE The exotic character of American Indian semantic structures, as manifested not only in their vocabularies but also in the relationships expressed by their morphological categories and syntactic patterns, has led a number of scholars to speculate on the relationships between language, culture, and habitual thought patterns or view, It was hypothesized that the unique organization of universe that is embodied in each language might act as a determining factor in the individual's habits of perception and of thought, thus forming and maintaining particular tendencies in the associated nonlinguistic culture. As Edward Sapir put it: Human beings do not live in objective alone, ... but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society . . . The fact of the matter is that the real world is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. . . We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation. This idea was further developed, largely on the basis of work with American Indian languages, by Sapir's student Benjamin Lee Whorf, and is now often known as the Whorfian hypothesis. Whorf's initial arguments focused on the strikingly different organization of experience that can be found between English and Indian ways of saying the same thing. From such linguistic differences, Whorf infers underlying differences in habits of thought. It then remains to show how these habits are manifested in non-linguistic cultural behavior. Thus Worf points out that, in Hopi, words referring to units of time (e.g. day) differ from other nouns in that they have no plural form; furthermore, they cannot be counted with the cardinal numbers (one, two, etc.) but only with the ordinals (first, second, etc.). From this he infers that when the English speaker speaks of ten days, as if the days were an aggregate of separate units, the Hopi speaker, on the other hand, thinks in terms of the cyclic recurrence of single phenomenon. Whorf attempts to support this idea by reference to Hopi ceremonial behavior, which involves repeated preparation for future events. …

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