In the development of human civilization men have formed a close relationship with animals. Animals have naturally become to reflect men's thoughts, feelings, and ways to recognize things. Animals are also reflected in a language. They tend to play v...
In the development of human civilization men have formed a close relationship with animals. Animals have naturally become to reflect men's thoughts, feelings, and ways to recognize things. Animals are also reflected in a language. They tend to play various roles in vocabulary of a language. Investigating the meanings animals represent and how they are used in a certain language can help to understand the historical, social, cultural background of a society in which a language is used.
The purpose of this study is to investigate twelve animals described in Chinese and Korean idioms and understand the meanings they represent. It is also to find the objects animals are compared to and examine the symbolic meanings they represent by comparing and analyzing Chinese and Korean idioms.
Animals described in idioms are supposed to symbolize appearance, habits or personality of human beings in addition to their inherent meanings. Animals represent various and complicated aspects of human beings by substituting for them. Besides, descriptions using animals effectively convey abstract ideas such as feelings or situations in a vivid and realistic way.
Symbolic meanings of twelve animals represented in Chinese and Korean idioms are mostly negative. They accord with actual outward appearance, behavior, habits and character of animals for the most part.
First of all, the more familiar, useful, important and common an animal is, the more frequent is the use of it in idioms. It is easier to use animals which are common and easy to deal with in idioms even though their symbolic meaning is not clear.
Secondly, Chinese idioms outnumber Korean idioms in general. And they are distributed in a more variety of areas from the aspect of symbolic meanings of animals. Korean symbolic meanings tend to be confined to outward appearance like looks, habits, and character of animals. By comparison Chinese symbolic meanings reflect abstract meanings as well as outward appearance.
Thirdly, It is frequent in Chinese idioms that two or more animals come together in one idiom. On the other hand, Korean idioms have few such cases.
Finally, one interesting thing about Korean idioms is that many idioms are merely composed of descriptions on animals' appearance, behavior, or motions without directly referring to animals themselves.
There are several differences between Chinese and Korean idioms. Above all, Chinese language gain predominance over Korean language in amount of vocabulary in that it is a language isolate and more convenient to mix and match words. And the history of Chinese idioms is longer than that of Korean idioms. Also, Chinese population outnumbers Korean population and China covers larger territory. Therefore, China has a more variety of dialects due to regional differences. Besides, historically frequent wars and invasions of other nations have brought about lots of population movement and frequent contact with other nation people. And there has been ceaseless repetition of prosperity and adversity of many dynasties. Overall, all of these historical, geographical, sociological elements have merged into literary works and contributed to richness and diversity of Chinese idioms.
This study surveys how animal descriptions are used in idioms and what the meanings of them are. Furthermore, it investigates the historical, social, cultural background of animal-using idioms and has an overall view of animal descriptions used in a language.