Idioms form and settle down based on the history, life pattern, traditional culture, and way of thinking of that country. As a result, the foreigners who just know the forms and lexical meanings and don’t understand these elements find it difficult ...
Idioms form and settle down based on the history, life pattern, traditional culture, and way of thinking of that country. As a result, the foreigners who just know the forms and lexical meanings and don’t understand these elements find it difficult to predict the meaning of the idioms. Among the idioms there are idioms that express feelings. They present delicate and complicated mental status of human beings. Therefore, this paper is aimed at comparing Korean and Chinese idioms that express feelings, figuring out the idioms which are used similarly in two countries and those which are used differently in two countries, and looking into the historical, social, and cultural backgrounds that are contained in the idioms.
This research was conducted by taking 157 idioms that express feelings in Korean and Chinese as the targets. They are divided into 8 categories which are pleasure, sorrow, anger, fear, love, hatred, shame, and desire. Furthermore, they are divided again into idioms that have the same forms and same meanings, idioms that have the same forms and different meanings, idioms that have similar forms and same meanings, and idioms that have different forms and same meanings so as to do comparative analysis about the expression aspects and the corresponding meanings. The discussions in each chapter are as follows.
The first chapter as the introduction covered the goals, targets, directions of the research and reviewed methods and the precedent studies. In chapter two, the concepts of Chinese and Korean idioms are sorted out and the reasons why this research will use idioms as the main term. In chapter three, after classifying the idioms that express feelings into pleasure, sorrow, anger, fear, love, hatred, shame, and desire, they are divided into four categories (idioms that have the same forms and same meanings, idioms that have the same forms and different meanings, idioms that have similar forms and same meanings, and idioms that have different forms and same meanings) again according to their forms and meanings. The idioms which belong to these four categories are also compared and analyzed. Idioms that have the same forms and same meanings and idioms that have similar forms and same meanings share exactly same meanings or similar meanings in Chinese and Korean, which results from the cultural communication of two countries that both belong to the cultural circle of Chinese characters in the rich and long history. From the idioms that have the same forms and different meanings, it can be known that two countries have different culture and different way of thinking. Although they have same forms, they are totally different in meaning because of different culture and different way of thinking. From the idioms that have different forms and same meanings, it can be known that the people of these two countries have different mental status and way of thinking because of different history, politics, and culture. Therefore, the vocabularies that are used to express the same meanings have its specific expressing way that belongs to each country.
In chapter four, the expression aspects the idioms present and the culture which are contained in the idioms are compared by focusing on the contents which have been discussed in chapter three. The cultural differences and similarities are analyzed also.
Korea and china both belong to the cultural circle of Chinese characters and develop with agrarian society as the history and society background, so idioms that have the same forms and same meanings and idioms that have similar forms and same meanings which come from the daily life culture can be found. From these idioms, the similar cultural background and way of thinking can be found in these two countries also. However, although many idioms that express feelings in Chinese and Korean have much in common, the idioms with differences can be still found. It is mainly because the cultural aspects like way of thinking and the mentally feelings expression are different. Even though the constructs and expression way of the idioms are similar in two countries, the connoted meanings can be different because of cultural differences.