A Study of Kinship Terms Between Chinese and English in Cross Culture (英语论文).doc

PAGE PAGE 1 A Study of Kinship Terms Between Chinese and English in Cross Culture Kin refers to ones family and relatives. Kinship is an important aspect of the complex system of culture, and it is a relationship between any entities that share a genealogical origin, through biological, cultural, or historical descent. It is the most basic principle of organizing individuals into social groups, roles, categories and genealogy. Some form of organization based on parentage and marriage is present in every human society. Kinship term system refers to all kinship terms and their relationshipsin a broad sense, it is the language-culture system of all kinship terms in human societies; in a narrow sense, it refers in particular to the language-culture system of some specific kinship terms in those societies, such as Chinese kinship system and English kinship system. There are many differences between Chinese and English in kinship terms, The Chinese language has many precise terms for describing family and other relationships. Chinese speakers distinguish between relatives on the mother side of the family from those on the father side and use different terms to refer to relatives on each side of the family. Chinese speakers use specific terms to address their family members and each name contains the meaning of the precise relationship between the speaker and the person being addressed. The English are on the contrary, they do not usually pay so much attention on this. Here is an example, in Chinese, tang xiong/di/jie/mei with the label tang are the children of fathers brothers, while the rest with the label biao are children of fathers sisters and mothers brothers and sisters. tang” in Chinese literally means the main part of a house where the family get together, while biao means” surface, outside or distant. The differences between tang and biao are different in Chinese kinship terms, because in China there are distinctions between the relatives attached to the