A Comparative Analysis Of The Symbolic Meanings And The Culture Of The Color Word White In Mongolian And Chinese

As the carrier of culture, language cannot exist without culture. Vocabulary is part of language and it is influenced and restricted by cultural factors such as social conditions, religious beliefs, geographical locations and customs. Color words, a subsystem of language, also reflect a nation's development, its unique understanding of the world, its aesthetic values and its philosophical thoughts. The study of color words is not only a study of a nation's culture, history, politics, but also a study of a nation's unique thought and cognition. Therefore, the study of color words is of great significance.The study of color words has remained a hot topic in China in recent years and great progress has been made in this field, but the theses concerning color words of minority nationalities is rare and sporadic. This thesis makes a contrastive study of the color word "white" in Mongolian culture and Chinese culture. By comparing the symbolic meanings of "white" in Mongolian and Chinese, this thesis analyzes the cultural factors that cause the different meanings of color words in Mongolian and Chinese.The main body of the thesis is organized in three parts. In the first part, the color word is defined. In the second part, the symbolic meanings of color words are divided into three categories in light of the theories of cultural linguistics: positive symbolic meaning, negative symbolic meaning and neutral symbolic meaning. The definitions of "white" in both Mongolian dictionaries and Chinese dictionaries are classified, and the individual characters and general characters of "white" are briefly compared and analyzed. In Part Three, the cultural factors causing the different meanings of "white" are expounded from the perspective of humanistic environment and natural environment.The Mongolian nationality is nomadic while the Hans nationality is engaged in agriculture. Based on different geographical locations, different historical background and different humanistic characters, the two ethnic groups have different understandings of the same color word "white", which forms different color cultures. Mongolians worship white while the Hans regard white as an ominous color.This thesis makes a multi-angle elaboration of the color word "white" based on the research of optics, folklore, semantics and comparative linguistics, hoping to throw some light on the study of color words.