A Comparative Study Of Chinese And Myanmar Taboos

Language is the carrier of the national culture and the culture is the spiritual product of each nations. Taboo, which is an important part of language, can reflect the various ethnic values and world view. Different nations have different religious cultures. Due to the impact of various superstitions and religious factors in people’s daily life conversation, there are certain topic taboos or certain words which are not allowed to say in social phenomena. Such prohibited languages or texts are called taboo language. With the development of social and economical globalization, emphasizing on the use of taboo words is very important in Sino-Myanmar bilateral cross-cultural exchange. These outstanding features show the learner (the researcher) the significant factors, and also bring great obstacle (impediment) in learning on the other hand.This paper mainly applies with the linguistic cultural methods and intercultural pragmatic research methods to analyze, compare and finally summarize the similarities and differences between Myanmar and Chinese cultural taboo words reflected from different nationalities.The paper is divided into four chapters. The first chapter is the definitions and the characteristics of taboo words; the causes and classification. The second chapter describes, under the different cultural influence of Myanmar and Han culture, the comparative sturdy of taboos relating to senility, feebleness and death, physiological taboos, the sacred mountains and the woods taboos, taboo aspects of festivals, taboos of different religions and addressing to the Holy persons, taboos on curses and swears, taboos on names and titles, taboos on numbers and colours, taboos on animals and privacy of each individual, and taboos on travelling. The third chapter analyses (comparative analysis of ways on avoiding Chinese and Myanmar taboos) the ways or techniques of how Myanmar and ethnic Han taboos are avoided to use. The fourth chapter is the revelation of Chinese taboos in Chinese language teaching.In short, the purpose of doing this research is that it has the benefits of reducing the misunderstanding in concepts and ideas in bilateral cultural exchange.