A Comparative Study Of Chinese And Thai All Day Time Words

The different in cultural background make Chinese-Thai time word differenct in meaning,origin and usage.Those divergent,undoubtedly,add more difficulty to Chinese-Thai language learners.Unfortunately,neither in Thai nor China,has remarkable comparison of Chinese-Thai all day time word.Even in education field,the research in Thai time word are still limited.This thesis uses contrastive analysis which infer in the 4 definitions:meaning,origin,word formation and usage.Comparing Chinese-Thai all day time words,the study shows 4 conclusions:(1)In meaning,Chinese and Thai specific time words have the same system,however,time unit "hour" has the obvious different."hour" is used from an ancient time,but nowadays some of them have changed in meaning.Non-specific time words mainly related in 5 periods of time which are day,night,dawn,twilight and,day-night.(2)In origin,Chinese-Thai all day time words practically due to nature,human activities and,animal activities,hence Thai also related to cultures and beliefs.(3)In word formation,Chinese is mostly compound words,simple words are few;Thai simple words are very rich,of which foreign words occupy the main part.Furthermore,there is a unique word formation in Thai called"Sa-mat composite".(4)In usage,the word "hour" in specific time word has very complexity.Chinese "hour" time unit use in 12 and 24 hours system,in contrast,Thai's use in 6,12 and,24 hours system.Matching in non-specific time words are also dissimilar,Chinese's usually pairs with preposition,direction words and,numeral phrase;Thai's,probably pairs with adjective and adverb.Both Chinese and Thai are also have repeated word structure,for Chinese,repeating word effects word meanings,but for Thai,except changing intonation marks can change meaning of repeated structure time word.In addition,in oral,non-specific Thai time words can add more literal word,though Chinese cannot.Through the systematic study of Chinese-Thai all day time words not only helps to show the linguistic heterogeneity and fill semantic gap between the two languages,but also can promote the study of the Sino-Tibetan language to be more advanced and at the same time,can provide help for Chinese-Thai language learners.Moreover,this study is very helpful with related theory research and provides practical education more references.