1-文化与语言的关系.pptVIP

1 Definition of Culture If we look back upon the historical origin of culture, we can find that the word culture was first used in Chinese ancient books. Its meaning is opposite to uncivilized, pristine and wildness, and has great differences with the meaning of culture which we use today. Nowadays, the word culture is original from the Latin word cultus which stems from colere (tend, cultivate). In late Middle English, the sense was cultivation of soil and from this (early 16th century) arose the present meaning of cultivation of the mind, faculties and manners. The meaning of English culture is related to politics, law, and education etc social life. From the end of the 19th century, scholars around the world tried to give a definite definition to culture. However, the definitions vary a lot from each other by now. The earliest and the most widely acknowledged definition of culture was given by the British anthropologist Edwar Tylor in his Primitive Culture (1871). He puts forward the first important anthropological definition of culture. Culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society(Tylor,1871:1) More specifically concerned with language and translation, in A Textbook of Translation, Peter Newmark defines culture as the way of life and its manifestations that are peculiar to a community that uses a particular language as its means of expression (Newmark, 1988:94) Daniel Bates and Fred Plog propose a descriptive definition Culture is a system of shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviors and artifacts that the members of a society use to cope with their world and with one another, and that are transmitted from generation to generation through learning (Samovar Porter, 2000:36) Vermeer focuses more on norms and conventions as the main features of a culture. For him, a culture is the entire setting of norms and conventions that an in