[Abstract] This paper focused on two types of words, kinship address as well as individualism and comrade, explored their different cultural content. Through exploring the origin of religion and belief, the formation of their thoughts step by step, this paper explains the great religious culture behind words. The connection between words and religion and belief brings out a question that is the lackness of religious culture and belief in our foreign language education. This paper reminds of the important significance of teaching religious culture and belief in foreign language education.

1 Introduction

When we talk about language, we can’t avoid mentioning culture, and vice versa. Then, what is language, what is culture and what is the relationship between them?

The tentative definition of language is that: language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication,[i] such as Chinese, English.

The word “culture” is a very broad concept, which should contain all the civilization of human beings, including food, mechanics, architectures, social organizations, economic systems, customs, thoughts and languages, etc.

Many scholars put forward different opinions about these questions, but they came to an agreement that culture and language influence each other greatly and deeply, especially the religious culture that reigned human society for several thousands of years help to develop different national consciousness, different cultural content and different understanding to words. This question also arouses the echo in foreign language education: How different cultural content affect students when they learn a foreign language? How can we use this influence passively?

This paper focused on two types of words, kinship address as well as individualism and comrade, tried to deplore the religious cultural factors that hid behind words, that is how Christian and Confucianism, the two different traditions on which eastern world and western world are built on, affect the understanding to words. Every word has profound cultural content behind it. We should involve cultural education in foreign language teaching in order to teach better, which is very significant. 

2 Review of Literature

   Many experts have begun to explore this field and they have got some achievements. Chen Yuan in his Language and Social Life expatiates how the change of social life affects the change of language, mainly about the change of language after new China. Deng Yanchang and Liu Runqing in their Language and Culture----the Contrast Between English and Chinese explores many aspects of culture’s influence on language. Their research is more general but doesn’t focus on religion and bring more profound explanation. Others like Gao Yihong’s The Understanding and Transcending to the Difference of Language and Culture Between Chinese and English, Wang Fuxiang and Others’ Culture and Language both study the effect of cultural difference on foreign language teaching and put forward that cultural education should be included in it; but they don’t study this question on the profundity of religion, either. Only Jia Yuxin’s Cross-Culture Communication does deeper research on religious culture’s effect on language, but not enough. My paper gives more profound explanation in this field, tried to explore the formation of different religious culture and thought and explain the different understanding to words from the origins. (All the names of works quoted here are translated by the author of this paper.)

3 Analysis of the Materials

   I chose two typical types of words in this paper, kinship address as well as individualism and comrade. Kinship address’ difference between Chinese and English is a typical question that is a big headache for many translators and language learners for its complexity. Individualism in Chinese and English nearly has quite contrast meaning; it is also a node of cultural difference. Comrade seems to be a word made up in Communist Country, in western country it is seldom used. All these examples are typical embodiment of cultural difference, through the research on them we could find the core of the culture hidden behind words.

A. Kinship and address: different conceptions of personal relationship between Confucianism and Christian

First let us see an interesting phenomenon. In China, there are a lot of words to address one’s relatives according to age and different relations between them, e.g. marriage relation, blood relation. While in English，kinship address is much simplified. The statement Katherine’s brother married John’s sister is hard to be translated into Chinese without additional information. We may wonder whether her brother is older or younger than her and whether his sister is older or younger than him.

For kinship address, we have a list here:

Chinese term

English term

English explanation

祖父（母）

外祖父（母）

Grandfather

Grandmother

Paternal grandfather (mother)

Maternal grandfather (mother)

父亲

母亲

Father 

Mother

兄（姐）

弟（妹）

Brother (sister)

Elder brother (sister)

Younger brother (sister)

伯父

叔父

Uncle

Paternal    father’s elder brother or younger brother

姑父

Husband of father ‘s sister

舅父

Maternal   mother’s brother

姨夫

Husband of mother’s sister

姐夫
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