問題詳情

Π.Is the Chinese Language a Superstition Machine?Every year, more than a billion people around the world celebrate Chinese New Year andengage in a subtle linguistic dance with luck. Those who need a haircut make sure to get onebefore the New Year, as the word for “hair” sounds like the word for “prosperity”. Foodserved at festive meals often includes fish, because its name sounds the same as the word for“surplus”. Oranges, sounding like “luck”, are purchased as decorations on the dinner table.English speakers can relish a good pun, but Chinese practices take punning to a wholenew level — one that reaches deep into a culture where good fortune is courted throughpositive words, and misfortune repelled by banishing the negative. But why is homophony,the phenomenon of words with the same sound, deeply woven into Chinese tradition? Englishspeakers are sanguine about homophony, making little attempt to clarify meanings, whileChinese speakers, on the other hand, seem to have a more sensitive radar for ambiguity.Far from being a bug, ambiguity is a useful feature for languages. It allows us to createample vocabularies by recycling some of the most common and easy-to-pronounce clumps ofsound. Without ambiguity, we would have to create longer words to distinguish meanings, orbecome more inventive at coming up with massive collections of speech sounds — and moreadept at pronouncing and distinguishing these sounds. In that aspect, Chinese homophony is truly prolific. While words in English are oftencomposed of multiple syllables, languages like Cantonese and Mandarin have monosyllabiccharacters. Add to that how Chinese languages use a much smaller set of vowels andconsonants than English, and you have an impressive number of meanings packed into asmall sliver of phonetic storage.All of this ambiguity has a direct effect on a Chinese speaker’s experience of theirlanguage, because ambiguous words can mentally activate more than one meaning. Somewords pull at attention more than others, such as those that stir up powerful emotionalreactions, especially if they are negative or taboo. It would not be surprising to find that wordsrelated to luck — and especially to misfortune — fall into the category of words thatChinese speakers find hard to ignore.We have an endless fascination with the interplay between language and culture — howa culture might press its values and worldview into its language, and how a language might inturn mold the minds of its speakers. Perhaps languages that jam many meanings into smallphonetic spaces heighten their speakers’ experience of ambiguity; perhaps culturalassociations cast an emotional tinge onto specific instances of ambiguity, remolding patternsof language use by speakers, and maybe eventually the lexical landscapes of entire languages.
36. What is the main idea of this article?
(A) Superstitions and taboos to remember in the Chinese society.
(B) The sounds that are used to pronounce Chinese words.
(C) The ambiguous structure of Chinese language and its effects.
(D) The emotional reactions of Chinese speakers towards negative words.

參考答案

答案：C
難度：簡單0.714286
統計：A(0),B(2),C(5),D(0),E(0)

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