摘要

语言是文化的载体。语言的应用和发展受到文化很大的影响。因此，学习一国语言不仅要学习它的词汇和语法，还要学习其文化。语言禁忌存在于人们生活的各个方面，是中西方普遍存在的一种社会现象。在汉英两种语言中，有一些禁忌语是一致的，如“死”和“葬礼”等方面。但是由于中西方文化背景、意识形态、价值观念等的不同，其禁忌语也有一些差异，如在个人隐私及颜色禁忌等方面。这些异同有时会给跨文化交际带来麻烦。如何避免这些麻烦，最重要的是充分了解中西方禁忌文化以及使用适当的委婉语。本文旨在通过对比分析汉英禁忌语来帮助人们提高跨文化交际的能力，从而达到理想的交际效果。

关键词：中西方，禁忌语，文化，对比

Abstract

Language is the carrier of culture. The use and development of language have been greatly affected by the culture. So, learning a foreign language is to learn not only the vocabulary and grammar, but also to know about the culture. Linguistic taboo exists in almost every aspect of people’s life and is a universal social phenomenon both in China and the west. The same taboos in Chinese and English include aspects of death and funeral, etc.. Because of the different cultural background, ideologies and the concepts of value, there are some different taboos in aspects of privacy and color etc. Sometimes, these similarities and differences bring a lot of troubles to cross-cultural communication. How to avoid these troubles? The most important thing is to have a good knowledge of the taboo cultural and the use of euphemism. This paper would help people improve their ability of cross-cultural communication and achieve better communicational effects by comparative analysis.

Key words: Chinese and Western, taboos, culture, comparison

1. Introduction
1.1    Aspects of taboos
Everyone lives in a complex society which consists of all sorts of people from different cultural background. Language is an important tool for people to communicate with others. Since different country has different culture deeply rooted in its language, in the communications with different people, some words and expressions, which are forbidden are called language taboos or linguistic taboos, and the forbidden behaviors are called non-language taboos. Taboo includes a lot of aspects, this paper analyses it through the comparison between Chinese and English taboos. With the rapid development of globalization, people’s minds have gradually been similar. There are plenty of similarities between Chinese and English taboos including the aspects of death and diseases, social position and sexism, human excretion parts and other’s appearance. However, there are still a lot of things which are deeply rooted in country’s culture. Differences cannot be avoided which cover privacy, color taboos, gifts taboos and social taboos and so on.