摘要

数字是观念和符号的结合，来自于人类对客观世界的观察和探索以及物质世界的认识的总结,人们用它来表示事物的数量和顺序，但是在不同的语言背景下，不同的民族文化中，每个国家形成了自己特有的数字文化。数字，作为语言中不可分割的一部分，由于受到具有强烈的民族文化氛围的民族心理、宗教信仰、语言崇拜和审美观念等的影响，被赋予各种神秘、褒贬、吉凶和象征意义。数字还具有浓厚的民族文化、地方历史色彩和特别的文化内涵，形成了人们不同的数字文化观。而这不同的数字文化观，又不可避免的影响人们的心理和行为。文章将讨论数字在神话传说、 宗教信仰以及民族心理中的文化差异, 并对中国和西方国家中有代表性的吉祥数字和禁忌数字进行详细分析。

关键词：文化差异，数字文化， 吉利数字， 禁忌数字

Abstract

    Number is a combination of ideas and symbols, which is from mankind’s objective observation and exploration of the world, as well as awareness of the physical world. People use it to represent the amount and order. But every nationality has its own numerical culture in different language backgrounds and different national cultures. As a special cultural language, number reflects numerous cultural dimensions in daily life and literary works, including national thinking pattern, philosophy, customs and characteristics of culture. Number, an indispensable part of language, owing to the effect of psychology, region, language worship and aesthetic concepts that have a strong nationally cultural atmosphere, are given various mysterious good and ill luck and symbolic meanings. It also has a strong ethnic and historical color and special cultural nationalities, forming people’s different views of numerical culture. Moreover, the views of numerical culture would inevitably have an impact on people’s psychology and behavior. The paper will discuss the numerical cultural differences rooted in different myths and legends，religion faiths and national psychology and analyze some representative lucky numbers and numerical taboos in China and western countries in detail.

Key words: cultural differences, numerical culture, lucky numbers, number of taboo

1. Introduction
Arabic numerals, numeric characters used by the whole world, were created to objectively reflect the scale and size of things in the world. However, numbers, which are affected and limited by the language environment, were given colorful cultural connotations. The generality of different peoples make it possible that some numerical cultures of them are similar while the individuality makes some of them totally different.