The Controlled Comparison between Japanese and Chinese term eyes-An Examination of Extended words meaning

• Main Authors: Shin-Mei Shih, 施馨媚
• Other Authors: Fong-Chi Tsai
• Format: Others
• Published: 2014
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/76150022178300605801

碩士 === 銘傳大學 === 應用日語學系碩士班 === 102 === People capture 80 percent of the objective world and external information with vision system. In other word, human eyes are not only recognizing the outside world but also forming the concept of cognitive contents while one lives his daily life. Still one’s life style and viewpoint varies country to country, those differences affect one’s words that are the result of different culture. Therefore, this article reviews compound words, which are related to human body, based on the hypothesis that suppose the human body is the basic agent of capturing the objective world. For instance, eyes and oculus are one of the most popular compound words in Japanese and Chinese. As for the Japanese language, there are simple to understand compound words, including ryo-me (both eyes) and me-da-ma (one’s eye), which both represent eyes from human body. At the same time, however, amino-me(mesh) and tai-fu-no-me(eye of typhoon) are having the body part, eyes’words, but these belong to derived words. Accordingly, it makes us hard to understand the original meaning of each letter. As for chinese version, shuang-yan (both eyes) and yan-zhu(eyeball) are those words that one can understand these letters represent eyes. On the contrary, zhen-yan(pinprick), wang-yan(meshes), tai-feng-yan(eye of typhoon), zhu-yan(main point), etc., are saying the word, eye, repsenting more meaning than the original one. In general, direction words of Japanese language dictionaries are arranged with Japanese alphabet order. Moreover, for each direction word has some synonyms so that one can gain more information toward a single word. Yet, for those people who prefer to look up derived lexical items, the current dictionary explanation is not enough. For that reason, the article aims to demonstrate Japanese and Chinese eye word comparisons, based on comparing both fundamental and derived words. Meanwhile, the study approaches the relationship between these two kinds of words. First, this article reviews eye’s descriptions from dictionaries, and tries to define the term origin, fundamental and derived forms. Second, examples are collected from dictionaries, text corpus, newspaper articles, etc. Third, the study applies to metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche as analysis tools. Finally, this study is to find out the process of eye’s derived words in both Japanese and Chinese. In addition to that, it is draw in a network chart by each meaning. This article makes a contribution to words’ change categories in Japanese language education through drawing a comparison between Japanese and Chinese word eye’s fundamental and derived significations.