pre2

1.开场白/prologue

Language and culture shape cognition; this is a classic topic in linguistics, often mentioned in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. However, rather than discussing this hypothesis, I prefer to introduce the cultural meaning of Chinese characters and the way of thinking.

2.例子/example

Here is an example from daily life. In the weather report on your mobile phone, the icon for “cloudy” usually shows the sun over the clouds. If we were to show this image as a Chinese character, it would be this one: 昙. In this character, sun is shown by 日, and cloud by 云; when combined, they form 昙. It seems that the meaning of 昙 is “cloudy”, right?

3.引入主题/introduce the topic

However, Chinese characters are not only the shape-based meaning from history but also the association meaning from culture.

4.解释/explain

In daily life, 昙 most commonly appears in one specific context – a kind of flower called this. But I don’t know how to pronounce this thing. known in Chinese as 昙flower.This flower is famous for its super short blooming period and for flowering only at night. Because this kind of flower is widely known, the character 昙 has another meaning, which is “short-lived“.This change shows the cultural meaning in Chinese characters. It shows how characters can get meaning that is beyond their original meaning.

5.文化网络/network of cultural

The evolution of 昙 from “cloudy” to “short-lived” itself, which is collective thinking and cultural memory become rooted in the writing system. Therefore, 昙 is not just a word for a natural event. It is a character that carries a shared cultural experience. At first, its meaning description of the weather. Over time, it came to mean something short-lived. This change did not come from logic or formal rules, but from long-term and repeated use in daily life. Through this process, nature, plants, and human feelings were combined into one character. This shows that Chinese characters do more than name objects; they take in shared memory and cultural associations. In other words, each Chinese character itself exists within a network of cultural meanings.

6. 上下文关联/Contextual relevance

When Chinese readers see 昙, the meaning they feel is not learned directly. It comes from shared cultural habits. I believe that most chinese student in our class know that 昙 meaning “short-lived”, but not because they have learned about this character, but because they know the feature of 昙flower.Because of this, Chinese users often understand meaning through association and context, but not through a fixed definition. The cultural meaning of Chinese characters is not added later. It is part of the characters themselves and shapes how people think. This idea is supported by research. For example, Yu (2009) points out that Chinese meaning grows from shared cultural experience. Not simple word-object links. This helps explain how the meaning of 昙 developed.