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In our daily life we will inevitably meet all sorts of color words, and we also need different words to describe them. Color terms appear frequently in the literature. Most of the people are masters of literature, just like Ralph Waldo Emerson who says “the gray past, the white future”, who does not only uses color words to express the vividness, but also gives a person the certain enlightenment. Color words looks very ordinary, but in terms of the cultural connotation of Chinese and English color words, they are special words. In most cases, the semantic features are endowed by color words to demonstrate the addresser’s ideas, emotion and attitude towards the person or the thing being talked. Therefore, we can gain some inspirations from the color words, and we also can know about their intension meaning.
Because of different cultures and different nationalities, people have perse comprehension of the color words and use them in different ways. So as an indispensable part of the language, color words are no longer purely objective matter, but deeply marked social and cultural imprint that embodied national values and aesthetics view, so that different cultures impart color words different connotations. Only to understand and have an intimate knowledge of these, we will facilitate us to better comprehend and grasp the language and make successful social communication and translation.
II. Cultural Connotations of Basic Color Terms
2.1 Definition of Basic Color Terms
There are a lot of definitions of the basic color terms. Most people accept the Berlin and Kay’s criteria, which help us determine basic color words in any given language. According to this view, Berlin and Kay hold that in English there are eleven basic color categories including white, black, blue, orange, purple, pink, green, red, brown, yellow and gray. While in Chinese, professor Yao Xiaoping points out judging from Berlin and Kay’s criteria of being monomorphemic, abstract, and representative, the basic color words in Chinese, after the evolution from Yin dynasty to the modern times, consist of 黑，白，红，黄，绿，蓝，紫，灰，棕，and 橙 (19-20). Compared to that eleven color terms in English, Professor Wang Fengxin thinks there are nine basic color terms in Chinese (66-74).:源^自'优尔;文,论|文{网[www.youerw.com
2.2 Definition of Cultural Connotations
Many linguists and scholars try their best to research words in relation to their associative effects and then relate the meaning of words to the cultural background, which, to a great extent, is the source of different associations (Pamler 71). Geoffrey Neil Leech, a specialist in English language and linguistics, pided the lexical meaning into seven parts in his Semantics, which includes conceptual meaning, connotative meaning, social meaning, affective meaning, reflected meaning, collocative meaning, and thematic meaning. A connotative meaning refers to what is communicated by virtue of what language refers to (21). It refers to people’s attitudes and feelings of things, and it is closely related to the culture. Cultural significance of words is the extra meaning given by the social and cultural background. So the connotative meaning and cultural significance are included in the cultural connotation. Zhu Guangqian, a famous Chinese scholar, also thinks a word may have associative meaning and contextual meaning (23). Their ideas are different, but the cultures are involved in their ideas. So we can say the word research is under the cultural background of the society.
2.3 Principles of Studying Color Terms
There are two relative principles -- Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and Berlin & Kay’s Theory of Basic Color Terms, which can be used together to research the differences in connotations of English and Chinese color terms (杨永林 4).
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a hypothesis in linguistics and cognitive science that holds that the structure of a language affects its speakers’ world view or cognition. The strong version claims that language determines thought and linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories. The weak version claims that linguistic categories and usage influence thought and decisions.