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To have a clear view on the developing laws, one should study the epochal attribute. Different ages have different cultures. In the ancient times, humans’ social life was very simple. The nature conditions they faced were almost the same. And the objects were the carrier of culture. This is a natural culture. It breaks the limitation of regions. With time moving on, humanity culture comes into being. For example, the Chinese idiom “拱手垂裳” and “拱手听命” are first used in Chinese traditional national culture. The word “拱手”, in the old days, was used to show the etiquette when men met each other. But they seldom use this posture today; instead, they just shake hands or bow. The posture in the idiom is merely a symbol of conveying some feeling. It has no practical meaning. In English, one can also find the evidence of culture’s epochal attribute. The English idiom “take eggs for money” originates from such an occasion: In old England, if one spent money on buying an egg, he was thought as a fool because eggs were in a large number and worth nothing. But nowadays, this fact is not accepted any more, so the pragmatic function of this idiom is lost. Knowing this helps them a lot in communicating with those from different humanity cultures.
When studying the nation attribute of culture, one is talking about the matter of communication and understanding between different nations. Every nation has its own culture .
In the course of communicating activities, language is a must. Whatever language style one uses, written or oral, whether he uses rhetoric or not, in some sense, language is a carrier that reflects a certain culture. If one wants to study the essence of language, he must analyze it in the background of human social activities and regard it as a culture. Judging from this, studying the relations between culture and language is vital. Language is a carrier and manifestation of culture. Its usage is also restricted by culture(Jiang 16). Humans establish their culture by using languages, meanwhile, cultures have impacts on human beings which bring them greater progresses(Ping 19) .Since the day human was born, culture and language begin to exist. During the period of human culture’s origin and evolution, language plays as an intermediary. Since language is a carrier of culture, it’s a part of culture. It goes together with culture. Culture also helps the language’s growth. The best part of culture will enter the language and become a basic content of it.
Language system is a small part of the whole culture system. They cannot be taken away from each other.
2 .2 Definition and Function of Simile
Language is influenced by culture differences, so people from different culture backgrounds may have difficulties understanding each other. To make their ideas understood, they would like to compare what they want to express to a common subject that is known to all, so they ask similes for help. Before we come to the cultural influences on similes, let’s make clear some basic concepts of similes .
A simile is a figure of speech in which two quite different things are compared because they appear to be similar in at least one characteristic. (Wang 27) when someone descries a subject or an action to others, if he uses a simile, he can life likely describe it. To give just a small example, “I was like a sandwich between two very stout men in the bus.” What appears before a reader’s eyes in this sentence is a vivid picture of a sandwich. Compared with a sandwich, what is resembled is that the author is pressed between two big men just like the middle part of a sandwich without any free space to move. Sandwich and person are two distinct essentially, but they have one resemblance in the above case, so we call it a simile. The effect of this simile is to give a fullest play to the crowded scene and the author’s dissatisfaction
In China, simile mainly originates from classical literary works, mythologies or legends. Ancient Chinese had little knowledge about nature. They thought the unexplained phenomena were controlled by spirit. While they came across their favorable things, they compared those things to the common natural objects which they were familiar with. For example, if they want to describe a beautiful girl, they may compare her eyebrows to “willow leaves”. Willow leaf can give people the impression what the eyebrows’ shape is like. Some figures from literature would become a symbol of a certain kind of people. For example, Master Dong Guo is from Zhongshan Wolf by Ma Zhongxi. He saves an ungrateful wolf and nearly become a meal to it. Nowadays,“Master Dong Guo” is used to refer to those who are kind and mercy to their enemies but eventually suffer from their own kindness.