Abstract and Key Words

Abstract: Color is very close to people's life. It is an important field for people to understand the world. Color not only has physical property, but also has rich intensions and extending meanings. In this way, the color words are no longer the objective material, but are regarded as the abstract cultural code. There are many color expressions in both English and Chinese, which reflect different culture psychology and emotional elements both in English and Chinese. People of different nations often have different cognitions about the same color as a result of their different culturals and history backgrounds. Many scholars at home and abroad have studied the phenomenon of color terms from different angles. In this thesis, the author has found that the articles of color cognition in the core magazines of foreign languages are few in the past few decades. A few articles on this topic in other magazines are limited to a brief list of the metaphorical meanings of certain color terms. The thesis aims to systematically analyze the cultural differences about the color words of English and Chinese. Through this research, it is much beneficial for us to grasp cultural differences between English and Chinese and to achieve successful communication.

Key words: color words; English and Chinese; cultural differences

摘要：色彩与人类的生活息息相关，是人类认识世界的一个重要领域。色彩不仅仅具有物理属性，还有着丰富的文化内涵和延伸意义。颜色词不再是一个客观的物质，而是一个融合了诸多因素的特殊文化概念。因此，无论是在英文和中文中，都有很多颜色的表达反映了不同的文化心理和情绪因素。由于文化和历史背景的差异不同国家的人们对于同一种颜色有不同的认知。到目前为止，国内外的许多学者一直在从不同的角度来研究这一现象。笔者发现关于颜色认知的文章，过去数十年发表在核心期刊的并不多，仅有几篇文章就这个话题在有限的杂志里简短地介绍了某些色彩词在此基础上总结得出了英汉基本颜色词的相同点和不同点。本文旨在研究中西方关于颜色的文化差异。通过研究，有益于我们学习英汉文化差异和取得更好的交流。

关键词：颜色词; 英汉; 文化差异

1. Introduction
  Nature shows human beings a colorful world. Each language has a large core vocabulary composed of many color words. However, there are different numbers of color words in different languages. Ancient Chinese scholars believe that: wood comes from water, the color is cyan, representing the East; fire comes from wood, the color is scarlet, representing the South; ash comes from fire, the color is yellow, representing the Central; gold comes from ash, the color is white, representing the West; water comes from gold, the color is black, representing the North.