Chinese Death Euphemism Essay

To begin with, regardless of nations, religions or customs, individuals hold similar or, to some extent, same attitudes towards death, which is an inevitable law of nature that no one is able to escape. People are scarcely dare speak plainly or reluctant to confront it directly for its mysterious and frightening, fearing that it would bring bad luck or a terrible curse. In order to shun to refer to death directly, people make great endeavor to disguise and obscure the word “death”. And this is the reason why such a lot of the euphemistic expressions of “death” come out. Death is considered as a taboo in almost every culture. Different cultures are distinct from others by their own individualities and also share some common similarities. As a result, both English and Chinese death …show more content…
In the process of collecting the samples of death euphemisms in Chinese and English, it is found that both include the descriptions of the physical reactions of the dead. There are two most common physical reactions of death, one is to close eyes, and the other is to cease breathing. For the former, there are “合眼(he yan)”, “瞑目(ming mu)” in Chinese, both refer to close eyes when die, while in the English language are “close one’s eyes”; for the latter, Chinese has expressions such as “断气(duan qi)”, “烟气(yan qi)”, “气尽(qi jin)”, “绝气(jue qi)”, that share the similar meaning of “to cease breathing”, “breathe one’s last” or “draw one’s last breathe” in the English death euphemism. Moreover, there are some other expressions that use different parts of human body to allude death. For instance, there are “心脏停止跳动(xin zang ting zhi tiao dong)” which means The heart stops beating, and “蹬腿(deng tui)” or “伸腿(shen tui)” that refers to kick one’s legs. While in English, there are “turn up one’s toes”, “kick the bucket” to allude