Kulturella nyckelord i Japanskan : en antropologisk och semantisk studie

Författare

Mia Åberg

Summary, in English

Japanese is being thought of as a heavily culture-laden language. In this thesis we will take a look into seven Japanese concepts that are said to reveal something extra about Japanese culture. These Japanese cultural key words are studied by a Polish linguist named Anna Wierzbicka and with the assistance of her research in Natural Semantic Metalanguage, she is trying to unlock these concepts to cultural outsiders. In order to gain some insight on how well Wierzbicka is describing these concepts, her interpretation of the Japanese cultural key words will be compared to the linguistic sense of the Japanese people. In addition to this review of how to unlock Japanese culture, it is said that no words or constructions of one language can have absolute equivalents in another. Many linguists agree that Western words are not appropriate for describing non-Western reality and therefor, no Japanese key word have direct equivalents in a Western language such as English. If there are no corresponding words to these Japanese cultural key words in a Western language then perhaps we may be able to find equivalents, or at least come closer to some sort of similarities, in another culturally close Asian language; Korean.

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