Sirui WangUniversity of Southern Mississippi

February, 2011

Numbers in our life:

137931363535036

2006010019 39401

601-333-4444

……

Different people would have differentinterests in different numbers, and thesepreferences could influence people’s values andworld outlook towards life and work. This is knownas “Number Preference”.

For example, a) person who dislikes number four, s/he would

change the number into other numbers when choosing phone number or card number;

b) sometimes people would choose the even number date for marriage or start new business, just with

the hope of good luck.

In Chinese, number eight is definitely a lucky number, just because its Euphony.

In Yueyu, a southern Chinese dialect, number

eight has the similar pronunciation as “fa”, which means having a lot of money or making a great fortune to become rich.

It should be pronounced as “jiu” in Chinese Mandarin, which has the meaning of permanent and enduring. People always use number nine to express their best wishes for love affairs and for longevity.

Of course, in Chinese, number nine is a very important number, not only for it pronunciation and euphony, but also for the folks which is popular in old China.

Word-Formation　　 Word- Formation, in its restricted sense, refers

to the process of word variations signaling lexical relationships.

It can be further sub-classified into the composition type (Compound) and the derivational type (derivation).

---------by Hu Zhuanglin, 2001 In English, word-formation is the way to enlarge the vocabulary. Number also have different expressions by the way of word-formation. For example, penta- is the other expression of number five; and trinity is the other expression of number three.

“The Trinity” in English means “ (in Christianteaching) union of three persons, Father, Son

andHoly Spirit, in one God.”

Trinity= unity + diversity

3= 2 + 1

Number Three &Number Three & Trinity Trinity

Morphology Morphology is the identification, analysis and description

of the structure of words

Number ZeroNumber Zero

In our daily life, number zero is used to show nothingbut sometimes, it has other connotation meanings. Numberzero is written into the form of Arabic number, the

imaginationwould appear. Especially for the English-speaking people, theshape of number zero is very similar to the word “O.K.”

the shape of number

Semantics　　

Firmly connected with society and culture, number is not only number itself. For instance, the idiom “Four Hundred” means that the modern high society or the distinguished personages in certain area. It could easily be found that this phrase doesn’t refer to any real amount, though it is consisted of number and its denotation is refereeing to amount. Why this number becomes the synonym of high society?

Number as a part of culture exits in all kinds of languages. Inits practical usage, caused by cultural differences, theconnotation of number is different, which could be reflected bylanguage. In this way, different preferences towardsnumbers appear. The analysis and comparison of those examplesof number preferences concludes thatbased on the multi-effecting of language and culture, thoseverbal elements in languages could influence these numberpreferences. From pronunciation to word-formation and semantic meaning, those verbal elements play very importantrole in the admiration of number.

According to the analysis of these different numbers, it can be found that the same number may have different connotations in different languages. Such kind of connotations of number is the result of language and relative social orders. For different cultures, the people may admire certain number, or show their worships of certain numbers, while other people using different languages may not.