英语颜色词之黄色

In English
• • • Yellow in English is different from the word in Chinese, which used to mean “cowardly”, for example: 1) turn yellow is to say becoming a coward. 2) he is too yellow to stand up and fight or turn yellow means he is too timid to stand up and fight; Yellow never means “pornography” in English, it refers to some newspapers that deliberately include sensational reports to attract readers, as in “the yellow press”
In Chinese
• Ancient Chinese belived that yellow is the natural color that will never change. The Yellow River, also called “huanglong”(黄龙yellow dragon ), is the craddle of Chinese nation.The Yellow River Valley is the birthplace of the Han culture.For thousands of years, people of the Han nation live and farm by the Yellow River Valley,eat “huangmi”(the glutinous millet, rice grown on the Yellow Earth), drink the water from the Yellow River, and then have the Yellow Skin, so the color “yellow” has always been in the mind of the Han people.
The sense of yellow color in Chinese and English
In Chinese
• Yellow is one of the colors that the Han people most advocate, which culturally implies “sacredness, imperial power, honor, solemnity, territory”, etc. It has been the color of Chinese nation since ancient times.

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Gold is similarly yellow , so yellow also implies “wealth, rank and brilliance”. In history, the rich families wear all kinds gold personal ornaments and have gold household utensils. Because of the value of gold, people today call”huangjin shijian” （黄金时间）to refer to the most precious time, “huangjinjijie”(黄金季 节) means the best season of a year, and “huangjinzhou”(黄金周the golden week) the one –week long holiday in Nation Day in October in China today, people also called “huanjinshidai”(黄金时代)to mean “the most precious life time—the time of youth.
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When people say “huangse”(黄色) today, it usually has a strong derogatory sense related with “sex or porn”.So the saying today”huangsedianying ”(黄色电影sex movies), “huangse gequ”（黄色 歌曲decadent songs） and the whole business is thus called “huangdu”(黄毒porn epidemics).
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In English
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In English, sometimes yellow used on special things, for example: 1)“Yellowstone National Park”is a famouse American park; 2)the taxi is represented by “yellow”but not the word of “taxi” in some of American cities,because the taxi there painted with yellow color; And both in English and Chinese, there is yellow page. That is a book with the telephone number of different shapes, business, organizations, etc, arranged in order of different categories. Yellow page is a very useful handbook whose pages are yellow, but the content is not yellow in the Chinese sense. Yellow in flag always stand for “mineral, cereal and wealth” which demonstrate the state is affluent.