High winds versus 月黑风高

xiaoz

永远的超级管理员
Staff member
News update from the University News Office this morning -

High winds and heavy rain is causing disruption to rail services today.
Trains from Lancaster station are subject to speed restrictions and some
services have been cancelled.

It is interesting to that that 高 'high' can modify 风 'winds' in English and Chinese. There are many such examples (foot of a hill, mouth of a river, eye of a needle) in which Chinese and English use similar metaphors.

It would be very interesting to use corpora in combination with some other methodology (e.g. cognitive linguistics, natural language semantics, or language in contact) to study this phenomena - is the similarity based on common human experience, or due to the effect of language in contact?
 
回复: High winds versus 月黑风高

"foot of a hill, mouth of a river, and eye of a needle" have cross-linguistic experiential basis (or embodiment) as suggested by cognitive linguistics.

BUT
"High winds and heavy rain" esp. "high winds" are creative use in this case as I see it.
 
回复: High winds versus 月黑风高

Plus, the phrase“月黑风高”has a negative implication while its English counterpart has not.
 
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