The principle purpose of the present study is to take the first step in raising foreign language learners’ cultural awareness through comparing color conceptual metaphors in English, Chinese and Bengali language. It is hoped that this awareness can pave the way for the development in language learners’ intercultural awareness. This paper, the authors explored English, Chinese and Bengali color metaphor in general that are very frequent in daily communication. The study is done on the graduate learners of the Nanjing Tech University of China, both the Chinese and overseas Bangladeshi learners. The results revealed that linguistic realizations common color metaphors are largely shared by English, Chinese and Bengali language user. But at the time certain color metaphor differs, sometimes used oppositely of one culture to another. So, this paper attempt to demonstrate raising learners' linguistic and intercultural awareness keeping focus on conceptual metaphors.

Metaphor has been used traditionally as a figure of speech used for special effects in a speech or an essay but it is used most often in our daily communication in every culture and people worldwide. It was Lakoff and Johnson’s who first noticed this abundant use of metaphor. People around the world use different metaphor, among them, color metaphor is one. There are numerous of metaphorical expressions with color serving as the source domain in English, Bengali and Chinese. Color is a ubiquitous perceptual stimulus that carries meaning and can impact the way we feel, think and act [1,2]. Every object in the world has its own color and color terms are usually used to depict the colors of objects in the world. As a vital human experience, colors took attention of many scholars’ attention. The scholars who carry out a landmark research on color terms; English has eleven basic color terms: black, white, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange and gray [3]. The research revealed that reason for the similarities and of color metaphor in the three languages can be attributed to the common perceptual and cultural experience, while the dissimilarities appeared from the different living environment, religion, culture, custom, and philosophy. This paper makes a comparison of color metaphor about the similarities and differences in English, Bengali and Chinese. Understanding similarities and differences of color metaphor in English, Bengali and Chinese is of great importance in the cross-cultural communication. It’s beneficial for us to do English/Bengali/Chinese teaching, English/Bengali/Chinese translation, and appreciation of English/Bengali/Chinese culture. So this comparative study more would be a cross-cultural study of color metaphor used in this three cultural. Aristotle, in Poetics, defined metaphor as “the application of an alien name by transference either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from species to species, or by analogy, that is proportion” [4]. But now Metaphor contains a large unexplored field. The publication of Metaphors: We Live By makes a milestone in metaphor study [5]. In this book, the idea of “conceptual metaphor” is put forward for the first time. Lakoff and Johnson claimed that, “Metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action”. Our ordinary conceptual system means the way we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature” [5]. They also point out that “the essence of metaphor is to understand and experience one kind of thing in terms of another” [6]. In this view, metaphor becomes a valuable cognitive tool and inevitable part of everyday human communication, understanding, and reasoning. In 1666, Newton, for the rest time in his life as well as in human’s history, distinguished seven colors in the order: red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple, that pushed forward the study of color a great deal [7]. The color terms study could be explained from the linguistic perspective by using the linguistic relativism proposed. In 1969, the ethnologist Brent Berlin and Paul Kay coauthored a book Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. They found the evidence that people rely on some focal colors for categorization. Correspondingly, these focal colors form the basic color words in languages. Berlin and Kay reached 98 languages, and found the basic color words expressions nearly all orderly came from 11 basic colors that enclosed if a language only has two color words, they must be black and white; if the language has the third color word, it must be red; if it has the fourth one, it must be green or yellow, and the rest may be deduced by analogy. Influenced by Berlin and Kay’s publication, basic color terms theory has resulted in great achievements in cross-discipline researched. Since then, many scholars have studied color terms from different perspectives. The predictions and explanations on cross-cultural and experience-based semantic color associations are known as Conceptual Metaphor Theory of Color (CMToC). The theory is based on the idea from cognitive linguistics that the study of metaphorical language provides valuable insights into our mental models involving color. The remarkable papers who claim that the semantics of basic color terms in all languages are the results of a common set of neuro-physiological processes in which differences in wave lengths of light reaching the eye are transformed into response differences in the visual nervous systems, while the other, led opposed Kay and McDaniel’s claimed and suggested that color concepts are anchored in certain universal identifiable human experiences, such as day, night, fire, the sun, vegetation, the sky, and the ground [8]. Evidently, the two camps look at the same phenomenon from completely different angles, one from a neuro-physiological perspective and the other from a cognitive perspective. So the result seemed, one accused the other of man-made connection between language and neural responses while the other discredits its opponent’s argument as observation unsupported by empirical evidence. In another study, color associations for ordered linguistic concepts (letters and days) were tested. The culture and language specificity of these effects was examined in a large group (457) of Dutch-speaking participants, 92 English-speaking participants, and 49 Hindi-speaking participants. The color choices which are non-random distributions were revealed; consistencies were found across the three language groups in color preferences for both days and letters. When the Hindi-speaking participants were presented, with letter stimuli matched on phonology, their pattern of letter-to-color preferences still showed similarities with Dutch- and English-speaking participants, interestingly. Moreover, it was found that the color preferences corresponded between participants indicating to have conscious color experiences with letters or days (putative synesthetes) and participants who do not (non-synesthetes). The outcome of the study supported a notion of abstract concepts (such as days and letters) that are not represented in isolation, but are connected to perceptual representational systems. Among those connections, some of these connections to color representations are shared across different language and cultural groups. In the year 1973, the connotative structure of the English color terms black, white, grey, red, yellow, green and blue and their equivalent color terms in 20 other languages of the world using the Semantic Differential Technique was analyzed by Adams & Osgood [9,10]. An important aspect to be taken into account is that Adams & Osgood’s methodology requires participants to make explicit ratings on the position of a given word (e.g. red) in a scale between two poles (e.g. between the terms fresh and stale, or hot and cold). Factor analysis generates the dimensions, and the specific ratings are then used to calculate the value of each word on the dimensions. Therefore, the methodology captures explicit judgments about the connotative loadings of terms. But for most color emotion psychologists ‘the activation of the colour association, as well as its influence on affect, cognition, and behavior, is viewed as occurring without the individual’s conscious awareness or intention’. Therefore it is pertinent to investigate whether the same values in the semantic dimensions can be found at an unconscious level as well. The Implicit Association Test (IAT), which is a new experimental methodology, is used to investigate the implicit connotative structure of the Peninsular Spanish color terms rojo (red), azul (blue), verde (green) and amarillo (yellow) in terms of Osgood’s universal semantic dimensions: Evaluation (good–bad), Activity (excited–relaxed) and Potency (strong–weak) (Soriano & Valenzuela, 2009, 421). The findings of the study showed a connotative profile compatible with the previous literature, except for the valence (good–bad) of some of the color terms, which is reversed. They suggested reasons for both these similarities and differences with previous studies and proposed further research to test these implicit connotations and their effect on the association of color with emotion words. Another study focusing on English and Spanish languages, that depth into the nature of motivation and into the literal and metaphorical continuum of color expressions for red and green color. They focus on the analysis of color metaphors in relation to concepts different from those of emotions, in non-literary texts, and where synaesthesia is not the only motivation. The corpus consists of lexical items, idioms and collocations where colour contributes to meaning, taken from the BNC (English) and the CREA (Spanish). The study shows that a) the literal-metaphorical cline cannot always be observed within the same expression; b) the importance of the centre of the cline made up of chains of entailments is predominantly based on cultural knowledge, as well as on value judgments assigned to colors by the language community focusing the goal of this paper is to deepen into the nature of motivation and into the literal/metaphorical continuum of expressions with colors red and green in English and Spanish approaches for a study on color metaphor, what was more a comparative study on use of color metaphor used in Chinese and English language unlike the above mentioned studies. His study mostly present the cultural differences and similarities of this two language practitioners unlike the above papers that concerns more the semantically use of color metaphor. This paper mainly follows the study style of Yu Weihua but it will also explore whether these similarities have any influence on foreign language cognition. Color metaphor, a universal phenomenon, is used both in English and Bengali language and culture. The “mapping of the logic of one domain (usually, but not always a concrete domain) onto another (usually more abstract) domain” is the way Metaphor defined [11]. Color is an important part of the human experience and plays a vital part in our daily life. People always use color words to express their understandings and thought. Both English and Bengali language share some similarities and dissimilarities using of color metaphor. This paper mainly concerns with some basic color metaphor such as black, white, red, yellow, orange, blue and green including their usage in English and Bengali language.

Black is a color mostly used to express ominous or meaning something negative in both language cultural. Symbolically black represents evil, darkness, night, and despair. It’s the same for any metaphorical expression such as the following table shows (Table 1).

Table 1: Black Color Metaphor and English, Bengali and Chinese Language.

???????????????????? (Wikipedia)/ H?ishèhuì yòu ch?ng h?ib?ng, zh?ngguó yòu ch?ng wèi y?u z?zh? fànzuì jítuán (Wikipedia)/ The underworld is also called the gang, and China is also called the organized crime group (Wikipedia)

???????????????(China News)/ chéngnián rén de b?ngkuì w?ngw?ng cóng sh?u dào h?iqián k?ish? (China News)/ The collapse of adults often begins with the receipt of black money (China News)

???????/ n? de qiántú h?n h?i'àn/ Your future is dark

??? ??????????????/ h?ish?u d?ng shì y?zh?ng h?n pángdà de y?u z?zh? fànzuì jítuán/ The mafia is a very large organized crime group

?????/ t? shì h?ix?n rén

?????????????/ t? de bùliáng xíngwéi g?i ji?l? m?h?ile/ His bad behavior smeared the family.

???????/ T?men xi?ngxìn h?i móf?/ They believe in black magic

?White is another basic color metaphor often used in everyday life in Bengali, English and Chinese culture. The more examples are given below (Tables 3 and 4).

Table 3: White color metaphor and English and Bengali language.

?????????????/J?huì què báibái de cóng n? sh?nbi?n li? z?u./ Opportunity slipped away from you in vain.

?????????????????/Zài w?men ji?, jiàoyù háizi de shíhòu w? chàng bái li?n./ In our house, I sang my face when educating children.

?????????/Su?y?u de g?ngzuò d?u bái zuòle/All the work was done in vain

?????????????????/báiy? dù ji?ng: Bèidòng jìnéng, zh? néng sh?yòng y?cì./ Crossing the River in White Clothes: Passive skills, can only be used once.

??????????????/W? cónglái méiy?u fànguò shì, q?ng q?ngbáibái./ I have never committed a crime, innocent.

???????/T? shì q?ng bái wúg? de/He is innocent

????????????????????????/jiébái dì m?iyù shàngmiàn méiy?u y?di?n xi?o b?n. B?yù rén huò shìwù wánm?i wúqu?/There is no spot on the white jade. As a metaphor for people or things to be perfect.

?????????????????/y?nxià w? shì báid?ng y?gè, dànshì w? huì d?ng jiàoshòu de/ Right now I am Bai Ding, but I will be a professor

A survey questionnaire was done among the Bengali, Chinese and English learners about the use of color metaphor especially white color. They have been told to find the similarities and dissimilarities and the result was following (Table 5).

White conveys purity, cleanliness and angelic but at the same time suggesting ominous, uselessness or common in Bengali, Chinese and English as well. In these languages religion plays a vital role, for example, in Christian religion in marriage white color dress a bride wore but in Bengali culture in marriage wearing white is ominous. But, compared with bái’s other extended also abstract meanings, bai’s meaning in báihuà “clear language” is clearly related to bái’s meaning in míngbai “clear/understand”, but neither bai’s “legal” meaning in baidao “legal way” nor the “antirevolutionary” meaning in báijun “anti-revolutionary army” is remotely related to any of bai’s other meanings.

Table 6: Red Color Metaphor in English, Bengali and Chinese.

????????????/T? de jieri gei women dài láile hóngb?o/ Its festival brought us red envelopes

?????/t? de li?nhóngle/ She blushed

???????/t? y?j?ng shàng hóngzhu?ngle/ She has red makeup

????????????????????????????/zhè shì méiy?u zh?o ch? zhè zh?ng hóngsè zhèngquán su?y? f?sh?ng hé cúnzài de zhèngquè de ji?shì de yuángù./ This is because there is no correct explanation for the occurrence and existence of this red regime.

??????????????????/ S? tè lán bi?oshì, l? q? hé hóng q? ji?ng huì b?c? gélí./ Strand said that the green zone and the red zone will be separated from each other.

??????? ?/ T? qì dé li?nhóng bózi c?/ He blushed and his neck was thick

??????????????????????/ rúgu? néng yíngdé k?iménhóng dehuà, y?hòu de shìqíng jiù huì shùnlìle./ If you can win a good start, things will go well in the future.

???????????????/ C?nzhu?ng hóngbáix?shì zh?ng de rénjì ji?ow?ng zh?nzé./ 

Guidelines for interpersonal communication in the weddings in the village.

Table 7: Red color metaphor Exist in Chinese Bengali and English language.

In this case, we may conclude that bai’s “clear” meaning was probably developed earlier than hei’s “secret” meaning in heihua “black language”, but bai’s “legal” and “anti-revolutionary” meanings were probably deduced from hei’s “illegal” meaning and hóng’s “revolutionary” meaning respectively through people’s cognitive construal of oppositeness.White color dress is put on, in Bengali culture in mourning for a death ceremony. But as the table present about 60 percent seemed similar when it comes to use and 40 percent were dissimilar [26-30]. 

Red is usually associated with celebrations and joyful occasions, luck and money, love and passion, power but at the same time it also indicates anger, fire, sleeplessness and so on. In China, the red color plays an important role in Chinese people’s life, seen as the color of sun and fire. In Bengali and English red is used more or less same (Table 6).

As the examples show that the use of red color metaphor is more or less the same in these languages. But there are some differences too. For example, in marriage both the Chinese and Bengali culture put on red dress which indicates the red beauty of a bride but in English it’s white. In Chinese culture during festival, all decoration is done with red which is not that common in Bengali and English culture. For example, hóngyán “red face/young girl” hongzhuang “red/feminine attire” hong bai dashi “red & white events/wedding and funeral” hongyun “red/good luck” zouhong “walk red/be lucky” hongren “red/favorable person” hongweibing “red/revolutionary guard” hongjun “red/revolutionary army” hongxin “red/revolutionary heart” yanhong “red eye/jealous”. When learners were asked about their opinion they answer following (Table 7).

Table 8: Blue Color Metaphor in English, Bengali and Chinese language.

????????/ Q?ngch?yúlán ér shèng yú lán/ the student surpasses the master

Blue is the color of soothing sky and also sadness. Blue metaphor in English and Bengali has a lot of similarity but not in a conceptual metaphorical way. Again Chinese and English has little in common. The examples are following (Table 8).

So the use of the color blue seems to have fewer similarities in these three cultures. But in English blue has also extended meaning such as; “Alex turned blue when Carmen pushed him all of a sudden/ He feels blue as he failed in exam./ The want control of the company to remain in true blue hands.” But in English the expression “The blueprint of the building helps them a lot”, which doesn’t seem common in Chinese but In Bengali it exists such as, although blue metaphor is not that commonly used in Bengali and Chinese, but the way this color metaphor is used in Bengali and Chinese, in English, they are more or less similar. As in Chinese blue is understood, lanshan “blue shirt/poor quality clothes” lanling “blue collar/working class” in Bengali it is a bit different. So the Bengali and Chinese learner find the use similar rather than dissimilar. As the table present (Table 9).

Table 9: Blue color metaphor Exist in Bengali, Chinese and English language.

???????????????/ W?y?, shíy? huángj?n zh?u l?yóu zh? xi?ngduì jízh?ng./ Tourists are relatively concentrated during the Golden Week on May Day and November.

??????????/ Yòng huángj?n shídài y?guò zàojù.

/ Use the golden age in a sentence.

???????????/ Zhè shí zhèng shì ch?nti?n de huángj?n shíqí/ This is the golden age of spring

Yellow color metaphor is mostly used in Chinese language rather than Bengali and English language. Yellow color in Chinese language is a royal color, especially for the king’s dress up. But yellow in Chinese also means failure. More examples are following (Table 10).

Just like blue is a significant color in English language, the same way Yellow is the important color for Chinese people/culture and language, that has more use then the other languages comparatively. For example; The leaf turns yellow due to season change expression is absent in Bengali language.

Yellow in Chinese is huangjin “yellow gold”, “yellow” huangdi “emperor”, huangquan “ground spring” yellow/cowardly person huanglian “yellow face”, huangle “fail”, huangshu “pornographic”(Xing, 2008), in Bengali has similarities with English understanding pornographic as the both culture it is understood with the color blue. When learners are told to find out the similarities and dissimilarities of using of color metaphor with their native language and English, the survey outcome was following (Table 11).

As the chart shows, based on learner’s observational survey present, Bengali, Chinese and English has some similarities but mostly they are dissimilar when it comes to any metaphorical expression. It seems that color metaphor is used more or less similarly but there are also dissimilarities when it comes to use in daily expression.

From the finding above it is clear that among the color metaphor discussed above; black, white and red has mostly the similar use while other color like; blue, yellow are used differently in Bengali, Chinese and English language. This similarity if compared then they may help the learner of the Chinese or Bengali learner to learn the English language which is the foreign language for both language learner contexts. So it seems color plays a remarkable role in people’s daily life and intercultural communication. A cross- cultural comparative study on Bengali, Chinese and English common color metaphor to find out their similarities and dissimilarities by analyzing their different meanings and cultural background was the basis of the study. This paper tried to find out whether the learner are conscious about the use of color metaphor and the use of those color terms in their native language. There are so many expressions with color terms in both English and Bengali, English and Chinese, Chinese and Bengali but the paper contains few examples mostly to show contrast and make comparison. The purpose of the paper is not only to enclose the similarities and dissimilarities; the most important point is to understand them between cultures and the implications keeping focus in this three languages and cultures [31-37].

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