Due to cultural differences, what is auspicious and honorable in oriental people’s eye is evil and brutal to the westerners, like the bats and the dragons for shop names. In China, “dogs” are, more than often, related with what is degrading, such as “like a dog threatening people on the strength of its master’s power”, “no ivory issues from the mouth of a dog”, while westerners regard dogs as faithful friends so that “man’s best friends” came into being.
6 Conclusion
The cultural differences between the eastern and western nations are reflected in different associations caused by respective culture and such differences affect people’s ideas about how to name their shops.
As discussed above, there is a superb collection of shop names so that they themselves constitute an amazing world. Short as the shop names are, they are capable of displaying the simplicity and “cream” of languages. They are the crystallization of the businessmen’s wisdom and the fruits of the old civilization and the modern fashion. “Shop names”, on one side, reflect people’s ideal and changeable psychology as well as the colorful connotations of the specific culture. Therefore, research of the “shop names” is a multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural study, and such a research is getting more and more important in today’s world with rapid economic development and strengthening cultural exchange.
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