English-Persian Word Formation with an Eye on Culture and Thought Effects

Abstract

This research aims to introduce culture and thought -within Whorfian <br />hypothesis-of the target language to EFL learners and helps them get a deeper <br />idea over the root and reference of words and thereby keep them longer in <br />memory. To test the hypothesis Orwell's <br />Animal Farm <br />was chosen along with <br />two translations in Persian as well as a Persian short story titled <br />Ahu-ye Kuhi <br />. <br />Required data were extracted from the aforesaid books with no sampling <br />procedure applied but the whole books were taken into consideration. The <br />researchers made use of syntactic discussions like grammatical gender in <br />addition to semantic domains like colors, planets, flowers, religion, and <br />others in a contrastive way. Any word signaling one of these domains was <br />highlighted and analyzed through examples. The domains revealed a high rate <br />of effect on the formation of words both in English and Persian with basic <br />changes in between. It was concluded that the roles of thought and cultural <br />domains on the vocabulary systems of the two languages are effective and <br />crucially important particularly in that EFL learners get familiar with <br />the culture and thinking styles of the target language which paves the <br />way for learning the language easier.