In contrast to the oriental, westerners put much emphasis on analytic thinking. It is widely accepted that ancient Greek culture has exerted much influence on western civilization. The hostility of natural circumstances threw a light on the coming into being of the ancient Greek civilization. Because of the poor soil and cold weather, life in this area was challenging. Therefore, it is not difficult to understand why Greeks paid more attention to laws of nature. They tried to conquer it. So did the western people. The basic aim of western is to have a good command of knowledge to control and conquer nature. From their perspective, nature and human are totally opposite. They are inclined to observe and analyzed nature from macro-perspective to micro-perspective.
Because of their analytic thinking, it is common for westerners to describe scenery accurately in literature. The poet Cloud written by Shelly was such an example:
I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers,
From the seas and the streams,
I bear light shade for the leaves when laid,
In their noon-day dreams,
From my wings are shaken the dews that waken,
The sweet buds every one,
When rocked to rest on their mother’s breast,
As she dances about the Sun,
I wield the flail of the lashing hail,
And whiten the green plains under,
And the again I dissolve it in rain,
And laugh as I pass in thunder.
It is obvious that the poet described the scenery so vividly, accurately, and meticulously. Not only Chinese poet understood the meaning of life from nature, but also western poet appreciated the philosophy from the scenery. However, the perspectives from which they looked at the problems are totally different.
Analytic thinking modes of westerners make their language diverse in morphology, grammatical form, syntactic structure and so on. In comparison to analytic thinking, creative-synthetic thinking determines that Chinese concentrate on general idea of passage, neglecting details. The two different thinking modes are reflected in language as follows:
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