The importance ofcultural connotations when teaching vocabulary

Abstract

In the current paper we are exploring the importance of cultural connotation in the vocabulary teaching, more precisely we are focused on the secondary meanings of the lexemes expressing colors. Those culturally motivated “secondary” meanings are the keys to understand received message properly, without any misinterpretation or even more, misunderstanding. The data is presented from English, Russian and Georgian languages. It is interesting that for each language some culturally determined meanings of words are authentic; also it should be mentioned, that in Georgian language some cultural meanings of the color expressing vocabulary has been borrowed from Russia (during Russian Empire and Soviet Union) and from Anglo-American culture during last decades (after increasing the role and influence of US in the Georgian politics, education, economic and social relationships). We have come to the following conclusions: there are similarities in color vocabulary cultural connotations and significant differences as well: Blue – the color of sadness in English and color of romance (one from several culturally loaded meanings) in Georgian. Blue blood – means someone is from aristocratic family in all three languages. Some similarities can be considered as universal cultural data (facts), but teacher should emphasize the similarities in order to make learning process for students more comfortable and familiar: Black – the color often associated with negative qualities. Some similarities might be cultural borrowings (especially between Russian and Georgian languages, from Soviet time period, when both countries were the part of the same political (and partly socio-cultural space): white – expressing social class, enemies of Soviet authorities in Georgian and Russian. Differences between languages in this aspect can be considered as a cultural peculiarity. Teacher’s responsibility is to explain as precise as possible these differences to avoid any misunderstanding or misinterpretation: black – expressing criminals in Georgian and Afro-Americans in English. The language teacher’s responsibility is to explain as precise as possible these differences to avoid any vacant hole in the language teaching and keep the teaching standards high.