During the presidency of Carter, an American journalist asked president of Egypt Sadat whether he would visit America to hold the peace talk with President Carter. Sadat answered: " Invited or not invited, I will come." After reading this news, most Americans thought that Sadat was rude and arrogant. This made the Egyptians in America feel very surprised and hurt, because what Sadat had used was the most common way in Egypt to express the best wishes to solve the misunderstandings and recover the peaceful relationship.
Why do people in these two countries held different feelings to the same sentence? First of all, we have to know what language is. Here is a definition stating that: language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication. Yes, for communication. Language allows people to say things to each other and express their communicative needs. It is the cement of society, allowing people to live, work, and play together. It expresses the cultural reality. But language is not the expression of cultural reality only; it is also a guide to cultural reality, which powerfully conditions all our thinking about social problems and processes. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality, as Daniel J. Sullivan pointed out in Linguistic Fallacies:.
No system of words, no matter how refined or elaborate, can perfectly translate the subtleties of thought or reflect the infinite variety within reality. There will always be an unexpressed margin between language and thought, and this is always a potential source of misunderstanding. 1.
Buddhism civilization of China is quite different from Christianity civilization of Western world. Without the acknowledgement in cultural background, misunderstandings are inevitable. Some of them maybe are trivial. Some of them probably will impair the image of a nation, as the story mentioned before, or cause the unnecessary political tightness among nations.