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儒琴今日英语单词 Word of the Day
syncretic
adjective /sɪŋˈkret̬.ɪk/
英文解释
The combination of different forms of belief or practice；the fusion of two or more originally different inflectional forms.
Noun: syncretism
中文解释
（宗教，思想等）混合的；合一的；融合的；汇合的。syncretic（融合）一词起源于一个古老的联盟。它是希腊语synkrētismos的衍生词，意思是“克里特城市的联邦”，syn的意思是“一起”，Krēt的意思是“克里特”。这个形容词在19世纪中期首次出现在英语中，而相关名词“syncretism”则要早200多年就出现。syncretic（融合）保留了联合的概念，出现在“融合的宗教”、“融合的社会”甚至“融合的音乐”等语境中，所有描述的事物都受到两种或两种以上的风格或传统的影响。这个词在语言学上还有一个特殊的应用，它指的是语法形式的融合。（merriam-webster.com）
原文举例
However, this mixing of faiths is not fundamentally sequential: rather, it is concurrent. People are routinely syncretic in matters of religion, combining elements from different traditions. This is often physically obvious. The Buddhist temple of Kiyomizu-dera and the Shintō shrine Jishu-jinja in Kyoto are contiguous, and Japanese visitors perform rituals at both.
然而，这种信仰的混合从根本上来说并不是前后连续的；相反，它是并行同时发生的。人们在宗教事务上经常融合，将不同传统的元素结合在一起。这通常是显而易见的。清水寺(Kiyomizu-dera)和京都Shintō神社(Jishu-jinja)相邻，日本游客会在这两个地方举行仪式。
Another reason religion is syncretic across east Asia is that its function is at least as much to bind people to each other as to the divine. Visiting a Shintō shrine or having a Buddhist funeral is a way of acknowledging that one comes from and belongs to a specific culture with its own traditions. In that sense it doesn’t really matter what rituals one performs, as long as they are the same as those your peers and ancestors observe.
宗教在整个东亚融合的另一个原因是，它的功能至少是将人们与神联系在一起。参观Shintō神社或举行佛教葬礼是一种承认自己来自并属于具有自己传统的特定文化的方式。从这个意义上说，一个人举行什么仪式并不重要，只要他们与你的同辈和祖先遵守的仪式相同就行。
The syncretic spirit is hard to import to the monotheistic west because for so long religion has been about competing claims to be the one true faith, often resulting in wars and schisms.
融合的精神很难引入到一神论的西方，因为长期以来，宗教一直在争夺唯一真正的信仰，经常导致战争和分裂。
If that is what Christmas comes to mean, then the west too could develop its own syncretism, in which one could be a pagan at solstice, a Christian at Christmas and an atheist on New Year’s Eve.
如果这就是圣诞节的含义，那么西方也可能发展出自己的融合，即一个人可以在冬至时成为异教徒，在圣诞节时成为基督徒，在新年前夜成为无神论者。
