Culture and Customs of Vietnam

Tema	Geografija
Tipas	Referatas
Aprašymas	Darbas anglų kalba. Vietnamo papročiai ir kultūra. Land, people and language. Geography. Ethnolinguistic groups. The Vietnamese Language. Forms of Address. History and institutions. Pre-colonial institutions. Social Classes. The Village. Cities. Viet Nam Under French Domination. The Rise of Nationalism. The Socialist Republic. Thought and religion. Introduction. Animism. Taoism. Buddhism. Confucianism. Catholicism. The new sects. Cao Dai. Hoa Hao. Religion in the Socialist Republic. Literature. In Chinese. The Folk Tradition. In Vernacular Characters. In Romanized Vietnamese. Under Colonialism. Popular or Realist Literature. Resistance Literature. "Marking Time" Literature. Renovation Literature. Art and architecture. Pre-colonial Arts. Ceramics. Lacquerware. Painting. Modern painting. Architecture. Cuisine. Introduction. Utensils and manners. Cereals, Fruits, and Vegetables. Meat and Meat Products. Fish and Crustaceans. Drinks and Desserts. Areca Nuts, Tobacco, and Opium. Daily fare in the S.R.V. Family, gender, and youth culture. The Vietnamese Family in Pre-colonial Times. The Family in Times of War. Family life in the S.R.V. Generation 2000. Festivals and leisure activities. Introduction. The Lunar Calendar. Festivals. Group Specific Observances. Leisure activities. Sports and Leisure in Contemporary VietNam. Performing arts. Music and dance. Traditional (Musical) Theatre. Water Puppetry.
Patalpinta	2008-11-19
Parsisiuntė	50
	Parsisiųsti45 KB

Išsamus aprašymas

Land, people and language

Geography

Vietnamese describe Vietnam as resembling a shoulder pole with a rice basket at each end. The image is useful, for the heavily populated, grain-producing areas of modern Vietnam are in the extreme North (in the Red River Delta, also called the Tonkin Delta) and South (the Mekong Delta), with a thin, less productive, and less densely inhabited coastal region linking them.
The Red River and its major tributaries are vital for irrigation, transportation, and hydroelectric power but are subject to violent and unpredictable flooding. Despite their dangers, the rivers deposit rich silt on the lowlands, and the Tonkin Delta has been intensively cultivated since the origins of Viet settlement. This remains true today, with irrigated or “wet” rice the principal crop.
Central Vietnam is an extremely thin region, only about thirty miles from the South China Sea to Laos at its narrowest. Given their proximity to the South China Sea and its teeming marine life, most of the villages combine farming with fishing. Central Vietnam is intersected by Seventeenth Parallel, which was a contested political boundary from 1954 to 1975.
The South’s major river is one of the world’s great rivers, the Mekong. The Mekong Delta is modern Vietnam’s second great agriculture and population centre, although the Viet did not begin significant settlement there until the 1600s. In addition to rice, still the main crop, sugarcane, bananas, and coconuts are produced abundantly.

Ethnolinguistic groups
Although the precise physical origins of the modern Vietnamese people remain in dispute, most scholars agree that they derive from a combination of aboriginal Australoid peoples with Indonesian and Mongoloid peoples from outside the region. Since historical times, the Viet have been a sedentary, rice-growing, village-dwelling people. Today there are more than 80,000,000 Vietnamese citizens, most of whom are ethnic Viet and live packed on about 20 percent of Vietnam’s territory. The rest of Vietnam – the remaining 80 percent – is for the most part left to non-Viet peoples. These areas are mountainous and covered by jungle and brush.
Vietnam’s mountains and high plains are thus inhabited by a variety of non-Viet ethnic groups, many of them similar to the peoples who live in Laos and Thailand. There are at least sixty different peoples in this category; collectively they total more than 4,000,000 people. In English they have been called the “hill peoples,” “tribal minorities,” or, more recently, “highlanders.”
Several non-Vietnamese ethnolinguistic groups also inhabit the lowlands of today’s Vietnam. In southern Vietnam there remains a group of Khmer Krom. Krom means “South” in Khmer and the Khmer Krom are the remnants of the time when the Khmer Empire controlled the Mekong Delta.
The Chams are another non-Viet lowland people, the human vestiges of an ancient empire called Champa that was conquered and absorbed by the Viet in the fifteenth century.
There is also a large Chinese population in Vietnam, totaling almost 1,000,000. Many Chinese have intermarried with Viet and are presently almost undistinguishable from them. Others have retained their Chinese identities by living in distinct communities, teaching their children the Chinese language and culture, and maintaining clan organizations.


The Vietnamese Language
Scholars do not agree on the best way to classify the Vietnamese language, which seems to share structures with and borrow words from many of the languages spoken in East and Southeast Asia. Vietnamese is tonal, suggesting an affinity with the Sino-Tibetan family, which includes the Chinese and Tai languages. It also has structural similarities to languages in the Mon-Khmer group of the Austro-Asiatic family, which are not tonal. Still other scholars view Vietnamese as a unique language that virtually constitutes a family unto itself, albeit one that has borrowed extensively from other families.
Throughout their history, the Viet have used a variety of writing systems. Like many other Asian nations, the Viet began their experience with writing by borrowing the “ready-made” system of Chinese characters (chu Han). From at least the thirteenth century onward, Viet scholars developed a second system, an indigenous character-based vernacular (chu nom) that adopted and adapted some of the symbols of Chinese characters to express Vietnamese-language sounds. Another system, chu quoc ngu, which remains in usage today, was invented by Catholic missionaries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They developed an alphabetical system based on a smaller number of Latin letters, which in combination express the sounds of spoken Vietnamese, including Chinese loan words.
After the end of colonialism in 1954, quoc ngu became the official writing system for government business and public education on both sides of the Seventeenth Parallel, and it remains so today in the S.R.V.
From the phonological point of view, Vietnamese is a monosyllabic and tonal language. It’s monosyllabism is manifested in the articulation of syllables in connected speech, but many of its words are disyllabic and even polysyllabic. For English speakers, the tonal quality of Vietnamese is one of its most interesting aspects. Each word is formed with at least one vowel that is voiced with either level or changing pitch. Depending on regional variations, there may be four to six of these pitches or tones. Unlike the intonations that English speakers use to express shades of meaning or emphasis, these changes in tone or musical pitch affect the lexical meaning of Vietnamese words.
Vietnamese is an isolating language: words do not change their forms, and grammatical categories cannot be expressed by prefixes or suffixes. Although syntax and contest are usually relied on to indicate grammatical meaning, function words may be added for clarification. However, Vietnamese words remain invariable, be they singular or plural, masculine or feminine, subject or object.

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