베트남 성어(成語)와 베트남 문화

Vietnamese ‘thanh ngu (Idiom)’ and Vietnamese Culture

The culture is the result of the human intellectual activities in society, which is composed of material, as well as psychosocial, and sociodemographic factors. As such, the culture of an ethnic group can show us their life, social status, consciousness and concept on life. The culture is also the result of human psychological activities, based on the language, and ultimately reflected and evaluated by the language. Therefore, the study on the culture of an ethnic group through their language is very useful. Vietnamese ‘thanh ngu (idiom)’ is the diachronic language which was created in daily life of Vietnamese people and has been developed from generation to generation. Therefore, it reflects the history, society and culture of Vietnam. One of the linguistic characteristics of this Vietnamese ‘thanh ngu’ is the fact that it has dual meaning, figurative and metaphoric meaning, and literal meaning. Vocabularies are selected from the familiar things and phenomena around the daily life of people, so as to easily suggest the metaphoric meaning. Therefore, the word meaning and sentence meaning of Vietnamese ‘thanh ngu’ is directly linked to Vietnamese physical culture. Furthermore, almost all of metaphoric meanings of Vietnamese ‘thanh ngu’ are involved into criticizing or praising the attitudes, activities or thoughts of people, in such a way that we can understand their psychological culture, including their mentality and concept on life. This study looked into the vocabulary, sentence and metaphoric meaning of Vietnamese ‘thanh ngu’ related to the food, clothing and shelter in order to know and understand their physical culture on these topics and their psychological culture involved in it. For the efficiency of this study, we introduced the concept and category of Vietnamese ‘thanhngu’.