Documenting The Vocabulary And Its Cultural Knowledge In Guangnan Dong

Dong language is the manifestation to record, inherit, and develop Dong cultures. As a basic part of Dong language, the vocabulary contains brilliant traditional cultures. Currently, great work has been achieved on Dong, but little attention has been paid to its lexicon. With Dong language in Guangnan Village, Pingdeng Township, Longsheng County, Guilin City, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region as the study object, and based on plenty of materials (including words and texts) collected by fieldwork, this paper attempts to give a detailed description of its lexicon, with the hope to reveal its characteristics and improve the study on Dong lexicon. Specifically, based on some linguistic theories and methods, this paper first gives an analysis on the internal structure of the words. It then proceeds to reveal the cultural knowledge contained in these words via some typical culture-loading words, namely, local placenames, kinship terms and flora and fauna words.For the vocabulary, analysis reveals that Guangnan Dong language displays two main processes of word-formation:affixation and compounding. The number of affixes is quite limited, especially that of the suffixes. On the contrary, the compounding process is quite productive. From the syntactical and morphological point of view, it consists of five types:head-modifier, subject-predicate, predicate-object, predicate-complement and coordinate compound. From the perspective of semantic analysis, compound words can be classified according to the following 10 semantic fields, including color, position, utility, material, product, habit, container, and part-whole relationship.For the cultural implications, the vocabulary, especially placnames, kinship terms, and flora and fauna words, records rich cultural information. Firstly, the grammatical structure of placenames has its unique pattern, which formed as’generic term+ proper noun’. This is different from Chinese. Meanwhile, after analyzing the meangning of the morphemes, we find that lots of local history, historical relics, and folk stories are documented by placenames. Secondly, many kinship terms in Guangnan Dong denote a ’one-to-multiple’ relationship, which means a kinship term can denote many relationships. What’s more, there is no distinction between father side and mother side, or between consanguine and affinal relationship for some kinship terms. It is an outstanding feature that differs from Chinese and English, and to some extent, it reflects the cultural relics of Dong social and marriage system. Finally, as a typical agricultural minority, Dong people share a special intimacy with animals and plants. For the flora and fauna words, all their naming principles, use values and folk tales embody the unique culture of Dong Nationality.