West Union Wa Kinship Terms And Cultural Studies

Every language, after long development and evolution will gradually form their own kinship terms. Kinship terms depends largely on forms of marriage and the structure of families, but also to varying degrees by other social and cultural factors. It tend to lag behind the development of marriage and family patterns, and retain more remnants which able to explain the form of the ancient society of marriage.Therefore, the significance of in-depth analysis and researching on Ximeng Wa's kinship terms, lies not only in elaborating institution of current marriage, the most important thing is exploring the Ximeng Wa's ancient marriage patterns, which no written records in the history of, and revealing other complex cultural issues hidden behind the kinship terms.In this paper, on the basis of description of Ximeng Wa's kinship terms, summarizing its characteristics and analysis of semantic, explore influencing factors of Ximeng Wa's kinship terms through the analysis of marriage and family patterns, marriage customs and rules, kinship.Among them, the marriage customs and rules mainly include prohibit marriages within the family, the priority marriage of the cross-cousin, and so on. According to Ximeng Wa's male-centered sense of family, kinship is divided into two kinds to analyzed.Kinship terms, in turn, reflects traditional virtues of Ximeng Wa that they seniority and care for the young, male-centered sense of family, also a sign of the rights and obligations between people.The analysis shows that the development of the Ximeng Wa marriage and family patterns in line with the development of theories about human history of marriage and family, which explained by Morgan. And this is validated in the current kinship terms.Anyway, it is impossible to say that marriage and family patterns is the only decisive role of kinship terms, it also depends on the marriage customs, the sense of family, and so on.