people are addicted to alcohol and even little children drink rice wine. Sometimes, the whole population can be found in drunken stupors at times of celebrations. In some villages, people have been without rice for food because it has been used to make alcohol.
Men, women, and often children smoke tobacco rolled in banana leaves.
Many women are bare-breasted but some become shy in the presence of foreigners and are wearing more clothing. The men wear loin cloths.
Homes are built on stilts, four to five feet off the ground. They are called long-houses and are long and narrow. Floors and walls are made of bamboo and roofs are thatched. The people sleep on straw mats on the floor.
The Jarai believe accidents and diseases are caused by spirits and that sorcerers can cause all kinds of bad happenings, including death. They think that if they violate taboos, the whole village can be brought to suffering. Some of the punishments might be a lack of rain, epidemics, etc. Sacrifices must be made to placate the spirits and bring things back to normal. The village sorcerer is often called in to determine which spirit has been offended.
It is interesting to note that a sorcerer from a Vietnamese tribe has been converted to the Christian faith by the Christian and Missionary Alliance personnel.
Their religion is also surrounded by superstition. Elements of nature are considered to be manifestations of the various spirits or gods. They have gods and goddesses of sky, water, mountains, trees, rocks, etc.
There are no special churches, but sacrifices and ceremonies can be practiced at any given time or place. All important occasions are postponed until an appropriate sacrifice can be made to the spirits and gods.
THE VIETNAMESE LANGUAGE
Authorities do not seem to completely agree on the origin of the Vietnamese language. German linguists have said that they believe the Vietnamese language belongs to the Pegouan, Thai, or Mon-Khmer group. Some believe it is of Thai origin while another expert, Reverend Father Souvignet, traced it to the Indo-Malay group. Still another dissenter, A. G. Haudricourt, wrote that he believed it could more properly be placed in the Austro-Asiatic family of languages. Nguyen-Dinh-Hoa of Saigon's Faculty of Letters has said that the Vietnamese lexicon has many nouns in common with the Cambodian or Khmer language. This is especially true of nouns dealing with parts of the body, members of the kinship system, names of farm tools, species of flora and fauna, etc. He also added that Vietnamese used many of the same final consonants as Thai and used various levels of pitch and tone.
New words have also been added into the Vietnamese language during the times of Chinese domination and other outside influences in the country, such as French and American. Most of the words derived from these languages have been "Vietnamized" and given their own pronunciations.
The Vietnamese used Chinese characters or Chu Nho (scholars script) as their written language vehicle beginning in the ninth century. The Chinese characters came into use in all official transactions, correspondence, and literature. No one can reliably say what written language was used prior to this time in Vietnam.
The written Chinese language, Chu Nho, was different from the spoken Vietnamese. Citizens of various countries of the Asian world could write to each other and be understood. They did not pronounce the characters the same way, however, and could not expect to understand a conversation, should they have met.
Vietnamese scholars and literary types demanded history and literature in a language of their own, and started to borrow Chinese characters, improvising their own combinations to represent ideas and concepts, and to phonetize some of their native speech. This became known as" Chu Nom" which meant vulgar or demotic script. It looks like Chinese, but no foreigners could read it, as they could with Chu Nho. Chu Nom was found only in literary works, unofficial documents and the like.
During the seventeenth century, Catholic missionaries began to arrive in Vietnam from Spain, Portugal, Italy, and France. They needed some linguistic tool to get their ideas across to the people. Under the guidance of the Catholic Priest, Father Alexander-de-Rhodes, a system of romanized writing, known as "Quoc Ngu" (national language) was developed. This enabled them to use the spoken Vietnamese in a written manner through the Roman alphabet. Father Alexander-de-Rhodes completed a Vietnamese-Portuguese-Latin dictionary in 1649. He was a Jesuit scholar-missionary from France who studied in Vietnam for twelve years under another Jesuit, Francisco de Pina, before compiling the new written language.
In 1920, Quoc-Ngu was recognized as the official language. Since 1945, Quoc-Ngu has been used in all lower level schools in Vietnam. There has been considerable controversy about using the national language at the university level, replacing French. On several occasions, especially at times of poor Vietnamese-French relations, students have demonstrated in behalf of using Vietnamese entirely in the university curriculum.
Technicalities of the Language
The Vietnamese language is far too complicated to be throughly treated in a book of this type. For information purposes only, however, a few of the characteristics of the language follow.
There are 12 vowels and 27 consonants in the language. It is a tonal language, and a given syllable may be pronounced in any of six tones. A classic example is the word "ma." Depending on the voice inflection given the word, it can mean ghost, cheek, but grave, horse, or rice-seedling. There may also be other meanings, depending on the melody of the given sentence.
The language is noted for its lack of inflectional endings or the changing of form of the word to indicate number, gender, etc. Translated to English, a Vietnamese sentence and might read:
"Today John give I six pencil."
Modifiers always follow the noun, adjective, verb, or adverb that they modify. Many words are left out. One might compare a Vietnamese sentence with a thrifty telegram; all words that can be left out are omitted. It may have an understood subject or no subject at all.
The numerical system is decimal.
In the Appendices of this book may be found selected elements of the basic Vietnamese language; alphabet; glossary of selected vocabulary; and useful phrases.
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