A proverb, (from the Latin Latin or sometimes Roman is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Although often considered a dead language, in view of the fact that it has no native, fluent speakers, Latin continues to be taught in schools and has been, and currently is, used in the process of new word production in modern languages from many proverbium), is a simple and concrete saying popularly known and repeated, which expresses a truth, based on common sense or the practical experience of humanity. They are often metaphorical Metaphor also denotes rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via association, comparison, or resemblance. A proverb that describes a basic rule of conduct may also be known as a maxim According to Immanuel Kant, a maxim is a subjective principle or rule that the will of an individual uses in making a decision. If a proverb is distinguished by particularly good phrasing, it may be known as an aphorism The word aphorism denotes an original thought, spoken or written in a laconic and memorable form. The genre is also known as "maxim".

Proverbs are often borrowed from similar languages and cultures, and sometimes come down to the present through more than one language. Both the Bible (Book of Proverbs The Book of Proverbs is a book of the Hebrew Bible. The original Hebrew title of the book of Proverbs is "Míshlê Shlomoh" ("Proverbs of Solomon"). When translated into Greek and Latin, the title took on different forms. In the Greek Septuagint (LXX) the title became "paroimai paroimiae" ("Proverbs"). In) and medieval Latin have played a considerable role in distributing proverbs across Europe, although almost every culture has examples of its own.

Examples

• Haste makes waste
• Don't poke the bear
• Ignorance is bliss

Paremiology

The study of proverbs is called: paremiology (from Greek Greek , an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, is the language of the Greeks. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. In its ancient form, it is the language of classical ancient Greek literature and the New Testament of παροιμία - paroimía, "proverb") and can be dated back as far as Aristotle Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology. Together with Plato and Socrates (Plato's teacher), Aristotle is one of the most. Paremiography, on the other hand, is the collection of proverbs. A prominent proverb scholar in the United States is Wolfgang Mieder. He has written or edited over 50 books on the subject, edits the journal Proverbium (journal), has written innumerable articles on proverbs, and is very widely cited by other proverb scholars. Mieder defines the term proverb as follows:

A proverb is a short, generally known sentence of the folk which contains wisdom, truth, morals, and traditional views in a metaphorical, fixed and memorizable form and which is handed down from generation to generation. —Mieder 1985:119; also in Mieder 1993:24

Sub-genres include proverbial comparisons (“as busy as a bee”), proverbial interrogatives (“Does a chicken have lips?”) and twin formulas (“give and take”).

Another subcategory is wellerisms Wellerisms, named for Sam Weller in Charles Dickens's The Pickwick Papers, make fun of established proverbs by showing that they are wrong in certain situations, often when taken literally. Typically a Wellerism consists of three parts: a proverb or saying, a speaker, and an often humorously literal explanation, named after Sam Weller Sam Weller is a fictional character in The Pickwick Papers, the first novel by Charles Dickens, and is allegedly the character that made Dickens famous. Weller first appeared at the White Hart in the third serialised episode. Previously the monthly parts of the book had been doing badly — the humour of the character transformed the book into a from Charles Dickens Charles John Huffam Dickens was the most popular English novelist of the Victorian era, and he remains popular, responsible for some of English literature's most iconic characters's The Pickwick Papers The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club is the first novel by Charles Dickens. After the publication, the widow of the illustrator Robert Seymour claimed that the idea for the novel was originally her husband's; however, in his preface to the 1867 edition, Dickens strenuously denied any specific input, writing that "Mr Seymour never (1837). They are constructed in a triadic manner which consists of a statement (often a proverb), an identification of a speaker (person or animal) and a phrase that places the statement into an unexpected situation. Ex.: “Every evil is followed by some good,” as the man said when his wife died the day after he became bankrupt.

Yet another category of proverb is the anti-proverb An anti-proverb is the transformation of a stereotype word sequence – as e. g. a proverb, a quotation, or an idiom – for humorous effect (Mieder and Litovkina 2002), also called Perverb A perverb is a humorous modification of a known proverb, usually by changing its ending in a way that surprises or confounds the listener. In such cases, people twist familiar proverbs to change the meaning. Sometimes the result is merely humorous, but the most spectacular examples result in the opposite meaning of the standard proverb. Examples include, "Nerds of a feather flock together", "Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and likely to talk about it," and "Absence makes the heart grow wander". Anti-proverbs are common on T-shirts, such as "If at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you."

A similar form is proverbial expressions A proverbial phrase or a proverbial expression is type of a conventional saying similar to proverbs and transmitted by oral tradition. The difference is that a proverb is a fixed expression, while a proverbial phrase permits alterations to fit the grammar of the context (“to bite the dust”). The difference is that proverbs are unchangeable sentences, while proverbial expressions permit alterations to fit the grammar of the context.^[1]

Another close construction is an allusion An allusion is a reference to, or representation of, a place, event, literary work, myth, or work of art, either directly or by implication. M.H. Abrams defined allusion as "a brief reference, explicit or indirect, to a person, place or event, or to another literary work or passage". It is left to the reader or hearer to make the to a proverb, such as "The new broom will sweep clean." ^[1]

Typical stylistic features of proverbs (as Shirley Arora points out in her article, The Perception of Proverbiality (1984)) are:

• alliteration In poetry, alliteration refers to repetition of a consonant in any syllables that, according to the poem's meter, are stressed as if they occurred at the beginning of a word, as in James Thomson's verse "Come…dragging the lazy languid Line along" (Forgive and forget)
• parallelism Parallelisms of various sorts are the chief rhetorical device of Biblical poetry in Hebrew. In fact, Robert Lowth coined the term "parallelismus membrorum in his 1788 book, Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrew Nation. Roman Jakobson pioneered the secular study of parallelism in poetic-linguistic traditions around the world, including (Nothing ventured, nothing gained)
• rhyme A rhyme is a repetition of similar sounds in two or more words and is most often used in poetry and songs. The word "rhyme" may also refer to a short poem, such as a rhyming couplet or other brief rhyming poem such as nursery rhymes (When the cat is away, the mice will play)
• ellipsis In linguistics, ellipsis or elliptical construction refers to the omission from a clause of one or more words that would otherwise be required by the remaining elements (Once bitten, twice shy)

In some languages, assonance Assonance is refrain of vowel sounds to create internal rhyming within phrases or sentences, and together with alliteration and consonance serves as one of the building blocks of verse. For example, in the phrase "Do you like blue?", the /uː/ is repeated within the sentence and is assonant, the repetition of a vowel, is also exploited in forming artistic proverbs, such as the following extreme example from Oromo Oromo, also known as Afaan Oromoo, Oromiffa (Amharic: ኦሮሚኛ ’Orominya), Afan Boran, Afan Arsi, and sometimes in other languages by variant spellings of these names (Oromic, Afan Oromo, etc.), is an Afro-Asiatic language, and the most widely spoken of the Cushitic family. It is spoken as a first language by more than 25 million Oromo and, of Ethiopia.

• kan mana baala, a’laa gaala (“A leaf at home, but a camel elsewhere"; somebody who has a big reputation among those who do not know him well.)

Internal features that can be found quite frequently include :

• hyperbole Hyperbole , is a rhetorical device in which statements are exaggerated. It may be used to evoke strong feelings or to create a strong impression, but is not meant to be taken literally (All is fair in love and war)
• paradox A paradox is a true statement or group of statements that leads to a contradiction or a situation which defies intuition. The term is also used for an apparent contradiction that actually expresses a non-dual truth . Typically, the statements in question do not really imply the contradiction, the puzzling result is not really a contradiction, or (For there to be peace there must first be war)
• personification Personification is an ontological metaphor in which a thing or abstraction is represented as a person (Hunger is the best cook)

To make the respective statement more general most proverbs are based on a metaphor A metaphor is an analogy between two objects or ideas; the analogy is conveyed by the use of a metaphorical word in place of some other word. For example: "Her eyes were glistening jewels". Further typical features of the proverb are its shortness (average: seven words), and the fact that its author is generally unknown (otherwise it would be a quotation).

In the article “Tensions in Proverbs: More Light on International Understanding,” Joseph Raymond comments on what common Russian proverbs from the 1700s and 1800s portray: Potent antiauthoritarian proverbs reflected tensions between the Russian people and the Czar Tsar is a title used to designate certain monarchs or supreme rulers. The first ruler to adopt the title tsar was Simeon I of Bulgaria. As a system of government, it is known as Tsarism. The rollickingly malicious undertone of these folk verbalizations constitutes what might be labeled a ‘paremiological revolt.’ To avoid openly criticizing a given authority or cultural pattern, folk take recourse to proverbial expressions which voice personal tensions in a tone of generalized consent. Thus, personal involvement is linked with public opinion ^[2] Proverbs that speak to the political disgruntlement include: “When the Czar spits into the soup dish, it fairly bursts with pride”; “If the Czar be a rhymester, woe be to the poets”; and “The hen of the Czarina Tsaritsa , formerly spelled czaritsa (and in English usually tsarina or czarina, with the German feminine suffix), is the title of a female autocratic ruler (monarch) of Bulgaria or Russia, or the title of a tsar's wife herself does not lay swan’s eggs.” While none of these proverbs state directly, “I hate the Czar and detest my situation” (which would have been incredibly dangerous), they do get their points across.

Proverbs are found in many parts of the world, but some areas seem to have richer stores of proverbs than others (such as West Africa), while others have hardly any (North and South America) (Mieder 2004:108,109).

Proverbs are often borrowed across lines of language, religion, and even time. For example, a proverb of the approximate form “No flies enter a mouth that is shut” is currently found in Spain, Ethiopia, and many countries in between. It is embraced as a true local proverb in many places and should not be excluded in any collection of proverbs because it is shared by the neighbors. However, though it has gone through multiple languages and millennia, the proverb can be traced back to an ancient Babylonian proverb (Pritchard 1958:146).

Proverbs are used by speakers for a variety of purposes. Sometimes they are used as a way of saying something gently, in a veiled way (Obeng 1996). Other times, they are used to carry more weight in a discussion, a weak person is able to enlist the tradition of the ancestors to support his position. Proverbs can also be used to simply make a conversation/discussion more lively. In many parts of the world, the use of proverbs is a mark of being a good orator.

The study of proverbs has application in a number of fields. Clearly, those who study folklore Folklore consists of culture, including stories, music, dance, legends, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, customs and so forth within a particular population comprising the traditions of that culture, subculture, or group. It is also the set of practices through which those expressive genres are shared. The academic and usually and literature Literature,, is the art of written works. Literally translated, the word means acquaintance with letters (as in the Arts and Letters"). In Western culture the most basic written literary types include fiction and nonfiction are interested in them, but scholars from a variety of fields have found ways to profitably incorporate the study proverbs. For example, they have been used to study abstract reasoning of children, acculturation of immigrants, intelligence, the differing mental processes in mental illness, cultural themes, etc. Proverbs have also been incorporated into the strategies of social workers, teachers, preachers, and even politicians. (For the deliberate use of proverbs as a propaganda tool by Nazis Nazism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany. It was a unique variety of fascism that involved biological racism and anti-Semitism. Nazism presented itself as politically syncretic, incorporating policies, tactics and philosophies from right- and left-wing ideologies; in practice, Nazism was a far right form of, see Mieder 1982.)

There are collections of sayings that offer instructions on how to play certain games, such as dominoes Dominoes generally refers to the collective gaming pieces making up a domino set (sometimes called a deck or pack) or to the subcategory of tile games played with domino pieces. In the area of mathematical tilings and polyominoes, the word domino often refers to any rectangle formed from joining two congruent squares edge to edge. The traditional (Borajo et al. 1990) and the Oriental board game go Go is an ancient oriental board game for two players that is noted for being rich in strategy despite its simple rules (Mitchell 2001). However, these are not prototypical proverbs in that their application is limited to one domain.

Sources for proverb study

For those interested in further study of proverbs, a number of sources are available. A seminal work in the field is Archer Taylor's The Proverb, later republished together with an index, by Wolfgang Mieder (1985). A good introduction to the study of proverbs is Mieder's 2004 volume, Proverbs: A Handbook. Mieder has also published a series of bibliography volumes on proverb research, as well as a large number of articles and other books in the field. For those interested in proverbs of Africa, Stan Nussbaum has edited a large collection on proverbs of Africa, published on a CD, including reprints of out-of-print collections, original collections, and works on analysis, bibliography, and application of proverbs to Christian ministry (1998). For those interested in comparing proverbs across Europe, Paczolay has published a collection of similar proverbs in 55 languages (1997). Mieder edits an academic journal of proverb study, Proverbium (ISSN: 0743-782X). A volume containing articles on a wide variety of topics touching on proverbs was edited by Mieder and Alan Dundes Alan Dundes, was a folklorist at the University of California, Berkeley. His work was said to have been central to establishing the study of folklore as an academic discipline. He wrote 12 books, both academic and popular, and edited or co-wrote two dozen more. One of his most notable articles was called "Seeing is Believing" in which he (1994/1981).

There are some serious websites related to the study of proverbs (in addition to those that list proverbs from various areas):

• aDailyProverb http://www.adailyproverb.com
• Associação Internacional de Paremiologia / International Association of Paremiology (AIP-IAP) http://www.aip-iap.org/en
• Interdisciplinary Colloquium on Proverbs http://www.colloquium-proverbs.org/
• General bibliography: http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Discourse/Proverbs/Bibliography.html
• Proverbs, Maxims and Phrases of All Ages: 20,500 selections from the classic reference work
• English and Irish proverbs: Largest collection of English sayings and proverbs
• Chinese sayings: best Chinese proverbs
• Particularly for Biblical studies: http://faculty.gordon.edu/hu/bi/ted_hildebrandt/OTeSources/20-Proverbs/Text/Bibliography/Proverbs-Bibliography.htm
• Particularly for proverbs in Africa: http://afriprov.org
• Folklore, particularly from the Baltic region, but many articles on proverbs: http://www.folklore.ee/Folklore/
• Folk Sayings from Italy (see the thematic list on the left hand side of the page) http://www.italyrevisited.org/
• Proverbial Wisdom (NPR) http://www.onpointradio.org/2008/09/proverbial-wisdom
• Proverbs and Proverbial Materials in the Old Icelandic Sagas: http://www.usask.ca/english/icelanders/

Bibliography

• Borajo, Daniel, Juan Rios, M. Alicia Perez, and Juan Pazos. 1990. Dominoes as a domain where to use proverbs as heuristics. Data & Knowledge Engineering 5:129-137.
• Grzybek, Peter. "Proverb." Simple Forms: An Encyclopaedia of Simple Text-Types in Lore and Literature, ed. Walter Koch. Bochum: Brockmeyer, 1994. 227-41.
• Mieder, Wolfgang. 1982. Proverbs in Nazi Germany: The Promulgation of Anti-Semitism and Stereotypes Through Folklore. The Journal of American Folklore 95, No. 378, pp. 435–464.
• Mieder, Wolfgang. 1982; 1990; 1993. International Proverb Scholarship: An Annotated Bibliography, with supplements. New York: Garland Publishing.
• Mieder, Wolfgang. 1994. Wise Words. Essays on the Proverb. New York: Garland.
• Mieder, Wolfgang. 2001. International Proverb Scholarship: An Annotated Bibliography. Supplement III (1990–2000). Bern, New York: Peter Lang.
• Mieder, Wolfgang. 2004. Proverbs: A Handbook. (Greenwood Folklore Handbooks). Greenwood Press.
• Mieder, Wolfgang and Alan Dundes. 1994. The wisdom of many: essays on the proverb. (Originally published in 1981 by Garland.) Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
• Mieder, Wolfgang and Anna Tothne Litovkina. 2002. Twisted Wisdom: Modern Anti-Proverbs. DeProverbio.
• Mitchell, David. 2001. Go Proverbs (reprint of 1980). ISBN 0-9706193-1-6. Slate and Shell.
• Nussbaum, Stan. 1998. The Wisdom of African Proverbs (CD-ROM). Colorado Springs: Global Mapping International.
• Obeng, S. G. 1996. The Proverb as a Mitigating and Politeness Strategy in Akan Discourse. Anthropological Linguistics 38(3), 521-549.
• Paczolay, Gyula. 1997. European Proverbs in 55 Languages. Veszpre’m, Hungary.
• Pritchard, James. 1958. The Ancient Near East, vol. 2. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Raymond, Joseph. 1956. Tension in proverbs: more light on international understanding. Western Folklore 15.3:153-158.
• Taylor, Archer. 1985. The Proverb and an index to "The Proverb", with an Introduction and Bibliography by Wolfgang Mieder. Bern: Peter Lang.

References

1. ^ ^{a b} "Proverbial Phrases from California", by Owen S. Adams, Western Folklore, Vol. 8, No. 2 (1949), pp. 95-116 doi A digital object identifier is a character string used to uniquely identify an electronic document or other object. Metadata about the object is stored in association with the DOI name and this metadata may include a location, such as a URL, where the object can be found. The DOI for a document is permanent, whereas its location and other metadata:10.2307/1497581
2. ^ J. Raymond. Tensions in Proverbs: More Light on International Understanding. pg 153-154

See also

• List of proverbial phrases
• Wiktionary:Proverbs
• Wikiquote:English proverbs

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