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Paremiography (from
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
παροιμία - ''paroimía'', "proverb, maxim, saw" and γράφω - ''grafō'', "write, inscribe") is the study of the collection and writing of
proverb
A proverb (from la, proverbium) is a simple and insightful, traditional saying that expresses a perceived truth based on common sense or experience. Proverbs are often metaphorical and use formulaic speech, formulaic language. A proverbial phra ...
s. A recent introduction to the field has been written by Tamás Kispál. It is a sub-field of
paremiology
Paremiology () is the collection and study of paroemias (proverbs). It is a subfield of both philology and linguistics.
History
Paremiology can be dated back as far as Aristotle. Paremiography, on the other hand, is the collection of proverbs. T ...
, the study of proverbs.
There are many published collection of proverbs, ranging from ancient
Akkadian Akkadian or Accadian may refer to:
* Akkadians, inhabitants of the Akkadian Empire
* Akkadian language, an extinct Eastern Semitic language
* Akkadian literature, literature in this language
* Akkadian cuneiform
Cuneiform is a logo- syllabi ...
clay tablet
In the Ancient Near East, clay tablets (Akkadian ) were used as a writing medium, especially for writing in cuneiform, throughout the Bronze Age and well into the Iron Age.
Cuneiform characters were imprinted on a wet clay tablet with a stylu ...
s to internet sites. A proverb collection has been describe as "the oldest book in the world". Published collections of proverbs are formatted in a variety of ways. Some are simply alphabetized lists, some are arranged by topic (e.g. laziness, respect for elders), others are arranged by key word (e.g. dog, rain). Some are from single languages (e.g. Russian), others are multilingual but from a single country (e.g. Nigeria), others are collections from around the world. Others are collections of
anti-proverb
An anti-proverb or a perverb is the transformation of a standard proverb for humorous effect. Paremiologist Wolfgang Mieder defines them as "parodied, twisted, or fractured proverbs that reveal humorous or satirical speech play with tradition ...
s rather than the more standard proverbs (Reznikov 2009). Some have collected proverbs and sayings of a certain structure, such as
wellerism
Wellerisms, named after sayings of Sam Weller (character), Sam Weller in Charles Dickens's novel ''The Pickwick Papers'', make fun of established clichés and proverbs by showing that they are wrong in certain situations, often when taken literally ...
s (Mieder and Kingsbury). Some collections are a combination of these, such as proverbs about women from around the world (Schipper 2003). Every year, the journal ''
Proverbium
''Proverbium: Yearbook of International Proverb Scholarship'' is an academic journal covering paremiology, the study of proverbs. Each volume includes articles on proverbs and proverbial expressions, book reviews, a bibliography of recent prove ...
'' contains a listing of newly published (or newly discovered) collections of proverbs from around the world.
Collecting proverbs in languages with a literate heritage is usually done by looking for examples in the available literature. There are published collections in many languages with long written traditions, Greek, Latin, Russian, French, German, Greek, Chinese, etc. In addition, there are published collections from languages that do not have a long written tradition, such as Temne, Oromo, Bambara, Bassa.
The most famous published collection of proverbs is the Latin
Adagia
''Adagia'' (singular ''adagium'') is the title of an annotated collection of Greek and Latin proverbs, compiled during the Renaissance by Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus. Erasmus' collection of proverbs is "one of the most monumen ...
collected by
Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus (; ; English: Erasmus of Rotterdam or Erasmus;''Erasmus'' was his baptismal name, given after St. Erasmus of Formiae. ''Desiderius'' was an adopted additional name, which he used from 1496. The ''Roterodamus'' wa ...
, mostly from ancient literature. As people from across Europe read the proverbs it contained, they often translated them into local languages, spreading them across Europe. This is the source of many English proverbs, including "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king" from "In regione caecorum rex est luscus".
There are continuing efforts to collect proverbs not just from published sources, but from the speakers of languages. For example, there has been a project to collect proverbs from multiple generations of French speakers in Belgium.
There has been a call for collecting and documenting the proverbs of undocumented languages, especially those that are endangered (Himmelmann 1998), as part of the broader task of
language documentation
Language documentation (also: documentary linguistics) is a subfield of linguistics which aims to describe the grammar and use of human languages. It aims to provide a comprehensive record of the linguistic practices characteristic of a given speec ...
. However, when scholars collect proverbs from languages without a literate history, it requires different approaches than for languages with a written heritage, such as methods described by Yankah (1989), Unseth (2008), and Tadesse Jaleta Jirata (2009).
Collecting proverbs from speakers is best done in the language community's home area. However, proverbs have also been collected in emigrant communities, such as among the Georgian-speaking community in Israel, the Assyrian community in California. and German speakers in Los Angeles.
Edward Zellem
Edward Zellem is a retired U.S. Navy captain and the 12-time award-winning author of 5 books. He is known for his work inside Afghanistan's Presidential Palace and for authoring three bilingual collections of Afghan Proverbs: ''Zarbul Masalha: 1 ...
has developed a method for collecting proverbs via social media. In this way, he was able to collect hundreds of proverbs from the
Pashto language
Pashto (,; , ) is an Eastern Iranian language in the Indo-European language family. It is known in historical Persian literature as Afghani ().
Spoken as a native language mostly by ethnic Pashtuns, it is one of the two official languages ...
of Afghanistan and Pakistan, even though he was in the USA. Another advantage of this method was that the members of the community also interacted with each other about their proverbs, tweeting comments and retweeting proverbsback and forth within the Pashto-speaking community.
Many pioneering proverb collections having been collected and published by Christian workers, both from within language communities, such as
Aster Ganno
Aster Ganno (c.1872–1964) was an Ethiopian Bible translator who worked with the better known Onesimos Nesib as a translator of the Oromo Bible, published in 1899.
Biography
She was born free, but was later enslaved by the king of Limmu-En ...
of Ethiopia and
Samuel Ajayi Crowther
Samuel Ajayi Crowther ( – 31 December 1891), was a Yoruba linguist, clergyman, and the first African Anglican bishop of West Africa. Born in Osogun (in what is now Ado-Awaye, Oyo State, Nigeria), he and his family were captured by slave raide ...
of Nigeria, and by those from outside the language communities, such as
William Shellabear
William Girdlestone Shellabear (1862–1947) was a "pioneer" scholar and missionary in British Malaya (today, part of Malaysia). He was known for both his appreciation of Muslim society and also his translation of the Bible into the Malay langua ...
of Malaysia and others. There is an ongoing series of collections of proverbs gathered from small languages of eastern Africa being published under the inspiration of
Joseph Healey, published both in hard copy and on the web.
However, the collection and documentation of proverbs even in languages with a literate history is never completely done, new proverbs are constantly being created and old ones fall into disuse. No collection is either totally complete or up to date (Taylor 1969). An attempt to update the list of recent English proverbs is ''The Dictionary of Modern Proverbs'' from 2012, which contains only proverbs documented after 1900, such as "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" and "Stop and smell the roses."
[Charles Clay Doyle, Wolfgang Mieder, & Fred Shapiro. 2012. ''The Dictionary of Modern Proverbs''. New Haven: Yale University Press.]
Some scholars collect and list the proverbs used by certain authors or speakers, such as
Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer (; – 25 October 1400) was an English poet, author, and civil servant best known for '' The Canterbury Tales''. He has been called the "father of English literature", or, alternatively, the "father of English poetry". He w ...
,
Martin Luther
Martin Luther (; ; 10 November 1483 – 18 February 1546) was a German priest, theologian, author, hymnwriter, and professor, and Order of Saint Augustine, Augustinian friar. He is the seminal figure of the Reformation, Protestant Refo ...
(Cornette 1997),
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln ( ; February 12, 1809 – April 15, 1865) was an American lawyer, politician, and statesman who served as the 16th president of the United States from 1861 until his assassination in 1865. Lincoln led the nation thro ...
(Mieder 2000), and
Agatha Christie
Dame Agatha Mary Clarissa Christie, Lady Mallowan, (; 15 September 1890 – 12 January 1976) was an English writer known for her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, particularly those revolving around fictiona ...
(Bryan 1993).
A listing of proverb collections from around the world has been published as ''International Bibliography of Paremiography'' (
Wolfgang Mieder
Wolfgang Mieder (born 17 February 1944) is a retired professor of German and folklore at the University of Vermont, in Burlington, Vermont, USA, where he had taught for 50 years. He is a graduate of Olivet College (BA), the University of Michigan ...
2011).
References
{{Reflist
Further reading
* Bryan, George B. 1993. ''Black Sheep, Red Herrings, and Blue Murder: The Proverbial Agatha Christie''. Peter Lang.
* Cornette, James C., Jr. 1997. ''Proverbs and Proverbial Expressions in the German Works of Martin Luther'', edited by Wolfgang Mieder and Dorothee Racett. (Sprichwörterforschung. Bd. 1.) Peter Lang.
* Himmelmann, Nikolaus. 1998.
Documentary and descriptive linguistics ''Linguistics'' 36:161-195.
* Mieder, Wolfgang. 2000. ''The Proverbial Abraham Lincoln''. Peter Lang.
* Mieder, Wolfgang. 2011. ''International Bibliography of Paremiography''. (Supplement Series of ''Proverbium'', 34.) Burlington, VT: University of Vermont.
* Mieder, Wolfgang and Stewart Kingsbury (eds). 1994. ''A dictionary of Wellerisms''. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
* Reznikov, Andrey. 2009. ''Old wine in new bottles: Modern Russian anti-proverbs''. (Supplement series of Proverbium, 27.) University of Vermont.
* Tadesse Jaleta Jirata. 2009. ''A contextual study of the social functions of
Guji-Oromo proverbs''. Saabruecken: DVM Verlag.
*
Schipper, Mineke. 2003. ''Never marry a woman with big feet: Women in proverbs from around the world.'' New Haven: Yale University Press.
* Taylor, Archer. 1969. How nearly complete are the collections of proverbs? ''
Proverbium
''Proverbium: Yearbook of International Proverb Scholarship'' is an academic journal covering paremiology, the study of proverbs. Each volume includes articles on proverbs and proverbial expressions, book reviews, a bibliography of recent prove ...
'' no. 14:369-371.
* Unseth, Peter. 2008. How to collect 1,000 proverbs quickly: field methods for collecting proverbs. ''Proverbium'' 25: 399-418
Web version* Yankah, Kwesi. 1989. Proverbs: problems and strategies in field research. ''Proverbium'' 6:165-176.
External links
* Video of
Wolfgang Mieder
Wolfgang Mieder (born 17 February 1944) is a retired professor of German and folklore at the University of Vermont, in Burlington, Vermont, USA, where he had taught for 50 years. He is a graduate of Olivet College (BA), the University of Michigan ...
calling for ongoing collecting of proverb
* Website with collections of proverbs from eastern Afric
Proverbs