Introduction to European Proverbs
Introduction to European Proverbs by Rui João Baptista Soares (Portugal) and Elena Carter (Russia). Tavira, 2018, pp. 21–24. Published here in full with the author’s permission.
According to Lord John Russell’s not quite scientific but surely brilliant definition, “a proverb is the wit of one and the wisdom of many.” The book “European Proverbs” by Rui João Baptista Soares (Portugal) and Elena Carter (Russia) familiarizes its readers with the proverbial wisdom of the people who speak Portuguese, English, and Russian using their most common sayings for the purpose of learning the Portuguese and Russian languages. In turn, English language proverbs may serve as a connecting link to illustrate the broad similarities of paremias1 used by many European nations.
This book consists of four parts. The first one contains a lengthy list of Portuguese, English and Russian proverbial expressions. The second part clusters these sayings into groups of three, selected according to their semantic structure. The third part considers various interpretations of the paremias, while the fourth one provides a set of exercises designed to facilitate the memorizing the Portuguese and Russian proverbs, understanding their metaphorical character and grammar, as well as suggesting the broad comprehension of the applied system of logical transformations.
“European Proverbs” is a serial edition. Its first part (in Portuguese, English, and Finnish) appeared in 2006. Afterwards, a number of books using Polish, Estonian, Serbian, German, and Dutch examples were published.
Paremias are a convenient and effective tool for learning a language: they contain its frequency vocabulary and demonstrate all varieties of its morphological and syntactical forms. Moreover, paremias help familiarize readers with the way of life, material and spiritual culture, customs, beliefs, and superstitions of the nations that created them.
For the most part, Portuguese and English sayings were compiled from a highly reliable collection, “European Proverbs in 55 languages”.2 The main source for the Russian equivalents was Vladimir Dal’s original classical work “Proverbs of the Russian People”, first published in 1861-1862.
A considerable number of sayings that belong to a stock of common European proverbs were translated from the Latin and Greek languages. Among them are “All the roads lead to Rome"3; “Better late than never”; “Crows do not pick crow’s eyes”; “Plato is dear to me, but truth is dearer still.” The other part of proverbs appeared in European languages due to the spread of Christianity (Russia was baptized in 988). Such biblical proverbs as “Man proposes, God disposes”, “As a man sows, so shall he reap”, “No man is a prophet in his own country”, “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” eventually became widely known. Even more sayings grew into common usage due to the establishment of intensive political, economical, and cultural relations among European countries, including Russia.
Long before, according to Alexander Pushkin, Peter the Great “cut a window into Europe”, there existed a trade route “from the Varangians to the Greeks” that traversed through the territory of Kievan Rus’, and that connected Scandinavia and Northern Europe with the Balkans, Southern Europe and Byzantium. At that time, Latin and Greek were studied in Russian monasteries. There were a considerable number of paremias exchanged by European nations: “One swallow does not make a spring”, “Strike the iron while it is hot”, “Never put off till tomorrow what you can do today”, “A new broom sweeps clean”, et al. It is often difficult to trace the language where any of the above mentioned sayings first appeared.
However, the main corpus of the paremiological stock of any nation (and Europe as well) is compiled of original proverbs and proverbial expressions that appeared in their own environment. Their similarity to the sayings of other languages can be explained by the nature of paremias. As it was established by the prominent Russian folklorist Grigorii L’vovich Permiakov (1919-1983), “they are signs and models of situations or certain relationships between objects.“4 Inasmuch as far-flung peoples deal with similar human situations, the paremias they invented to describe those situations agree in meaning, but might differ in images.
For example, if it is pointed out that people are often biased when judging their own errors and those of others, the Russians say: “You can see a knot in someone else’s eye, but you can’t see a log in your own eye.” The English remember “you see other’s fault in the woods but fail to notice yours under your nose.” And the Portuguese use the saying similar to the Russian equivalent: “You can see a straw in someone else’s eye, but you can’t see a log in your own eye.” A nomad from Somalia (whose language and culture I have studied for many years) may observe that “the elephant does not notice a gadfly that sits on it, but sees the one that sits on another elephant.”
On the face of it, some paremias may contradict each other. Indeed, some may say that, “The game is worth the candle” while some other may insist that, “The game is not worth the candle.” However, it only looks like a contradiction. Each of these sayings models its own situation, and if it is appropriately used, conveys the essence of the matter: in the first case, it is worth making your efforts, and in the second one, it is not worth doing.
Over the course of time, folk sayings can change both their form and meaning as well. It happened, for example, to the German proverb “Who says A, must say B.” In the opera Der Jasage (A person who always says “yes”), one of the characters advises: “If you said A and see that you’ve made a mistake, then you do not have to say B.” In the Russian language, the paremia about “A and B” is used in its original form as well as a modern variant: “Saying A, don’t be B.“5 In order to understand its meaning, one must be familiar with Russian obscene lexicon.
In the Appendix of “European Proverbs”, each saying has its own three-digit index referring to the universal typological classification created by famous Finnish folklorist Matti Kuusi (1914 - 1998) and subsequently developed by his daughter Outi Lauhakangas to “put thousands of proverbs in a sensible order.“6 For instance, the index of the proverb “All that glitters is not gold” (C6c) means that this saying belongs to one of the thirteen main themes - “C” (“Basic observations and socio-logic”), to “C6” class (appearance: internal values), and to “C6c” subgroup (everything is not as it appears; the deceptiveness of identifying marks).
In the logico-semiotic classification of proverbs and proverbial expressions (based on their semantic structure) that was created by G.L. Permiakov, the proverb “All that glitters is not gold” is in the object-theme group 15 “Object - Sign” (there are about 100 thematic groups where proverbs and proverbial expressions are arranged in accordance with the types of objects contrasted with each other) and in the form-building group 8: Interdependency - Independence of an Object and a Sign (there are 28 groups where objects are arranged according to the nature of the logical connection between them).7
Intended as a teaching tool, the textbook “European Proverbs” is suitable for use at secondary schools as well as in university classrooms. Finally, as a collection of wise sayings, this book offers a suitable choice for thoughtful and leisurely reading, as they say, “in private, being alone.” For, as it was said not yesterday and not by us, “it’s good to eat a chicken together: a chicken and I”.
Georgii Kapchits
Lomonosov Moscow State University
Endnotes
1 The Greek word παροιμία means «proverb». The name of the philological discipline (paremiology) that studies different types of proverbs comes from this word.
2 G.Paczolay. European Proverbs in 55 languages. Wesprem, 1997.
3 In the Turkish variant of this proverb, all the roads lead to Mecca; in the Finnish proverb ‒ to Turku, and in the Estonian equivalent ‒ to Saint Petersburg.
4 Г.Л.Пермяков. От поговорки до сказки. Москва. 1970, с. 25. (Permiakov L.G. From Proverb to Fairy-Tale. Moscow, 1970, p. 25)
5 М.Л.Гаспаров. Записи и выписки. Москва. 2008, с.9. (Gasparov M.L. Records and Extracts. Moscow, 2007, p. 9)
6 Wolfgang Mieder. Proverbs: A Handbook. Westport, Connecticut. London. 2004, p. 16.
7 For more detailed information about the logico-semantic classification, see G.L. Permiakov’s book “Proverbs of the Peoples of Asia. Systematic Collection of Sayings of Two Hundred Nations”, Moscow, 1979.