Paremiology

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Paremiology (from Greek παροιμία (paroimía) 'proverb, maxim, saw')^[1] 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. The proverb scholar Wolfgang 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

Categorization

As well as actual proverbs, the following may be considered proverbial phrases:

• Proverbial comparison, such as "as busy as a bee."
• Proverbial interrogative, such as "Does a chicken have lips?"
• Sam Weller from Charles Dickens's The Pickwick Papers
  (1837), is a triad that 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. An example: "Every evil is followed by some good," the man said when his wife died the day after he became bankrupt.
• perverb. This is a misuse or adaptation of a familiar proverb to twist or change its meaning. 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."^[3] Even classic Latin proverbs can be remolded as anti-proverbs, such as "Carpe noctem" from "Carpe diem." Anti-proverbs are not new; Aristophanes is credited with creating one over 2,300 years ago.^[4]
• Proverbial expression, such as "to bite the dust." This is not strictly a proverb, which should be a fixed unchangeable sentence; a proverbial expression permits alteration to fit the grammar of the context.^[5]
• Allusion, which is a reference to a proverb rather than a statement of the proverb. An example: "The new boss will probably fire some of the old staff, you know what they say about a new broom." This allusion refers to the proverb "A new broom sweeps clean."^[5]

Styles

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

• Alliteration^[6] (Forgive and forget)
• Parallelism (Nothing ventured, nothing gained)
• Rhyme (When the cat is away, the mice will play)
• Ellipsis (Once bitten, twice shy)

Metaphorical links

To make the respective statement more general, most proverbs are based on a metaphor.^[7] Further typical features of proverbs are their shortness and the fact that their authors are generally unknown.

Interpretations from other languages

In the article "Tensions in Proverbs: More Light on International Understanding", Joseph Raymond comments on what common

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 2004b:108,109).

Users of proverbs

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, or even to argue a legal case.^[9] 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.

Uses of paremiology

The study of proverbs has application in a number of fields. Clearly, those who study

There are collections of sayings that offer instructions on how to play certain games, such as

Folklore

One of the most important developments in the study of proverbs (as in folklore scholarship more generally) was the shift to more ethnographic approaches in the 1960s. This approach attempted to explain proverb use in relation to the context of a speech event, rather than only in terms of the content and meaning of the proverb.^[10]

Cognitive science

Another important development in scholarship on proverbs has been applying methods from cognitive science to understand the uses and effects of proverbs and proverbial metaphors in social relations.^[11]

Further reading

• Hrisztova-Gotthardt, H. (Ed.) & Aleksa Varga, M. (Ed.) (2015). Open Access version Introduction to Paremiology. A Comprehensive Guide to Proverb Studies. Berlin: De Gruyter Open.

References