Paremiography

Paremiography (from Greek παροιμία - paroimía, "proverb, maxim, saw" and γράφω - grafō, "write, inscribe") is the study of the collection and writing of proverbs. A recent introduction to the field has been written by Tamás Kispál. It is a sub-field of paremiology, the study of proverbs.

There are many published collection of proverbs, ranging from ancient Akkadian clay tablets 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-proverbs rather than the more standard proverbs (Reznikov 2009). Some have collected proverbs and sayings of a certain structure, such as wellerisms (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 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 collected by Erasmus, 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.

...
Wikipedia