Paremiology

Paremiology (from Greek παροιμία paroimía, "proverb, maxim, saw") is the collection and study of proverbs.

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.

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

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

In some languages, assonance, the repetition of a vowel, is also exploited in forming artistic proverbs, such as the following extreme example from Oromo, of Ethiopia.

Similarly, from Tajik:

Notice that in all of these cases of complete assonance, the vowel is <a>, the most common vowel in human languages.

Also in Amharic, complete assonance is not infrequent when verbs are in the 3rd person masculine singular, past tense. The vowel <ä> is the most frequent vowel in the language.

Internal features that can be found quite frequently include:

To make the respective statement more general most proverbs are based on a metaphor. Further typical features of the proverb are its shortness and the fact that its author is generally unknown.

In the article "Tensions in Proverbs: More Light on International Understanding", Joseph Raymond comments on what common Russian proverbs from the 18th and 19th centuries portray: Potent antiauthoritarian proverbs reflected tensions between the Russian people and the Czar. 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 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 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.

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