Proverbs

[Pamela Munro]

I second what Victor says here. I have never seen anything like a 
proverb in the North American languages I've studied.

Pam

On 11/13/12 2:43 AM, Victor Golla wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 12, 2012 at 9:31 PM, Bernd Heine<heine39 at gmail.com>  wrote:
>
>>                                              Why should proverbs not have a place in a
>> (comprehensive) reference grammar? After all, they appear to occur in all
>> languages that have been appropriately documented, and they are part of the
>> knowledge speakers have about their language.
> Proverbs are far from universal.  They are notably rare in North American
> Indian languages, where riddles, too, are virtually unattested, except for a
> few post-contact borrowings from English or French.
>
> I don't think that the absence of these genres across an entire continent can
> be written off as due to the lack of appropriate documentation.  Rather, it's
> a matter of  metaphorical speech in general being little used in aboriginal
> North American cultures for reasons that are ultimately historical and
> distributional.
>
> I'm not sure what this says about speakers' knowledge of their languages
> in North America, but it at least suggests that certain elements of cognitive
> style can co-vary with differences in discourse=level patterns of encoding.
> This is apparently what Whorf meant when he wrote in "The Relation of
> Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language" (in Carroll, ed., Language,
> Thought and Reality, p. 146) that Hopi does not have metaphor "built into it"
> in the same way that European languages do.
>
> --Victor Golla
>

-- 
Pamela Munro,
Distinguished Professor, Linguistics, UCLA
UCLA Box 951543
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1543
http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/munro/munro.htm