Proverbs

[Marianne Mithun]

And I was just going to chime in with the same thing. I think Victor put it 
exactly right.

Marianne Mithun


--On Tuesday, November 13, 2012 7:31 AM -0800 Pamela Munro <munro at ucla.edu> 
wrote:

> 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
>