Proverbs

[Riddle, Elizabeth]

In the North American languages referenced, does some other form of communication, such as story telling, serve any purpose similar to the use of proverbs in other languages and cultures? 

Thanks,

Liz

Elizabeth M. Riddle
Professor and Chair
Department of English
Ball State University
Muncie, IN 47306 USA
emriddle at bsu.edu
Tel:  765-285-8584
________________________________________
From: funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu [funknet-bounces at mailman.rice.edu] on behalf of Marianne Mithun [mithun at linguistics.ucsb.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, November 13, 2012 11:40 AM
To: Pamela Munro; Victor Golla
Cc: Bernd Heine; funknet at mailman.rice.edu
Subject: Re: [FUNKNET] Proverbs

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
>