Proverbs

[Marianne Mithun]

Sure, in a sense. But, one could say, stories also serve many other 
functions, and much more elaborately.

Marianne


--On Tuesday, November 13, 2012 4:49 PM +0000 "Riddle, Elizabeth" 
<emriddle at bsu.edu> wrote:

> 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
>>