Proverbs

[Tim Thornes]

I don't know that my original reply to all was delivered to funknet,
as my recent change of email address appeared to have shut me out
momentarily as a discussant.

My comment regarded the apparent lack of proverbs as a distinct
discourse genre in Native North American languages, as per Victor's
reply. I was responding in part to Elizabeth's comment and to
Marianne's and Wally's insights:

"I was struck with the same idea regarding the invocation of a well
known story in Native America as serving the same "wise saying"
function of a proverb. I was thinking, too, of Coyote stories and how
the simple mention of one (of the stories) serves as a reminder not to
be vain, greedy,
garrulous, disobedient, disrespectful, or lascivious. Perhaps it is
the invocation itself that serves (a proverbial role), since, as
Marianne points out,
storytelling carries a broader range of functions.

Cheers, Tim

On 11/13/12, Eve Sweetser <sweetser at berkeley.edu> wrote:
> Karen Sullivan and I have a paper about the metaphoric and metonymic
> relationships in proverbs which I think applies quite well to these cases:
>
> 2009. Karen Sullivan and Eve Sweetser.  2009. Is "Generic is Specific" a
> Metaphor?" in Fey Parrill, Vera Tobin and Mark Turner (eds.), /Meaning,
> Form and Body/.  (Selected papers from the 2008 CSDL meeting).  Stanford
> CA: CSLI Publications.
>
>
>
> On 11/13/12 6:45 PM, Angus Grieve-Smith wrote:
>> On 11/13/2012 12:51 PM, Riddle, Elizabeth wrote:
>>> Following up the points about story telling, I'm thinking of times
>>> when English speakers say things like "Remember the boy who cried
>>> 'wolf'" as an admonishment to a child.  This utterance is not a
>>> proverb in and of itself, has normal sentence structure, and is not
>>> really metaphorical in the sense that saying "that's sour grapes"
>>> might be, but seems to serve a similar communicative purpose to that
>>> of a proverb in such a situation.  I'm wondering if such references
>>> regularly occur in the discourse of various native North American
>>> languages.
>>
>>     It's not just explicit allusions like that, but implicit
>> quotations like "Once more into the breach, my friends!" or in French,
>> "revenons à ces moutons..."
>>
>>     At this point I have to mention the Star Trek episode "Darmok,"
>> which imagined a culture that communicated entirely in those kinds of
>> allusions to old stories:
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darmok
>>
>>     The "Universal Translator" technology was unable to cope with it,
>> passing the allusions on literally without supplying either the
>> stories themselves or any interpretation as to their relevance.
>>
>
>


-- 
TimThornes
Assistant Professor of Linguistics
English Department
Boise State University
SMITC 218A
(208) 426-4267