Proverbs

[Rankin, Robert L]

>Can anyone shoot down this hypothesis?

I think proverbs (which I've always pronounced "praberbs" for some reason)
are attested just about as far back as writing, but "fairly recent" is a
relative term in any event.  I have entire books of them in Romanian, and
many of these had precise analogs in classical antiquity.

I guess I've always looked upon them as just another literary genre, and, as
such, the product of style, fad and rapid diffusability.  They're not
exactly formal genera like haikus, limericks or sonnets, but there is a
semi-formal element to them in that they must be concise, pithy, etc. in
order to be catchy enough to take hold, spread and be passed to succeeding
generations.

Native American music seems to be short on love ballads too, but that
doesn't stem from any lack of the feeling of love among/between Indian
people; it's just a style of expression that Europeans (and no doubt others)
have adopted in order to express those sentiments.  They could as easily be
expressed linguistically -- in either prose or poetry -- and no doubt are.

My misspent years as a literary scholar (?) before I discovered TRVTH
suggest to me that these things are matters of fashion, not social politics.
Theories that rely on any version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis
are nearly impossible to disprove, but they are equally impossible to prove.
The evidence, such as it is, admits of too many conflicting interpretations.
These sorts of interpretations were very much frowned upon during the '50's
and '60's but reappeared in literature and anthropology in the '80's or
early '90's.  As you can see, I'm a product of the earlier period.  :-)

Bob