Proverbs

[Koontz John E]

On Wed, 19 Dec 2001, Trechter, Sara wrote:
> John's original caveat when introducing this subject was that it is in some
> way 'extra-linguistic' or something like that.

I know some linguists - those of us who are linguists probably all do, I
imagine - who would definitely identify it as "not linguistics."  I'm sure
it qualifies as philology.  I think that is is linguistically interesting
in the sense that genre clearly influences purely linguistic factors like
morphology and syntax.  In addition, though the status of the lexicon with
purists is somewhat nebulous, texts in such succinct forms tend to verge
on idioms, which are presumably lexical entries or on the border of that.

> However, it seems also to be of great interest. I think that in the
> western stereotype occurring in movies, etc, there is always some
> scene where the Native American explains some obscure, wise "saying."
> ...

The collections of examples of Native American sayings I've seen were
isolated, not in movies, and struck me as a mix of new age wisdom and
cowboy humor.

> The grammatical structure, style, and origin of proverbs (or lack of,
> however we define them) in Native North America would make an
> interesting planned session for the next SSILA when it meets with the
> AAA:New Orleans. If of any interest at all, I'm willing to be an
> organizer and put the word

That would be very interesting!  I hope you won't restrict it to
Siouanists.  And I hope you can get somebody to do some sort of a
preliminary survey.  Or maybe that could be a non-paper activity?

I do think you'll either have to have some sort of reference that defines
proverbs, or perhaps characterize it somehow as a session on allusions
within one text to another text.  "Traditional literary allusions in
Native American discourse"?