Proverbs

[Koontz John E]

On Wed, 19 Dec 2001, Alan Knutson wrote:
> Wablu'shka mayu'ta yelo', oshi'ciN kta se'ce lo'.
> Lit.: "Worms are eating me, so the weather is going to be bad".
> (Said when someone has a headache or pain in his bones.)
>
>
> This is what I would define as a proverb ... a condition and a
> result.....most of us would probably consider English proverbs as cliches
> ...a stitch in time saves nine....I guess fits

I'd be willing to accept this as a proverb:  it's a sentence with a fixed
form encapsulating what could be viewed as a warning or advice.  I don't
believe it could be called obscure or metaphorical, though the conditional
clause falls potentially into that category, even though comparing pains
in the body to gnawing is a common enough analogy.  It sounds like its
application is fairly literal, which is to say that you couldn't use it to
mean that the children are quarreling and homelife is bound to take a turn
for the worse.

It's not clear to me that proverbs necessarily or typically involve a
condition and a result, though that is a good way to ecapsulate advice.
But consider:

The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
Feed a cold, starve a fever.
(The original "Feed a cold, starve of fever." is conditional.)
A bird in the hand is worth nine in the bush.
Be it never so humble, there's no place like home.
You have to break some eggs to make an omelette.

Conditions are implicit, however, in proverbs like:

Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise.
Red sky at morning, sailor take warning; red sky at night, sailor's
delight.
Love me, love my dog.

I think that in proverbs conditional formulations are like similes:
common but not criterial.

Would it be reasonable to say that a proverb is a short text of more or
less fixed and memorable form that encapsulates something that a culture
knows?  It's not necessarily an allusion, except perhaps to the knowledge
in question, but you can allude to the proverb, e.g., "It may be time to
start stitching."

I'm not sure if an allusion to familiar text, as in the case of "it's like
when ..." or "he's acting like ..." formulae, explicit or implicit, is a
proverb, though as indicated you can clearly allude to a proverb without
quoting it. In addition, both proverbs and allusions are ways of using one
text within another, and invoke traditional knowledge or cultural context.

JEK