Comment expliquer le fait de nommer une meme notion en différents termes métalinguistiques ou d'attribuer de différents traits métalinguistiques a celle-ci ? Pourquoi dit-on quand on parle du loup, ...on en voit la queue en français ou quand tu parles du chien, prépare le bâton ("iti an çomağı hazırla"), le quasi-équivalent en turc ? Pourquoi dit-on la faim fait sortir le loup du bois en français ou le chien affamé détruit la boulangerie ("aç köpek fırın deler") en turc ? Ou bien encore pourquoi utilise-t-on des expressions comme tete de Turc en français et rester Français en turc ("Fransız kalmak", ce qui signifie rester de marbre) ? Le présent article porte sur les dénominations métalinguistiques, présentes dans les expressions figées, plus précisément dans le cadre des proverbes français et turcs. Nous partons de l'hypothese que chaque langue a sa propre maniere de représenter un concept. Car il existe une relation réciproque entre les langues et les cultures : les proverbes sont issus d'un espace linguistique et refletent la culture de ce dernier. Nous les considérerons ainsi comme étant une structure linguistique (? dénomination ?), mais également une richesse socioculturelle (? dénomination métalinguistique ?). Notre démarche méthodologique consistera a effectuer une analyse contrastive des proverbes français et turcs, afin d'en déduire les analogies ou divergences métalinguistiques résultantes.
The present article largely draws upon the author’s thesis dealing with the topics of birth and death in Tigrinya proverbs, submitted at the Free University of Berlin, Germany. The paper investigates ...-parallels of some of these proverbs to those from other African as well as Mid- East-ern, European, and Asian language cultures. The relevance of the analysis lies in the fact that, although being the third largest modern Semitic language, Tigrinya remains not sufficiently studied, with many gaps in the academic research of this language, not to mention its proverbial heritage. Although the notion that Tigrinya proverbs have equivalents in other languages might suggest itself, hardly any documented evidence of it has been presented up to the present day. The following analysis thus takes a step toward the comparative study of Tigrinya proverbs by offering an annotated overview of selected proverbs and sayings with their correspondences in other languages.
The purpose ascribed to this paper is to compare and contrast the corpus of selected American and Polish religion-related paremias – featuring God as a constitutive element – with a view to revealing ...certain distinctive features in the attitude towards religiosity in two respective linguo-cultures. Hence, principally, the God-related proverbs from both languages are analysed by the use of the semantic approach and grouped in terms of the general messages they put across in order to search for common ground and specific differences. A secondary objective to be reached is an attempt at explanation of the most apparent peculiarities bearing in mind different places of proverb origin and their specific geographical, historical, social and cultural environments.
In case of religion—but not exclusively—a paremiographical col-lection of the proverbs of a given nation constitutes an ethnography of the people, which if systematized can provide a profound insight into people’s, among others, philosophy and beliefs, moral truths and social values. Such a universally acknowledged axiom is underscored by an English philosopher Francis Bacon who said that The genius, wit, and spirit of a nation are discovered in its proverbs (Trench 2003, 46). The relation between language and culture is the most prominent postulate behind a contemporary scholarly discipline integrating linguistics and the study of culture called Linguistic Culturology.
The pilot empirical section of the paper is based on two unparalleled and invaluable paremiographical collections. The American religion-related proverbial texts including the component of ‘God’ are selected from A Dictionary of American Proverbs (1992) edited by Wolfgang Mieder, Stewart A. Kingsbury, and Kelsie B. Harder. In turn, the analytical research on Polish God-related proverbs is conducted on the basis of a fairly recent and detailed paremiographical reference compiled by Danuta and Włodzimierz Masłowski in their Wielka Księga Przysłów Polskich ‘A big book of proverbs’ (2008).
