page_title: Proverb
section_title: Borrowing and spread
hierarchical_section_title: Proverb / Features / Borrowing and spread
caption_attribution_description: Русский: Питер Брейгель Старший Притча о слепых Дерево, масло. 1568
context_page_description: A proverb is a simple, concrete, traditional saying that expresses a perceived truth based on common sense or experience. Proverbs are often metaphorical and use formulaic language. Collectively, they form a genre of folklore.
  Some proverbs exist in more than one language because people borrow them from languages and cultures similar to theirs. In the West, the Bible and medieval Latin have played a considerable role in distributing proverbs. Not all Biblical proverbs, however, were distributed to the same extent: one scholar has gathered evidence to show that cultures in which the Bible is the "major spiritual book contain between three hundred and five hundred proverbs that stem from the Bible," whereas another shows that, of the 106 most common and widespread proverbs across Europe, eleven are from the Bible. However, almost every culture has its own unique proverbs.
context_section_description: Proverbs are often and easily translated and transferred from one language into another. "There is nothing so uncertain as the derivation of proverbs, the same proverb being often found in all nations, and it is impossible to assign its paternity."
  Proverbs are often borrowed across lines of language, religion, and even time. For example, a proverb of the approximate form "No flies enter a mouth that is shut" is currently found in Spain, France, Ethiopia, and many countries in between. It is embraced as a true local proverb in many places and should not be excluded in any collection of proverbs because it is shared by the neighbors. However, though it has gone through multiple languages and millennia, the proverb can be traced back to an ancient Babylonian proverb (Pritchard 1958:146). Another example of a widely spread proverb is "A drowning person clutches at [frogs] foam", found in Peshai of Afghanistan and Orma of Kenya, and presumably places in between.
  Proverbs about one hand clapping are common across Asia, from Dari in Afghanistan to Japan. Some studies have been done devoted to the spread of proverbs in certain regions, such as India and her neighbors and Europe. An extreme example of the borrowing and spread of proverbs was the work done to create a corpus of proverbs for Esperanto, where all the proverbs were translated from other languages.
  It is often not possible to trace the direction of borrowing a proverb between languages. This is complicated by the fact that the borrowing may have been through plural languages. In some cases, it is possible to make a strong case for discerning the direction of the borrowing based on an artistic form of the proverb in one language, but a prosaic form in another language. For example, in Ethiopia there is a proverb "Of mothers and water, there is none evil." It is found in Amharic, Alaaba language, and Oromo, three languages of Ethiopia:
  Oromo: Hadhaa fi bishaan, hamaa hin qaban.
  Amharic: Käənnatənna wəha, kəfu yälläm.
  Alaaba: Wiihaa ʔamaataa hiilu yoosebaʔa
  The Oromo version uses poetic features, such as the initial ha in both clauses with the final -aa in the same word, and both clauses ending with -an. Also, both clauses are built with the vowel a in the first and last words, but the vowel i in the one syllable central word. In contrast, the Amharic and Alaaba versions of the proverb show little evidence of sound-based art.
  However, not all languages have proverbs. Proverbs are (nearly) universal across Europe, Asia, and Africa. Some languages in the Pacific have them, such as Maori. Other Pacific languages do not, e.g. "there are no proverbs in Kilivila" of the Trobriand Islands.  However, in the New World, there are almost no proverbs: "While proverbs abound in the thousands in most cultures of the world, it remains a riddle why the Native Americans have hardly any proverb tradition at all." Hakamies has examined the matter of whether proverbs are found universally, a universal genre, concluding that they are not.
caption: The Blind Leading the Blind by Pieter Bruegel the Elder
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