## Elisabeth Piirainen *

## Europeanism, internationalism or something else? Proposal for a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural research project on widespread idioms in Europe and beyond

## Abstract

Terms like Europeanism or internationalism are used rather carelessly in phraseology research, and they are often applied to idioms accidentally observed to have similar lexical  and  semantic  structures  in  a  few  languages. The  central  question  as  to  what idioms  actually  constitute  the  so-called  'phraseological  uniformity  of  Europe'  has never  been  studied  systematically.  The  present  paper  describes  my  fi  rst  steps  of  a research  project  aimed  at  creating  an  inventory  of  factually  existing widespread idioms . The total set of idioms is subdivided into smaller groups on the basis of their cultural foundations, thus becoming comparable across a great variety of languages. Questionnaires sent to a large number of idiom research experts are producing fi  rst results: numerous idioms are spread across at least several dozens of languages. The problem remains that idioms are currently accessible for only a small portion of the approx. 140 European languages.

## 1. By way of introduction: proverb research and idiom research

The present article is concerned with idioms that are widespread across various languages. Phraseology researchers appear to have some vague knowledge about a cross-linguistic uniformity of idioms in European languages,  but  the  set  of  problems  connected  with  this  concept  has never been methodically studied. Some researchers even use terms like Europeanism or internationalism for idioms that happen to be found 'similar'- more or less accidentally - in a small number of languages.

* Dr. Elisabeth Piirainen Dumte 32 D-48565 Steinfurt piirainen@t-online.de

45

This paper reports on a recent attempt to look into this phenomenon in a more systematic way.

Since this article will concentrate on idioms proper, a short comment on the term idiom seems appropriate. In English, idiom is sometimes used as an umbrella term for all kinds of fi  xed expressions, cf. Čermák (2004), who speaks of 'proverbs and other idioms'. However, this usage is quite misleading because it is ambiguous and contradictory to the usage of terms such as Idiom in German or идиома (idioma) in Russian. In this study, idiom will be understood in a narrower sense and reserved for multi-word units that are highly irregular, i.e. show a high degree of stability and idiomaticity. Idioms are seen as the central category of phraseology, distinguished from other categories such as proverbs and less idiomatic restricted collocations.

Although it is not common practice in phraseology to consistently separate  'proverb  research'  from  'idiom  research',  this  distinction must be observed for the purpose of the present study because of the dif  ferent states of research of the two disciplines. Yet let us fi  rst take a short retrospective view on approaches to the problems discussed in this paper.

Matti Kuusi's important book 'Regen bei Sonnenschein. Zur Weltgeschi  chte einer Redensart' ('Rain in the sunshine. Toward the world history of a saying') appeared in 1957. From today's perspective, it is hard to imagine how it was possible at that time, without our modern media, to gather such extensive research material from languages across the world. Kuusi succeeded in recording more than 3,000 variants of the saying mentioned in the title of his book, taken from hundreds of lan  guages and dialects spoken in various countries and continents, and he interpreted them against their particular mythological, cultural and folkloric background. In his introduction, Kuusi (1957: 5-26) describes his surveys, which consisted, above all, of a number of circulars sent to all researchers and research institutes within his reach and an untiring correspondence with scientists and non-professionals all over the globe. Kuusi also tells us about the problems he experienced trying to get into contact with representatives of 'diffi  cultly accessible' countries. He was afraid, for example, that several postal items had got lost. Final  ly, the different alphabets and transcriptions of all the languages in- volv  ed posed a considerable problem, for which Kuusi again received interna  tional support.

As for Kuusi's work (1957), it is a matter of course for many paremiol  o  gical studies to research the linguistic and historico-cultural pa  rallels of proverbs within their global dimension, cf. e.g. Aquilina (1972), Kuusi (1985) or, more recently, Paczolay (1994, 1997). All these authors  present  extensive  collections  of  proverbs  that  are  common  in many  European  languages  and  far  beyond.  Mieder's  bibliography (2004: 259ff) cites  a  large  number  of  similar  proverb  studies. These stud  ies are not primarily set in linguistics but in a wide-ranging ethnological-folkloristic and cultural framework. This may be one of the reasons why phraseology research - or to be precise: idiom research in the linguistic sense - never really noticed them. Until recently, idiom researchers have had quite different interests.

Quite  probably,  a  systematic  multilingual  investigation  of  idioms, along  similar  lines  as  outlined  above  for  proverbs,  would  produce promising results. Although there are many idioms that would be worth looking at in this respect: with regard to their variants, equivalents and spread across a great variety of languages, such attempts are restricted to a few small studies. There is no tradition of worldwide idiom studies that would be comparable to the prosperous tradition of international cooperation in the fi  eld of proverb research, a gap that was not even recognised until recently.

Now and then, idiom researchers have noticed common features of the idioms of some European languages. Menac (1987), for example, pre  sents  an  inventory  of  several  dozens  of  -  supposedly  -  common Europ  ean idioms, drawn from six languages of diverse genetic relationships, namely two Slavonic (Croatian, Russian), two Germanic (German, English) and two Romance (French and Italian) languages. Her ana  lysis reveals quite a large number of near-equivalent idioms in these lan  guages. These cross-linguistic (also called 'international') simil  arities are attributed exclusively to phenomena of loan translations.

Another comparative study of idioms (Korhonen 1991) covers nine European languages: German, Finnish, French, Italian, English, Swedish,  Russian,  Hungarian  and  Estonian.  The  article  is  structured  synchronic  ally,  and  it  focuses on cross-linguistic equivalences and differences of German and Finnish idioms (cf. the traditionally postulated cross- linguistic  equivalent  types  labelled  as  full  or  total,  partial  and  nonequivalents), whereas the idioms of the other seven languages serve as a control group. More carefully than Menac (1987), Korhonen refers to  the  origins  of  the  idioms  and  to  the  so-called  'European  cultural heritage', so that in some cases their common sources and the ways of borrow  ing from one language to the next become visible. (Admittedly, his  results  could  well  be  complemented  by  diachronical  studies  that take account of the infl  uence of Middle Low German on Swedish and thus  also  on  Finnish  idioms,  cf.  Naumann  1989;  Braunmüller  1997, 2004).

Other attempts to analyse idioms across several languages fall far behind the above-mentioned studies. Some research papers rashly label idioms found in a few languages as internationalisms or even universals . Braun and Krallmann's article (1990) may serve as one example of several other studies of this kind. The authors report their detec  tion of 'international proverbial sayings', which they assert were un  known at the time of publication. They use the German term Inter-Phra  seo  logismen for this phenomenon and illustrate their 'discovery' by means of long lists of quite similar idioms in German, English, French, and, in part, Italian.

Mokienko  (1998)  offers  similar  lists,  supplemented  with  material from  Slavonic  languages. Again,  idioms  of  very  different  origin  are pre  sent  ed  in  a  highly  unsystematic  way.  What  Mokienko  does  not men  tion - and what his lists have in common with those of Braun and Krall  mann - is the fact that a number of these idioms depend on wellknown textual sources (the Bible, fables, belles-letters, or quotations from prominent people, etc.). Mokienko (1998) calls the tendency of these idioms to converge either internationalism or Europeanism, and in places even universality.

Several other 'cross-cultural' studies start from the traditional grouping of idioms into 'thematic groups' (e.g. idioms with body part, animal or garment constituents), mistakenly referred to as 'onomasiological' ap  proach as well. They come to the result that there are 'similar idioms' in some languages. Porsch's (1997) discovery that 'crocodile' - a wild animal not native to Europe - can be found nevertheless in the phraseology of German, Polish and Portuguese, may be regarded as an absurd attempt to cope with this topic (for the spread of the idiom to shed crocodile tears , see examples (4-6) below). Along the same lines, Mejri (2004: 67) classifi  es the French idiom jeter le gant (English to throw down the gauntlet , cf. (1) below) as belonging to the thematic group of 'garment' (together with coat, shirt, shoes and hat) instead of taking its culture-based nature into account and fully understanding its cultural foundation as its essential feature (the expression refers to a gesture in medieval knighthood, a sign of issuing a challenge).

There  have  been  different  attempts  at  explaining  cross-linguistic simil  arities of idioms. Earlier views to the effect that genetic affi  liation could play an important role, as e.g. postulated by O. Nagy (1979) for some similarities between Hungarian and Finnish phraseological units, gave way to the view that the increasing infl  uence of English on other languages  is  central  to  the  explanation  (e.g.  Mokienko  1998).  However, all the articles mentioned above refer to the somewhat nebulous con  cept of a 'cultural European heritage', which, for its part, would need a precise explanation. The opinion that similarities between phrase  ological  units  can  be  traced  back  to  the  times  of  the  migration  of peoples (Piñel 2004: 377) seems to be a special case.

In  summary,  cross-linguistic  similarities  of  idioms,  as  opposed  to pro  verbs,  have  never  been  studied  systematically.  Lists  of  so-called Europea  nisms or internationalisms remain accidental; they are merely un  methodical, noncommittal compilations of heterogeneous material. Their  main  weaknesses  are  the  small  number  of  languages  analysed and the complete lack of a theoretical foundation. It is unacceptable to use such terms without the systematic empirical collection of data of lan  guages of different continents and distant cultures, dialects, minor lan  guages,  and  historical  varieties.  Without  a  systematic  approach, the discovery of idioms that are spread across various European languages is mere chance, depending on the individual researcher's accidental  foreign  language  informants  or  on  his/her  own  knowledge  of lan  guages.  In  view  of  Kuusi's  (1957)  global  approach  as  early  as  in the  fi  fties,  however,  it  should  be  even  easier  today,  with  the  help  of our modern digital media, to gather data for at least a large number of European languages.

## 2. European idioms: a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural research project

As terms in idiom research, Europeanism and internationalism lack a clear defi  nition. From a theoretical viewpoint, all the crucial questions as to how relevant Europeanisms/internationalisms can be singled out and determined remain unanswered. Some seem to have never been ask  ed: by what criteria can idioms be defi  ned as Europeanisms/international  isms? How many languages are to be involved? How great do the simi  larities have to be, and what metalanguage should be used? Further central issues include the questions of how many Europeanisms/internatio  nalisms exist in every single language, or in all of them collectively, and to which cultural domains they belong.

A short time ago, I have set about investigating more systematically into the question of idioms that are supposed to be widespread across many - mainly European - languages. The principal goal of my envisaged research project will be the creation of an inventory of fact  ually existing 'widespread European idiom types'. This task re  quires substantial empirical preliminary work, which cannot be car  ri  ed out by one single researcher. An international, multi-language coo  per  ation of linguists will be necessary to analyse the similarities of idioms in as many languages as possible. A prejudiced 'Eurocentric' view must be avoided: although it is true that the idioms focused upon are mainly taken from European languages, this does not mean that they do not occur in non-European languages (see section 4 below). Thus, for idioms supposedly widespread across European languages and beyond, we suggest the term Widespread Idiom (or WI for short) as a working term.

To  single  out  possibly  widespread WIs,  the  fi  rst  step  was  to  subdivide the total number of idioms into smaller and therefore com  parable entities (cf. Piirainen 2004a, in print a, b). Idioms were cate  goris  ed  according  to  their  cultural  foundations,  using  the  typology  of prin  cipal cultural phenomena that underlie idioms (cf. Dobrovol'skij/ Piirainen 2005: 205ff). This typology was guided by the multi-language idiomatic material itself. A large number of idioms had been analysed to  learn  what  types  of  cultural  knowledge  play  a  role  in  motivating the links between literal and fi  gurative meanings. Starting exclusively from  this  linguistic  basis,  one  can  note  that  there  emerge  structures of cultural phenomena that are strikingly similar to those established by semioticians attempting to defi  ne the notion of 'culture', namely cate  gories such as social, material and mental culture. Since language as  a  whole  is  a  mental  phenomenon,  the  category  'mental  culture' is  unsuitable  for  describing  linguistic  phenomena  and  had  to  be  replaced  by  further  subcategories  (i.e.  textual  dependence  of  idioms, fi  c  tive  conceptual  domains  and  symbolic  knowledge  as  the  principal sub  cate  gories of cultural foundation). Let us illustrate this with some examples.

One  type  of  cultural  foundation  is  represented  by  idioms  whose under  lying  cultural  knowledge  chiefl  y  goes  back  to  knowledge  of aspects  of  social  culture .  This  type  can  be  divided  into  smaller sub  groups.  One  of  them  consists  of  semiotised  gestures  as  source con  cepts of idioms. It does not matter whether the gesture in question is  actually  performed  or  not.  The  widespread  idiom to  tear  one's hair out will be discussed in section 4, example (11). The gesture of throw  ing the gauntlet mentioned above belongs to this group of cultural found  ation as well (rather than simply to a 'garment' group). The fi  rst cri  terion for being supposedly 'widespread' is if an idiom occurs not only in some Central European languages such as English, German or French, but also in some geographically more distant and genetically un  related languages. Idiom (1) would be such a candidate. (See below for abbreviations of languages.)

- (1) Eng

jmdm. den Fehdehandschuh hinwerfen Spn arrojar el guante a al Rus бросать/бросить перчатку кому-либо 'to throw the glove to sb.'

- to throw down the gauntlet Grm Fr jeter le gant à qn

Fin heittää jklle taisteluhansikas 'to throw the battle-glove to sb.' all meaning 'to issue a challenge, to challenge sb. to a contest'

Sometimes other aspects of social culture overlap with aspects of ma  teri  al culture as source concept. Clearly determinable subgroups in  clude, for example, the domains 'sport', 'games' or 'theatre and music'. The fol  lowing idioms taken from these subgroups can be found in sever  al lan  guages and are potential WI candidates: below the belt, to play one's trump card, behind the scenes, to play a role or to play the fi  rst/se  cond fi  ddle.

Another  type  of  idioms  is  based  on  source  concepts  that  can  be fully  ascribed  to aspects  of  material  culture .  These  aspects  can  be di  v  id  ed into a number of smaller subgroups as well, extending from know  l  edge of everyday life, e.g. modern traffi  c, telecommunication or urb  an dwelling (see examples (7) and (10) in section 4), and other cultural achievements (such as writing with black ink or print pro  ducts) to  artefacts  of  craft  or  agriculture  in  earlier  days.  Examples  (2)  and (3), drawn from such subgroups of material culture, may be WI can  didates.

- (2) Eng (to have something down) in black and white

Fr (écrire quelque chose) noir sur blanc

Grm (etwas) schwarz auf weiß (haben)

- It (mettere) nero su bianco

Fin (jotain on) mustaa valkoisella '(sth. is) black on white' all meaning '(something is) offi  cial, in writing or print'

- (3) Eng (BrE) (to be) the fi  fth wheel (on the coach) ; (AmE) to be the third wheel

Grm das fünfte Rad am Wagen (sein)

Fr (être) la cinquième roue du carrosse

Fin olla kolmantena pyöränä (vaunuissa) 'to be (like) the third wheel (on a/the wagon)'

all  meaning  '(to  be)  someone  who  is  with  a  group  of  people,  even though that group may not want or feel comfortable with them'

The (almost certainly)  largest  type  of  idioms  suspected  to  constitute WIs can be subsumed under the label textual dependency . Originally, these are quotations or allusions, and so they refer to an identifi  able textual source. Subdividing idioms of this type into smaller groups is easy because their textual origins offer a suitable structure. This type includes a large number of idioms that can be traced back to narratives, tales, works of classical literature or quotations from prominent people ( with seven-league boots; to tilt at windmills; cannot see the wood for  the  trees; to  build  castles  in  the  air etc.),  to  fables  and  classical antiquity ( the lion' s share; to pull the chestnuts out of the fi  re for sb.; to bell the cat; a snake in the grass ) or to the Bible, which make up the largest group of all supposedly widespread idioms. All of the following idioms are proper candidates for widespread idioms: to cast pearls before swine; to swim against the tide/stream; to take someone under one's wing; to separate/sort the wheat from the chaff; (to be) built on sand; to pour out one's heart to someone; not to hide one's light under a bushel; the scales fall from someone's eyes; someone's hair stands on end; by the sweat of one's brow or to wash one's hands of something . As substantial studies of biblical idioms have already been carried out for various languages, the search for WIs could start directly from this subgroup.

Among the remaining types of cultural foundation, there is no such abundance of WI candidates: neither idioms that can be traced back to fi  ctive conceptual domains , such as superstition, ancient folk theories or other pre-scientifi  c conceptions of the world (e.g. (to thank) one's lucky stars; hell on earth ), nor idioms dealing with cultural symbols (e.g. to look on the black side, to have a heart of gold ) can be supposed to provide many WIs.

On the other hand, some other domains that do not belong to the typology of the cultural foundations of idioms need to be considered here. The complexes of 'nature and animals' behaviour' (e.g. to break the ice; to show one's teeth to a person; to play cat and mouse with sb. ) and 'somatic phenomena' (e.g. from head to foot; to be all ears; to open some  one' s eyes; (nothing but) skin and bones; to the last breath ) seem to contain widespread idioms.

Cross-linguistic  comparisons  of  these  smaller  subgroups  revealed about 150 idioms that can supposedly be found in various European languages. The next step consisted in designing questionnaires (accord  ing to the target group, drawn up in English, German, French or Russian) and to send them out as e-mail fi  les to as many idiom research experts as possible. This step met with wide response.

Up to the present day (February 2005), I have received idiom data of  the  following  European  languages: Albanian,  Bulgarian,  Catalan, Croatian,  Crimean Tatar,  Danish,  Dutch,  English,  Estonian,  Faroese, Fin  n  ish,  French,  North  Frisian,  Galician,  Georgian,  German,  Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Latvian, Lëtzebuergesch, Ladin, Lithuanian,  Mordvin  Erza,  Norwegian,  Polish,  Portuguese,  Romanian,  Romansh, Russian, Slovakian, Slovene, Spanish, Swedish, Swiss German, Turk  ish, Ukrainian and Upper-Sorbian.

Functioning  as  a  contrast  group  are  the  non-European  languages Chinese, Egyptian Arabic, Japanese, Korean and Thai. Nevertheless, data from more than hundred European languages are still lacking, as the following overview will show.

## 3. The languages of Europe

## 3.1.  Language families and idiom research

For the purposes of the research project envisaged here, i.e. the investigation of idioms that are widespread across European languages, it seems helpful to gain an overall view of the languages spoken in this continent and take stock of the idiom research that has been carried out so far for these languages. Attempts to demarcate 'Europe' from other cultural and linguistic areas by means of distinctive features are doomed to failure. Culturally, it is impossible to establish clear boundaries. Rather, the so-called European Occidental culture has its roots in the Middle East as well as in North Africa. The linguistic situation is quite similar. One of  the  major  language  families  spoken  in  Europe,  often  called  IndoEuropean , has substantially more representatives in Asia than it has in Europe.  In  the  Indian  subcontinent  alone,  we  fi  nd  much  more  IndoEurop  ean (i.e. Indo-Iranian) languages - and much more speakers of these languages - than in the whole of Europe. Moreover, a number of languages do not 'stop' at any virtual border within the Eurasian continuum, e.g. Turkish, Samoyed and various Altaic and Caucasian languages.

Therefore, Europe will  be  understood  here  simply  in  terms  of  its geog  ra  phic boundaries, extending eastwards as far as the Ural mountain range and -as is usual in linguistic typology -including the Caucasus region. According to this strictly geographical defi  nition of Europe, more than 140 languages should be taken into account; this number does not include dialects and diaspora languages (Yiddish, Judeo-Spanish or Romani). For simplicity's sake, let us ignore, as far as possible, the problem as to where to draw the line between 'languages' and 'dialectal varieties'; cf. Crystal's (2000: 11ff) discussion of how to defi  ne a lan  guage and how to distinguish between language and dialects. Following below is a list of European languages, classifi  ed according to their genetic affi  liation. It turns out that the linguistic map of Europe is made up of at least one totally isolated language, namely Basque ,  and  six com  plete  ly unrelated phyla ( Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, EskimoAleutian, Semitic and the Caucasian languages ).

At the same time, let us take a glance at the state of idiom research with  in  these  languages. Until now, much of idiom research has been con  cern  ed  with  a  few  standard languages, at fi  rst with Russian, Ger- man, French, Finnish, Hungarian as well as Czech, Slovak and Polish, but fairly recently also with Romanian, Bulgarian, Slovene, Spanish, Dutch, Icelandic, and Danish, and in its infancy also with Greek, Italian, Lithuanian and Latvian. Only one minor language, namely Lëtzebuergesch, has been studied thoroughly with respect to its idioms (Filatkina 2005). Dialects, apart from one Low German dialect, have been ignor  ed completely. Cf. Burger et al. (in print); Piirainen (2000, in print c) for more details.

In summary, only two of the European phyla (namely Indo-European and Finno-Ugrian, a subfamily of the Uralic languages) are suffi  ciently represented in the literature. The majority of European languages have hardly ever or even never been the object of idiom research. Apart from at best two dozens of easily accessible languages in which more or less extensive idiom research has been carried out, no idiom data are available at all, neglecting a large number of European languages (in fact more than 80% of the languages spoken in Europe). Things are largely different  with  regard  to  proverb  studies  since  paremiology  has  been practised on a more comprehensive, multi-language scale from the very beginning. There are a great number of dictionaries available for dialectal proverbs of Europe. The situation of minor languages, too, is much better in this area, cf. e.g. the comprehensive proverb dictionaries of Maltese (Aquilina 1972) or Sorbian (Hose 1996).

## 3.2.  Overview of the languages spoken in Europe 1

## The Indo-European language family

The number of living Indo-European languages spoken in Europe is estimated at about 60. Traditionally, these languages are divided into three almost isolated languages ( Albanian, Armenian and Greek )  and fi  ve  or  six  larger  branches,  whose  members  show  closer  linguistic affi  nities  with  each  other:  these  are  the Germanic, Romance, Celtic, Baltic , Slavonic (or the latter two seen as one branch, Balto-Slavic ) and Indo-Iranian languages. To date, no idiom data have been available for three of these Indo-European branches, namely Armenian, Celtic and Indo-Iranian. A traditional classifi  cation within these branches would look as follows:

1    The following details are mainly taken from Price (1998), van der Auwera (1998: 6-14) and Haarmann (1993, 2002); for Basque, Faroese, Galego, Karaim, Maltesian, Raeto-Romance and Welsh see also the respective articles in Stolz (2001).

- -The Germanic  languages are  composed  of  the North  Germanic group ( Icelandic,  Faroese,  Norwegian,  Swedish,  Danish )  and  the West Germanic group : Dutch, German, English, Frisian (with  its West-,  North-  and  East-Frisian  varieties )  and Lëtzebuergesch or Luxem  bourgeois , the latter being a minor language and one of the offi    cial languages of Luxembourg, whereas Swiss German , in spite of the comparable diglossic and socio-linguistic circumstances, is not labelled as a language but as a dialect).
- -The Romance languages are divided into Sardinan , spoken on the island of Sardinia (while Corsican is  seen  as  an  Italian  dialect)  and  the Continental Romance languages. The latter consist of one western group, with French, Occitan (or Provençal ) ,  Italian, Friulian , Ladin ,  and Romansh (whose  main  dialects  are  known  as Sursilvan and Sutsilvan , which together make up Romansh, one of the offi  cial lan  guages  of  Switzerland,  also  subsumed  under Raeto-Romance ) as well as Spanish, Catalan, Galego (or Galician ,  an  offi  cial  language in the autonomous region of Galicia) and Portuguese , and one eastern group, consisting of Romanian and Aromanian , also known as Macedo-Romanian ,  which  is  sometimes  seen  as  a  distinct  language and sometimes as a dialect of Romanian.
- -All surviving members of the Celtic languages belong  to  the  socalled Insular Celtic group ,  also  known as Brittonic or Brythonic lan  guages ,  with  the  subgroups  of Irish,  Scottish  Gaelic (or Scots Gaelic ,  spoken  along  the  northwest  coast  of  Scotland  and  in  the Hebrides islands) and Welsh , which is in a relatively secure position in  Wales. Breton ,  too,  spoken  by  a  small  minority  in  Brittany  in north-western France, counts among the Insular Celtic languages , because of the close relationship it has with them.
- -There are only two Baltic languages , Latvian and Lithuanian.
- -The Slavonic languages are subdivided into three groups: the east  ern group consists of Russian, Belorussian and Ukrainian , the western

group  of Czech,  Slovak,  Polish along  with  the  minor  lan  guages Sorbian,  Kashubian and Polabian ,  whereas  the  southern  group comprises  the  languages  of Slovene,  Croatian , Serbian,  Bosnian, Bulgarian and Macedonian .

- -Most of the (Indo-)Iranian languages are located in Asia. Only the languages Kirmanji, Talysh, Tati ,  and Ossetic (located in the Caucasus region) belong to the European area.

## The Uralic language family 2

According to van der Auwera (1998: 8), seventeen Uralic languages are spoken in Europe. They fall into two branches, the Samoyed group (of which only one language, Tundra Nenets , can be found in Northeast Europe) and the main group of Finno-Ugrian languages .

The Ugric group of the Finno-Ugrian phylum is composed of Hungar  ian , whose idioms have been studied very well, and the Ob-Ugric lan  guages. Of  the  latter  group,  only Mansi is  located  in  Northeast Europe. There are no known idiom collections for these languages.

As far as the Finnic group is concerned, there is no full consensus as to whether they should be divided into three or four sections. A common subdivision might look as follows:

- -The Permic group comprises the languages Udmurt , also known as Votyak ,  and Komi or Zyrian/Zirene (with  the  major  groups  of  the Komi-Zyryan , the Permyaks and the Komi-Yazua ).
- -The Volgaic group (or Volga Finnic group ) consists of the languages Mari (formerly Cheremis ) and Mordvin , which is one of the largest Uralic  languages  in  number  of  speakers,  ranking  after  Hungarian and Finnish and/or Estonian. Mordvin has two major dialects, which are sometimes considered to be separate languages: Moksha , spoken in the west of Mordvinia, and Erza or Erzya (which is represented in this study), spoken in the eastern parts.

2    Details are taken from Abondolo (1998), for the Finnic languages in particular also from Dahl/Koptjevskaja-Tamm (2001).

- -The North  Finnic or Baltic-Finnic  group. This  group  includes the  languages Ingrian,  Votic and Livonian ,  which  are  considered to  become  extinct  within  the  next  generations.  This  group  also includes  the  less  used  languages Vepsian and Karelian (with  the varieties Olonets and Ludic ,  considered to be a blend of Karelian and Vepsian), as well as the languages Finnish and Estonian .
- -The origin  of Sámi ,  indigenous  to  the  area  of  Lapland  and  other northernmost  parts  of  Europe,  is  uncertain.  Whether  the  Sámi varieties  form  a  separate  group  or  must  be  subsumed  under  the North Finnic group, remains a matter of controversial discussion.

Of the Finnic group of languages, Finnish idioms have been studied most  thoroughly.  Rich  data  are  also  available  for  Estonian  idioms, among other things through the dictionaries by Õim (1993) and Hanko/ Liiv (1998). Furthermore, there is quite a substantial documentation of Karelian idioms (Федотова 2000). As far as the remaining eleven Finnic languages - belonging to the European area as well - are concerned, it would be quite diffi  cult to obtain reliable data on their idioms. Again, for some of these languages, the study of proverbs (Komi, Livonian, Vepsian and Votyak) has a long tradition, cf. Kuusi (1985).

## Basque

Basque is the only European language that is completely isolated. It is regarded as the only remaining language of those that were spoken in southwestern Europe before they were driven back by the Romance languages. Basque with its standard variety and six dialects is still in a stable position in the Euskari province in Spain. A collaboration of native speakers of Basque would be desirable for the project described here.

## The Semitic language family

Maltese ,  the national language of the Maltese Islands, belongs to the southern central group of the Semitic languages. Although Maltese is regarded as a mixed language, Arabic is its genetic basis. It is closely related to the Arabic dialects of Tunisia and Algeria. Maltese is the only form of Arabic that is written in the Latin alphabet. Except for proverbs (Aquilina 1972), no phraseological material has been made available. A collaboration of an expert of Maltese has been announced.

There  are  two  further,  minor  Semitic  varieties  spoken  in  Europe: Cypriot Arabic , spoken by the inhabitants of the village of Kormakiti in Cyprus, and Assyrian , some speakers of which live on the European side of CIS states (Price 1998: 110, 20).

## The Eskimo-Aleut language family

Greenlandic ,  one  of  the  offi  cial  languages  of  Greenland  and  spoken by a small group of Greenlanders in Denmark, belongs to the Inuit or Eastern Eskimoan branch of the Eskimo-Aleut language family. A collab  oration  of  an  expert  of  Greenlandic  on  the  envisaged  project  has been announced.

## The Altaic language family

Haarmann (2002: 43) identifi  es 65 Altaic languages. About twelve of these are located to the west of the Ural mountain range (the virtual eastern  border  of  Europe).  These  languages  can  be  divided  into  the subfamilies  of  the Mongolian and  the Turkic  languages .  The  only representative of the Mongolian branch in Europe is the language of Kalmyk or Kalmuk , spoken in a region to the west of the lower Volga, northwest of the Caspian Sea. This language belongs to the Oirat (or Oyrat ), i.e. the western branch of the Mongolian language group.

Among  the  Turkic  languages  on  the  European  side,  we  can  fi  rst subdivide the so-called Common Turkic languages .  They  consist  of the  north-western  or Kipchak branch  (with Bashkir,  Karachi-Balkar, Kumyk, Crimean Tatar, Tatar and Karaim ,  the latter belonging to the north-western  or Kipchak branch),  a  southern  group  (with Turkish, Gagauz and Azerbaijani ,  the latter belonging to a south-western subgroup, also called Oguz or Turkmen ),  and  a  central  group  ( Nogai or Noghay ). Secondly, there is Chuvash , a separate branch of the Turkic lan  guage; it differs considerably from the Common Turkic languages.

Thus, besides Turkish , spoken by a number of people in the Balkans, e.g.  in  Bulgaria,  and  in  Turkey,  several  other  Turkic  languages  can be  found  in  Eastern  Europe.  Geographically,  they  are  spread  from Lithuania  to  the  south-easternmost  areas  of  Europe:  a  last  group  of Karaim speakers live near Vilnius in Lithuania and in south-western Ukraine, where it is also moribund. Bashkir is spoken in Bashkortostan, and Karachi-Balkar and Kumyk in the north of the Caucasus Mountains. Tatar is spoken in the republic of Tatarstan in west-central Russia and in Romania and Bulgaria. Kazan Tatar is  the  major Tatar dialect and a literary language .  Crimean Tatar is  most closely related to Kumyk , not to Kazan Tatar. There are still speakers of this language, living as a minority in Ukraine and Romania. Gagauz is  located  in  regions  to the north-west of the Black Sea, in Ukraine, Moldova and the Balkans, where  as Azerbaidjani and Nogai are  spoken  in  the  northern  and  the south  ern  Caucasus  areas,  respectively. Chuvash is  spoken  mainly  in Chuvashia and nearby regions south of the middle course of the Volga.

Although phraseological research has been undertaken on some of the Turkic languages mentioned here (cf. the bibliography of Бушуй 1987, and several proverb dictionaries, e.g. Yurbasi 1993, 1996), these studies are hardly accessible. For most of these languages, it will be very diffi  cult to gain data on idioms. We succeeded in winning speakers of Turkish and Crimean Tatar over as informants for the envisaged project.

## The Caucasian languages 3

More than three dozen languages spoken in the quite small territory north and south of the Greater Caucasus Range and its foothills are to be classifi  ed as 'the Caucasian languages' (i.e. the autochthonous languages,  not  to  be  confused  with  'languages  spoken  in  the  Caucasus region', cf. the above-mentioned Armenian, Kalmyk, and several Iranian and Turkic languages; see Comrie 2005: 1). The usual division of the Cau  casian languages into three typologically different phyla is named after  their  geographic  locations.  These  families  are  the North  East Caucasian , the small North West Caucasian and the South Caucasian lan  guages . The exact genetic affi  liations of all Caucasian languages are still unclear to some extent, with respect to both the relationships between the three major groups and some internal categories. In the follow  ing, we restrict ourselves to a rough outline.

- -The North  East  Caucasian  languages (also  known  as NakhDaghestan  ian ) fall into the Nakh group (with the fairly similar languages Chechen and Ingush and a very small language called Bats

3    The following details are taken from Boeder (2005), Hewitt (2005), and van den Berg (2005).

or Tsova-Tush ) and the Daghestan subfamily . The latter is divided into  the Avar-Andic-Tsezic group  (including  the  languages Andi, Akhvakh,  Avar,  Bagvalal,  Bezhta,  Botlikh,  Chamalal,  Godoberi, Hinukh,  Hunzib,  Karata,  Khvarshi,  Tindi and Tzez or Dido ),  the Lezgian  group (including  the  languages Agul,  Archi,  Budukh, Khinalug, Kryts, Lezgian, Rutul, Tabasaran, Tsakhur and Udi ), and the Lak-Dargwa group . Several languages of this family are close to extinc  tion.

- -The North  West  Caucasian  languages ,  also  known  as AbkhazoAdyghian ,  consist  of  three  branches: Abkhaz-Abaza (with  the  two very similar languages Abaza and Abkhaz ), the Circassian group (includ  ing Adyghe and Kabardian ) and the extinct Ubykh.
- -The South Caucasian languages (also called Kartvelian languages ) are comprised of Georgian, Svan and the Zan group (consisting of Laz and Mingrelian or Megrelian ).

As is the case with the Turkic languages, it will be very diffi  cult to gather reliable data on the idioms of most of the Caucasian languages. Although '[t]he Kartvelian languages are one of the best studied language families of the world' (Boeder 2005: 77), there is not much information on their idioms available. Among the Caucasian languages, Georgian has the longest written tradition; much linguistic research on Georgian has been carried out. Linguists also dealt with Georgian proverbs, and large collections of them exist (cf. Boeder 1985, 1991). To our knowledge, however, studies on Georgian idioms are only very small. The trilingual phraseological dictionary by Gamrekeli et al. (1973) seems to be largely obsolete.

## 4. Examples of questionnaire data and fi  rst results

This section will discuss four examples that illustrate different problems of widespread idioms. Each example starts with a full presentation of the idiom data as given by the native speakers questioned. These data will be arranged according to the language families in question, in line with the overview given in the previous section. This arrangement has been chosen for the sake of clarity; it does not imply that the gen  etic affi  liation infl  uences the spreading of the idioms. Sorting them accord- ing to geographic location (e.g. from the languages spoken in North West Europe to those spoken in the southeast) would have been less clear. If a given idiom type does not exist in a particular language, it is marked by (-).

After this basic data, three topics will be treated: (i) the distribution of the WI across the languages (as far as currently available with the aid of our informants), (ii) potential special features of the inner form of  individual  idioms  (of  their  morphosyntactic  and  lexical  structure, i.e. at the level of the 'literal reading') and (iii) potential peculiarities regarding  the phraseological  meanings (also  called  'fi  gurative'  or 'actual meanings'). Theoretical refl  ections on the nature of WIs, however, must be reserved until further empirical data have been analysed.

## 4.1.  'European idioms' or 'widespread idioms'?

The idiom to  weep/shed crocodile tears 'to  show sadness that is not sincere,  to  display  insincere  grief'  (4)  is  a  suitable  example  of  our data. This idiom is a genuine case of textual dependence. It originates from old legends, according to which crocodiles weep like a child and shed tears in order to lure their victims and when they devour them. In his infl  uential 'Buch der Natur' ('Book of Nature', 1350), Konrad von  Megenburg  describes  the  crocodiles'  behaviour  'wenn  ez  aines menschen ertoett, sô waint ez in' (when it kills a person, it weeps over him) (Bächthold-Stäubli 1933: 596). This knowledge about crocodiles - and accordingly, of the conventionalised idiom type - is believed to be of classical origin and to have been spread across the European languages by the humanists, mainly through Erasmus' infl  uential 'Adages' and Luther's works. The data compilation looks as follows:

## (4) TO WEEP/SHED CROCODILE TEARS

| Indo-European languages Germanic   | Indo-European languages Germanic                 | Ukr                           | лити/проливати крокодилячі сльози      |
|------------------------------------|--------------------------------------------------|-------------------------------|----------------------------------------|
| Ice                                | gráta/skæla krókódílatárum                       | Slva                          | ronit' krokodílie slzy                 |
| Far                                | (see (6a))                                       | Pol                           | roni ć krokodyle łzy                   |
| Nor                                | gråte krokodilletårer                            | Usrb                          | (see (6b))                             |
| Swd                                | gråta krokodiltårar                              | Slve                          | točiti/pretakati krokodilje solze      |
| Dan                                | græde krokodilletårer                            | Cr                            | roniti krokodilske suze                |
| Dut                                | krokodillentranen huilen                         | Blg                           | роня/проливам крокодилски сълз or      |
| Grm                                | Krokodilstränen weinen/vergießen                 |                               | плача с крокодилски сълзи              |
| Eng                                | to weep/shed crocodile tears                     | Albanian derdh lot krokodili  | Albanian derdh lot krokodili           |
| NFrs                               | Krokodilstuaren skrual                           | Greek χύνω κροκοδείλια δάκρυα | Greek χύνω κροκοδείλια δάκρυα          |
| Lëtz                               | Krokodilstréine kräischen                        |                               |                                        |
| SwG                                | Krokodilsträne brüele                            | Finno-Ugrian languages        | Finno-Ugrian languages                 |
| Romance                            | Romance                                          | Ugric                         |                                        |
| Fr                                 | verser des larmes de crocodile                   | Hng                           | krokodilkönnyeket hullat/ejt           |
| It                                 | versare lacrime di coccodrillo                   | Finnic                        |                                        |
| Rom                                | a plînge cu lacrimi de crocodil                  | MrdE                          | pravtoms krokod'il'en' s'el'ved't'     |
| Spn                                | derramar/llorar lágrimas de                      | Fin                           | itkeä/vuodattaa krokotiilin kyyneleitä |
|                                    | cocodrilo                                        | Est                           | krokodillipisaraid valama              |
| Glc                                | (-)                                              | Turkic languages              | Turkic languages                       |
| Prt                                | chorar lágrimas de crocodilo                     | Trk                           | timsah gözyașlarι dökmek               |
| Rmns                               | cridar larmas da crocodil                        | CrT                           | (-)                                    |
| Baltic                             |                                                  |                               |                                        |
| Ltv                                | raudât krokodila asaras                          | Caucasian languages           | Caucasian languages                    |
| Lith                               | krokodilo ašaras lieti/krokodilo ašaromis verkti | Grg                           | niang-is creml-eb-i 'crocodil's tears' |
| Slavonic                           | Slavonic                                         |                               |                                        |
| Rus                                | (лить/проливать) крокодиловы                     |                               |                                        |

(i)  Idiom type (4) can be found in almost all the languages analysed here. Furthermore, the idiom occurs in various languages outside of Europe. The following examples (5) provide an identical word string 'crocodile tears', equally meaning 'insincere, hypocritical tears' (different word  strings  for  the  same  denotatum,  e.g.  Japanese sora  namida 'empty tears' or Korean nun-mul-eul ssa-da 'wring out the tears' are not signifi  cant in this context):

- (5a) Egyptian Arabic dumū' timsah/f02c
- (5b) Thai namta jorrake
- (5c) Chinese liú xià/liú chū

So far, there has been no research on the way this idiom type has taken to  get  into  the Asian  languages  -  whether  it  is  to  be  traced  back  to common narrative traditions dating from antiquity (as has been shown to be the case with many idioms originating from fables and sub  sequently passed on via the 'Panchatantra') or whether it is based on a more recent layer of borrowing.

(ii) The idioms in (4) are almost identical lexically, literally meaning 'weep/shed crocodile tears/tears of a crocodile' or (Ctl and Rom) 'weep with tears of a crocodile'. Only the verb (as given by our informants) varies somewhat between 'to weep/cry' and 'to shed' - some infor  mants gave both verbs. All other differences, at the morpho  syntactic level, are language-internal, due to the typological char  acter of the partic  ular language in question. The more synthetic lan  guages will use a compound, such as the Germanic languages (Grm Kro  ko  dils  tränen ), or Hng krokodilkönnyeket and Est krokodillipisaraid . Other languages, especially the Romance ones, make use of genitive construc  tions (e.g. Spn lágrimas de cocodrilo ).  Most of the Slavonic languages pro  vide adjective-noun constructions, cf. Rus крокодиловы слезы . Ob  vious  ly, such differences do not concern the aim of singling out WIs. Thus, the lan  guages analysed here show a unifi  ed picture. Only two of the minor lan  guages go their own way: Faroese uses the word for 'horse' instead of 'crocodile' (6a), while Upper-Sorbian adapts the 'wolf', well-known for its 'bad' behaviour or as a symbol of malice and evil. The different passive construction should be noted here (6b).

- (6a) Far gráta rossatár 'weep horse-tears'
- (6b) Usrb wjelče sylzy ronja někomu 'wolf's tears are running down sb.'s face'

(iii)  The  phraseological  meaning  of  all  the  idioms  presented  here  is stable and does not require further comment.

These examples have several theoretical consequences. They demonstrate that the proper place of my research project is not in contrastive lin  guistics (in the traditional sense). Rather, the project is aimed at either corroborating or refuting the oft-claimed uniformity of European idioms, whereas the relationship of equivalence between idioms of different languages is irrelevant. Similarly, it is not concerned with the question of whether individual idioms are equivalent with respect to their textual behaviour or all their diasystematic features, e.g. their familiarity. To the contrary, research should even include obsolete idioms as well, at least initially. The idioms in (6) will surely need to be discussed further: we need to ask whether they belong to the same idiom type. More  over, the occurrence of this idiom type in several Asian languages rein  forces my call for the inclusion of non-European languages into the pro  ject. It may be more appropriate to speak of a 'widespread idiom type' here than of a 'European idiom type' proper.

## 4.2.  A gap in the geographical distribution

Let us now look at an example based on an aspect of modern material cul  ture. 'Radio communication' is the source concept underlying the follow  ing idiom type (7). The idioms refer to two or more people having sim  ilar  ideas  and  opinions, understanding each other very well, as if they were on the same frequency, like broadcasting transmitter and receiver. The following data are currently available:

## (7) TO BE ON THE SAME WAVELENGTH AS SOMEONE

| Indo-European languages   | Indo-European languages                                               | Baltic                 |                                                           |
|---------------------------|-----------------------------------------------------------------------|------------------------|-----------------------------------------------------------|
| Germanic                  | Germanic                                                              | Ltv                    | bűt uz viena viďňa                                        |
| Ice                       | að vera á sömu bylgjulengd (og einhver )                              | Lith Slavonic          | (-)                                                       |
| Far                       | vera á bylgjulongd (við ngn)                                          | Rus                    | (-)                                                       |
| Nor                       | være på bølgelengde (med noen)                                        | Ukr                    | бути на одній хвилі                                       |
| Swd                       | vara på samma våglängd (med ngn)                                      | Slva Pol               | (-) (-)                                                   |
| Da                        | være på bølgelængde (med ngn)                                         | Usrb                   | (-)                                                       |
| Dut                       | op dezelfde golflengte zitten (met iemand)                            | Slve Cr                | biti na isti valovni dolžini biti na istoj valnoj duljini |
| Grm                       | (mit jmdm.) auf der gleichen Wellenlänge liegen                       | Blg Albanian           | (see (9)) (-)                                             |
| Eng                       | to be on the same wavelength (as sb.)                                 | Greek                  | εκπέµπουν στο ίδιο µήκος κύµατος                          |
| NFrs                      | üp di salev Welenlengdi wiis                                          | Finno-Ugrian languages | Finno-Ugrian languages                                    |
| Lëtz                      | (-)                                                                   | Ugric                  |                                                           |
| SwG                       | uf dr gliiche Wällelengi sii                                          | Hng                    | egy/azonos hullámhosszon van                              |
| Romance                   | Romance                                                               |                        | vkivel                                                    |
| Fr It                     | être sur la même longueur d'onde essere sulla stessa lunghezza d'onda | Finnic MrdE Fin        | (-) olla samalla aaltopituudella (jkn.                    |
| Rmn Spn                   | (-) estar en la misma onda                                            | Est                    | kanssa) samal lainepikkusel olema                         |
| Glc                       | (-)                                                                   | Turkic languages       | Turkic languages                                          |
| Prt                       | estar na mesma sintonia                                               | Trk                    | aynι frekansa sahip olmak                                 |
| Rom                       | a fi pe aceeași lungime de und ă                                      | CrT                    | (-)                                                       |

(i)  The  spreading  of  this  idiom  type  presents  a  picture  that  is  quite different from that of the previous example (4). If the data is projected onto a geographic map, we can note an uninterrupted gap for the East Eu  ro  pean  languages  (Lithuanian  and  several  Slavonic  languages), running like a wedge between the northern and the southern areas of distribution. In theoretical terms, one has to consider how many Euro  pean languages are to be involved to constitute a 'European idiom type'. On the other hand, there are two quite similar idioms in non-Euro  pean languages (8), both of which are modern and colloquial.

- (8a) Japanese hachou-ga au 'have the same wavelength'
- (8b) Korean ju-pa-su-ga matt-da 'sb. has the same wavelength as sb.'

(ii) No particular emphasis should be laid on the morphosyntactic structures:  types  such  as  'be/lay  on  the  same  wavelength  (with  sb.)'  and 'have the same wavelength (as sb.)' are used side by side in some languages (cf. the German variant die gleiche Wellenlänge haben ). Some lexical variants should be noticed as well. The word used for 'same' can be omitted (as in Far, Nor and Dan), just as the element meaning 'length' (cf. Spn, Ltv and Ukr). Similar to 'wavelength' are Turkish frekansa or Catalan and Portugese sintonia .

(iii) Whereas all the idioms listed in (7) and (8) have the same phra  se  ol  ogical meaning (as described above), the seemingly similar Bulgarian idiom in (9) reveals a different semantic structure.

- (9) Bulgarian на същата вълна съм 'I  am on the same wave' 'I busy myself with the same problems or with similar ideas (as sb.)'

The antonymous idiom is just as frequent: на друга вълна съм 'I am on the other wave', meaning 'I occupy myself with different problems, I am thinking about something very different'. In view of the idioms listed above (7-8), the Bulgarian idiom (9) may be called a 'false friend' (see section 4.3).

## 4.3.  Phraseological false friends

The next example is from the domain of material culture as well. Housing  belongs  to  the  most  elementary  requirements  of  human  beings. There is a wide range of cultural diversity when it comes to the way that people build their homes. It is astonishing that the conceptualisations of 'house' or 'home' as source frames manifest themselves in very simi  lar idioms throughout a great variety of European languages. The following idiom type (10) is such an example.

## (10) ( TO BE) WITHIN ONE'S FOUR WALLS

| Indo-European languages   | Indo-European languages                                      | Slavonic                          | Slavonic                                 |
|---------------------------|--------------------------------------------------------------|-----------------------------------|------------------------------------------|
| Germanic                  | Germanic                                                     | Rus                               | жить/сидеть в четырех стенах             |
| Ice                       | innan fjögurra veggja (einhvers) (see (iii))                 | Slva                              | žiť/sedieť medzi štyrmi stenami/ múrmi   |
| Far Nor                   | sita tryggur innanveggja være innenfor sine egne fire vegger | Pol                               | zamknąć się/siedzieć w czterech ścianach |
| Swd                       | inom fyra väggar                                             | Usrb                              | (-)                                      |
| Dan                       | inden for hjemmets fire vægge                                | Slve                              | med štirimi stenami                      |
| Dut                       | tussen de/zijn vier muren zitten                             | Cr                                | u svoja četiri zida                      |
| Grm                       | in den eigenen vier Wänden                                   | Blg                               | (стоя си) между четири стени             |
| Eng                       | (-)                                                          | Albanian mbyllet mes katër muresh | Albanian mbyllet mes katër muresh        |
| Frs                       | ön/benenkant sin ain fjuur Wuuger                            | Greek                             | µέσα στους τέσσερεις τοίχους             |
| Lëtz                      | an sengen eegene véier Maueren (sëtzen)                      | Finno-Ugrian languages            | Finno-Ugrian languages                   |
| SwG                       | i den äigene vier Wänd sii                                   | Ugric                             |                                          |
| Romance                   | Romance                                                      | Hng                               | négy fal között                          |
| Fr                        | loger/être entre quatre murs                                 | Finnic                            |                                          |
| It                        | essere negli quattro muri                                    | Fin                               | neljän seinän sisällä                    |
| Rmns                      | (-)                                                          | Est                               | nelja seina vahel olema                  |
| Spn                       | estar entre cuatro paredes                                   |                                   |                                          |
| Ctl                       | estar tancat entre quatre parets                             | Turkic languages                  | Turkic languages                         |
| Glc                       | (-)                                                          | Trk                               | kendi dört duvarιnda                     |
| Prt                       | estar entre quatro paredes                                   | CrT                               | дёрт дивар ичинде яшамакъ                |
| Baltic                    |                                                              |                                   |                                          |
| Ltv                       | (savâs) četrâs sienâs                                        |                                   |                                          |
| Lith                      | tarp keturių sienų                                           |                                   |                                          |

- (i)  First  of  all,  the  lack  of  an  English  equivalent  of  this  otherwise wide  spread  idiom  should  be  stressed.  No  explanation  has  yet  been found for this exception to the 'European uniformity'. The assertion that  English  is  the  most  important  donor  language  for  so-called 'in  ter  nationalisms' is qualifi  ed by several similar examples.

The concept 'inside the four walls' once was legal terminology, and it is deeply anchored in the European culture. Hence, it has no parallels in culturally distant languages. Japanese idioms, for example, reveal a very different house type as their source concept, namely the traditional dwell  ing house with sliding doors and paper screens. The same holds for an archaic Low German dialect, where it is not 'the four walls' but 'the posts' of the ancient farmer house that make up the source concept

(cf. Piirainen 2000: 200-244; Dobrovol'skij/Piirainen 2005: 187-203).

(ii) We will not elaborate on structural differences between the idioms (e.g.  the  adverbial  use  of  the  Danish  example).  Lexical  differences, how  ever,  should  be  noticed.  Apart  from  the  different  prepositions and postpositions ( in , between , inside of ), verbs ( be , sit , live ) and the occurrence of an adjective for 'one's own', there are different concepts of the walls: some languages differentiate between the 'wall of a room' and  an  'external  wall'  (e.g.  Grm Wand vs. Mauer or  Fin seinä vs. muuri ), while other languages do not make this lexical distinction. All these facts can infl  uence the meanings of the idioms (cf. (iii)).

(iii) The phraseological meanings of the idioms listed in (10) are not congruent. Thorough semantic analyses are required for every single language. We can observe two main meanings: '(to be) in the privacy of one's (own) home, at home, in an atmosphere of confi  dence' on the one hand (mainly in the Germanic languages, but also in Finnish, Greek and Turkish), and 'to always stay at home, never go out, be isolated, be bored, feel hemmed in' on the other (mainly in the Romance languages, but also in Lithuanian). The meaning 'inside a building (of any kind)' seems  to  predominate  in  Icelandic.  In  some  cases  one  can  speak  of genuine 'phraseological false friends' (cf. Piirainen 2004b: 158f); in other cases one can fi  nd different meanings side by side in the same lan  guage. From a theoretical viewpoint, the question arises how great the semantic similarities need to be in order to speak of the same idiom type.

## 4.4.  Common source or independent origin?

The  next  example  is  taken  from  the  cultural  domain  of  semiotised gestures. The meaning of the following idioms (11) can be roughly paraphrased as 'to be in deep despair; to be frustrated or worried' (cf. (iii) be  low).

## (11) TO TEAR ONE'S HAIR OUT

| Indo-European languages   | Indo-European languages                           | Slavonic                           | Slavonic                           |
|---------------------------|---------------------------------------------------|------------------------------------|------------------------------------|
| Germanic                  | Germanic                                          | Rus                                | рвать (на себе) волосы             |
| Ice                       | að reyta/rífa hár sitt                            | Slva                               | trhat' si vlasy                    |
| Far                       | (-)                                               | Pol                                | rwać/drzeć włosy z głowy           |
| Nor                       | å rive seg i håret                                | Usrb                               | sebi włosy torhać                  |
| Swd                       | slita sitt hår                                    | Slve                               | puliti si lase                     |
| Dan                       | rive sig i håret                                  | Cr                                 | čupati si kosu                     |
| Dut                       | zich de haren uit het hoofd trekken               | Blg                                | скубя си косите                    |
| Grm                       | sich die Haare raufen                             | Albanian shkul flokët (nga marazi) | Albanian shkul flokët (nga marazi) |
| Eng                       | to tear one's hair out                            | Greek                              | τραβώ τα µαλλιά µου                |
| NfFr                      | hat es to Hiir ütriiwen/em kür jen di Hiir ütriiv | Finno-Ugrian                       | languages                          |
| Lëtz                      | ' t ass fir sech d'Hoer auszerappen               | Ugric                              |                                    |
| SwG                       | sich d'Hoor raufe                                 | Hng                                | a haját tépi                       |
| Romance                   | Romance                                           | Finnic                             |                                    |
| Fr                        | s'arracher les cheveux                            | MrdE                               | raz'd'ems čer't'                   |
| It                        | strapparsi i capelli                              | Fin                                | raasta/repiä hiukset päästään      |
| Rmns                      | sa strair per ils chavels                         | Est                                | juukseid katkuma                   |
| Spn                       | tirarse de los pelos                              |                                    |                                    |
| Ctl                       | estirar-se dels cabells                           | Turkic languages                   | Turkic languages                   |
| Glc                       | (-)                                               | Trk                                | saçιnι bașιnι yolmak               |
| Prt                       | arrancar-se os cabelos /descabelar- se            | CrT                                | башыны-сачыны юлкъмакъ             |
| Rom                       | a-și smulge părul din cap                         | Caucasian languages                | Caucasian languages                |
| Baltic                    |                                                   | Grg                                | tma-s iglež ¸s                     |
| Ltv                       | plēst matus                                       |                                    |                                    |
| Lith                      | rautis plaukusi                                   |                                    |                                    |

- (i) The distribution across the European languages shows a quite complete and unifi  ed picture here. The same holds for the non-European idioms in (12), which display almost identical word strings and phra  seo  logical meanings:
- (12a)  Egyptian Arabic yišidd ša'ru 'tear one's hair'
- (12b)  Chinese sī chě tóu fā 'draw/pull (out) the hair'
- (12c)  Japanese kami wo kakimushiru 'tear out the hair'
- (12d)  Korean meo-ri-teol-eul jui-eo tteut-da 'pull/pluck out the hairs'

In antiquity, the gesture of tearing the hair was a sign of mourning, of bewailing the dead (fi  rst mentioned in the Iliad, 18.23ff, when Achilles mourns the death of Patroclus). It can be supposed that most of the European idioms in (11) go back to this classical origin, even though the cul  tural dimension of the gesture, its semiotic meaning and anchoring in the ancient culture, was lost in the course of history. Since the same idioms occur in languages that have little to do with the classical occident  al  culture,  however,  we  should  also  take  the  possibility  of  independent  formations  into  consideration.  Similar  gestures  of  grief  and despair (causing oneself pain and actually tearing out one's hair) are widespread far beyond the Greek/Hellenistic sphere of infl  uence. It is per  fectly conceivable, therefore, that the corresponding idioms developed  independently  in  different  languages  (cf.  e.g.  Levin-Steinmann 2004).

(ii)  The  morphosyntactic  and  lexical  structures  of  these  idioms do  not  raise  particular  problems.  All  the  different  verbs  belong  to the  same  semantic  class  ( tear , pull , pluck , draw , tear  out , pull  out ). Some languages (Dut, Pol, Fin and Trk) have an additional element 'out  off/from  one's  head'.  The  minor  languages  North  Frisian  and Lët  ze  buergesch  do  not  provide  an  infi  nitive  form  but  use  the  idiom in utterances such as 'it's enough to tear one's hair out' (cf. Filatkina 2005: 206). Such pragmatic variants do not hinder us from counting them among the same idiom type.

(iii) The phraseological meanings of the idioms given by our informants vary between 'to be in deep despair, to show extreme desperation' and 'to be horrifi  ed by sth., to be frustrated or worried about sth.'; thus, they do not contradict the assumption that we are dealing with one widespread idiom type.

## 5. Outlook

The few examples have suffi  ciently demonstrated the existence of widespread idioms (i.e. idioms spread across approx. 40 languages), a fact that  hitherto  could  not  have  been  stated  that  clearly  with  respect  to idioms, although it may have been clear for proverbs. We can assume that about 100-150 idioms reveal a very similar pattern of distribution. The bulk of these idioms consist of items that go back to well-known literary sources, above all to the Bible.

Out of the numerous questions resulting from the empirical material, only a few could be discussed in the present paper. We could observe how  certain  idioms  are  spread  far  beyond  the  European  languages, while others show distinct gaps on the map. We then discussed the question to what extent deviations of the phraseological meanings can be toler  ated within the limits of one postulated 'widespread idiom'. We have deliberately refrained from questions regarding the causes of wide distri  bu  tion  (common  source,  literary  or  contact-based  borrowings) and pointed out that identical idioms may well have been spontaneous coinages  in  different  languages.  Further  results  were  only  touched upon: English is far from always representing the 'giving' language, as is so often claimed. The examples analysed so far show that the various lan  guages of northern Europe (Germanic, North-Finnic and Baltic) are not marginal fi  gures but central to the 'European uniformity'. Since a large number of languages in the east and southeast of Europe have not yet been included into the analysis and because there is currently no access to their idioms, it is only with reservations that we can speak of true 'widespread idioms in Europe'.

I  would  like  to  express  my  thanks  for  help  with  the  foreign  idioms: to  Eldrid  Aas,  Nils  Århammar,  Winfried  Boeder,  Aina  Budvytyte, Robert  Darquenne,  Adile  Ėmirova,  Ken  Farø,  Natalia  Filatkina, Ulrike Frenademez, Darina Genadieva, Eva Glenk, Ania Grzybowska, Manfred Gross, Erla Hallsteinsdóttir, Mohsen Hantout, Krisztina Hevér, Susanne Hose, Eun-Mi Hwang, Vida Jesenšek, Elinborg Joensen, Terje Keldoja, Reso Kiknadze, Sigrun Kotb, Varvara Leventoupoulo, Anna Litovkina, Flor Mena Martinez, Miriam Olejarová, Oleg Ostapovych, Antonio  Pamies,  Regula  Schmidlin,  Mudite  Smiltena,  Yanping  Tan, Björn Wahlberg and Casia Zaharia.

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## Abbreviations of European language names

Alb Albanian

Blg Bulgarian

Cr Croatian

CrT Crimean Tatar

Ctl Catalan

Dan Danish

Dut Dutch

Eng

English

Est Estonian

Far Faroese

Fin Finnish

Fr French

Glc Galician

Grg Georgian

Grk Greek

Grm German

Hng

Hungarian

Ice Icelandic

It Italian

Lëtz

Lëtzebuergesch

Lith Lithuanian

Ltv Latvian

MrdE Mordvin Erza

NFrs North Frisian

Nor

Norwegian

Pol Polish

Prt

Portuguese

Rmns Romansh

Rom

Romanian

Rus Russian

Slva Slovakian

Slve Slovene

Spn Spanish

Swd Swedisch

SwG Swiss German

Trk Turkish

Ukr Ukrainian

Usrb

Upper-Sorbian

76