Talk:Proverb

Proverbs and idioms

I am not entirely sure if there is a big difference, but I seem to remember back in primary school my teachers stressing the fact that idioms and proverbs were different things, and from what I learnt it seems some of the proverbs given as examples on the page are actually idioms - Such as, "Don't cry over spilt milk."-unknown.

I could be wrong, but I just thought it was worth mentioning. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 165.146.42.237 (talk) 21:22, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

165.146.42.237 (talk) 21:23, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

2003

Why not hold the language specific proverbs by (or refer to) pages of the referring wikipedia projects?

e.g. German proverbs in German wikipedia

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This is open for debate. Logically it would be better but on the other hand there should be some meeting point with a proverb equivalents.
Kpjas

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I have moved the following statement from the main page to here until it gets clarified:

One may look at it as a science of the old times and primitive peoples even now.

First, I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean. Can you elaborate?

Second, "primitive peoples" is not a very helpful term. If you mean a primary oral (or pre-literate) society, this is what you should say.

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I still don't see how a list of proverbs constitutes an encyclopedia article, or why such lists should be in an encyclopedia. --LMS

It isn't an encyclopedia article. This should be transfered to Wikiquote. LDan 22:36, 2 Nov 2003 (UTC)

A list of proverbs could constitute an encyclopedia article if it is joined with explanations of worldview of the people that made the proverbs. Nikola 04:02, 3 Nov 2003 (UTC)

They're here: Proverbs at WikiQuote --Xyzt1234 21:17, 22 June 2007 (UTC)

Afghan proverbs missing.

Where are the Afghan proverbs, and a few other languages, which were there a few days ago?

Question

I have a question. If there are pronouns and proverbs, why aren't there proadjectives? 71.0.240.5 01:40, 17 February 2007 (UTC)

Projective. Erudecorp 20:44, 3 October 2007 (UTC) Your question is clever. My answer is likewise so. DavidOaks (talk) 00:00, 19 January 2010 (UTC)

Poor Richard's Almanac Really Accessible

My website quotes Poor Richard's Almanac. It is indexed (with a search engine, too) and has relaxed copyrights. Help yourself. (It's true that I have also as Franklin says "gravely quoted myself." But those quotes are clearly labeled as updates of Franklin's and can be easily ignored.)

You needn't take time to reply, but help yourself if you like.

Congratulations on the help you give others.

Best Regards,

John McCall

www.benandverse.com —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 63.215.28.141 (talk) 17:26, 6 May 2007 (UTC).

Fillipino Proverbs

I don't see why the Fillipino section should be there - if there is a reason, then the text definitely needs to be changed. This is something would belong on a Fillipino page, not on the Proverbs page. The proverbs page is about the definition and usage and types of proverbs, and does not - with this exception - go into detail about proverbs in different cultures. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Computer Guru (talk • contribs) 13:55, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Lebanese Proverbs

Is this a joke I'm not getting? Even if it is meaningful in some other language, it's gibberish in English. I'd think it was vandalism, but according to the history, it's been there since the page first started. I'm quite confused. --Ueli-PLS (talk) 05:56, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

Links to collections of proverbs

Mikkalai has chosen to delete a list of links to collections of proverbs. Though it may not be within the narrow concept of an enyclopedia, surely this was a useful section. I personally used the set of links. I would like to restore it, but what do the rest of you think? Pete unseth (talk) 13:04, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

Aphorisms vs. proverbs

The proverb needs to be better distinguished here from aphorism at both articles, and even at the category level, as most articles on aphorisms we have, like first law of holes state incorrectly that they are proverbs and are categorized wrongly as such. We can argue about what the reliable sources say is the difference, but that's a discussion that actually needs to happen (on possible result of which is merging, if the sources suggest that aphorism is just a type of proverb). I know how I use these terms, but I'm not personally a reliable source of course.  — SMcCandlish ☺ ☏ ¢ ≽^ʌⱷ҅_ᴥⱷ^ʌ≼  21:25, 12 April 2014 (UTC)

Though I can see some differences between proverbs and aphorisms, I think of these as a Venn diagram, circles with a fair amount of overlap. I do not think we would be able to define and distinguish them in a way that would be accepted by enough readers to make it worth the effort. I am content to let sleeping dogs lie.Pete unseth (talk) 13:17, 13 April 2014 (UTC)

Section on gender

The recently created section on gender and stereotypes needs significant help. It makes very broad claims, such as "The relationship between men and women have been reduced to a global standardized scheme of behavior", but the only documentation for this is one page in a book. But the author of the chapter to which the citation points has also titled an article "On positively-tinted women proverbs (and quotations) in English and Polish language material", suggesting that the issue may not be as simple as the current paragraph suggests. I may be wrong, but some of the paragraph sounds like it could be quotations, but without quotation marks.

Unless the paragraph is improved with more documentation and specific documentation, it makes too strong and too universal a claim. Time to improve it or remove it.Pete unseth (talk) 13:29, 29 July 2015 (UTC)

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Section on gender appears to be quotations

The section on proverbs and gender reads as though it is a quotation, or series of quotations. It would be helpful if somebody, such as the editor who inserted it, would carefully check original source and change the paragraph as needed.Pete unseth (talk) 16:24, 18 September 2015 (UTC)

musmus

Who, or what, is musmus? — Preceding unsigned comment added by LuoShengli (talk • contribs) 13:42, 22 June 2016 (UTC)

I'm wondering exactly the same thing. Is it even a real word? McLerristarr | Mclay1 12:05, 7 October 2016 (UTC)

As always, the problem was an IP user. It was vandalism that was missed and couldn't be automatically reverted because of subsequent IP edits. I've fixed the issue. McLerristarr | Mclay1 12:18, 7 October 2016 (UTC)

Noteworthy proverb scholars (paremiologists and paremiographers)

This section was tagged for prose. I would have tagged it as an indiscriminate list that doesn't indicate why any of these people are relevant to the article. Move d to talk for discussion. RJFJR (talk) 15:43, 25 November 2017 (UTC)

• Claude Buridant
• Alan Dundes
• Desiderius Erasmus
• Galit Hasan-Rokem
• Joseph G. Healey
• Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
• Arvo Krikmann
• Matti Kuusi
• Dimitrios Loukatos
• Juan de Mal Lara
• Wolfgang Mieder
• Elisabeth Piirainen
• Dora Sakayan
• Mineke Schipper
• Archer Taylor
• Edward Zellem

I will undertake converting this list to a prose paragraph form. It may take a day or three. Pete unseth (talk) 17:20, 25 November 2017 (UTC)

Make sure to provide reliable sources for all statements in the section and explain what work each scholar has contributed and why it is notable here. If you cannot find sources on someone, feel free to drop that person off the list. --Katolophyromai (talk) 17:27, 25 November 2017 (UTC)

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Does this exist in English ?

In Swedish there is a pretty good saying "Konst är något man inte kan, men kan man så är det ingen konst".
Here one must first understand that the Swedish word "konst" is ambiguous. It can mean both "art" and "difficulty". If accepting (just for this brief moment) that "konst" is an English ambiguous word, meaning either art or difficulty - it translates -
"Konst is something one can't manage (to do), but when one can (by learning), it's no longer any konst". Hope it makes some sense. But is there any kind of counterpart to this expression in English ? Boeing720 (talk) 03:31, 24 January 2018 (UTC)

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English proverbs redirects here - this needs globalization and a split

This article need a rewrite into an article about proverbs in general, and the discussion of proverbs in English language needs a split to English proverbs. Note the existence of articles such as Chinese proverbs or Polish proverbs, all of course summarily ignored by this article. _{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 10:55, 7 January 2022 (UTC)

Adage needs to stop redirecting here

The subject of proverb is (correctly) described thus: "A proverb is a simple, traditional saying that expresses a perceived truth based on common sense or experience."

But adage is a broader category (proverbs are a subset), and it very often includes fairly neologistic sayings that express a perceived truth based on a particular and usually well-known person's observations based on expertise or with, e.g. Clarke's three laws, Godwin's law, etc.

We need probably a set-index article at Adage that summarizes various types of them in encyclopedic detail (with Template:Tlx for those with dedicated articles), including the one outline just above, and proverbs and probably some additional ones, like aphorism and rule of thumb, though I fear several such terms probably also redirect to proverb and in some cases probably should not (or are disambiguation pages like maxim that treat the term as synonymous with proverb, but would be better redirected to a dedicated Adage#maxim).

Adage in turn is a subset of the ultra-generalized term saying, which is also a very rudimentary set-index article, barely above the complexity of a typical disambiguation page.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:01, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

I suppose an alternative would be to develop saying better and redirect adage and such to an entry at it instead, to reduce the number of things that misleadingly end up at proverb, which is only about traditional common-sense sayings (plus some more distinct religious meanings of the word). That is, maybe saying can actually be the well-developed set-index article with properly encyclopedic content in it instead of just a list of article titles.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  17:01, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

Near the top of this talk page is a comment about idiom, and further down is one about aphorism. Some of the examples in this proverb article sound more like slogans. Apart from one of the refences ("Erasmus, Desiderius. Adages in Collected Works of Erasmus") this article does not mention adage, so the reason for redirecting it here is unclear. As well as SMcCandlish's suggestions, other possible solutions include splitting this long article into Proverb (folklore) and Proverb (saying), or otherwise create a new article adage. --Northernhenge (talk) 22:55, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

There is a call for a separate article for "adage" by the experienced editor SMcCandlish. However, it is very difficult to write non-overlapping, discrete definitions for "adage", "maxim", "saying", "byword", "motto", "aphorism", "apophthegm", "proverb". As Archer Taylor wrote, “An incomunicable quality tells us this sentence is proverbial and that one is not. Hence no definition will enable us to identify positively a sentence as proverbial.” I am not at all sure that creating an article for "adage" is worth the effort. Pete unseth (talk) 15:55, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

Well, we wouldn't necessarily need a stand-alone aritcle on "adage". I slept on it, and it seems that it might really be that the solution is to develop Saying into a more properly encyclopedic WP:SIA, with concise sections on such terms (using Template:Tlx when there are separate articles to go to), so that the terms without stand-alone pages have clear redirect targets with some content, rather than doing unhelpful things like sending Adage to Proverb. But right now the former doesn't seem to have a better redir target.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  16:53, 14 December 2023 (UTC)

What just happened?

The page was edited in some way, it appears: "3 revisions imported: import oldest edits from 'Proverb' in the August 2001 database dump". What was changed? I do not understand? Pete unseth (talk) 15:55, 27 February 2025 (UTC)