Hypotheses of International Proverb Similarity (IPS Hypotheses)

The study of proverbs internationally pervades in the goldmine of “Proverbium” journals1. During almost five decades of a long standing journal there had been so many never ending definitions submitted, and a great number of areas and disciplines approached. All came to find out and explain what, why, when, who, where and how the proverbs are useful to folk people. Among the range of studies, there is still a mystery to pose why a bundle of proverbs which rooted from different lands and cultures came into similar uses and meanings and had various variants to each other. In other words, the question may arise that why an indefinite number of people create different proverbs for similar equivalence of meaning. This question may also imply that why people create a different proverb for different people.

This concise paper attempts to argue three Hypotheses of why International Proverbs are similar to each other. The analysis is based on four European languages, i.e., Dutch, English, French, German, and three Asian languages, i.e., Chinese, Indonesian, and Japanese. The languages given in the analysis are listed alphabetically. The proverbs, except Indonesian, are primarily taken from Paczolay (1997), a dictionary of European Proverbs in 55 languages with Equivalents in Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, Chinese and Japanese 2. A comparative method was highly employed during the sample taking and analysis. And the hypotheses were reconstructed by virtue of internal proverb analysis and external factors such as human cognition, culture and environments. Correlation between linguistic and non-linguistic viewpoints in such objective was particularly recommended.