Styles of Communication, Vol 3, No 1 (2011)

Abstract

Together with vellerisms, agricultural sayings, weather prognostics, dialogic proverbs, and the so-called antiproverbs, priamels belong to the vast and diversified family of proverbs. In paremiological research priamels have been in the state of neglect. What is more, they hardly ever become the subject of comparative research. The following paper is a pioneering attempt at comparing a selected group of contemporary German and Dutch priamels, both of which belong to West Germanic languages and are closely related to one another. The current research is based on two proverb dictionaries: Huizinga’s spreekwoorden en gezegden (Baarn 1994) which was edited by Agava Kuijssen, Carl van den Bergen, Patricie de Groot, Veronique Leenden and Ellen van Slijpen, and which contains 12027 entries; and the five-volume Deutsches Sprichwörter-Lexikon (Leipzig 1867–1880) which was edited by Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Wander, and which contains about 250 000 entries. The present paper aims at providing German equivalents of Dutch priamels. The applied method hinges on an unilateral Dutch–German comparative analysis. 74 priamels have been extracted from the first abovementioned dictionary, then their German equivalents have been sought in Wander’s dictionary. The equivalents have been divided into the following three levels of equivalence: full, partial and zero equivalence. It has been shown that only 20 Dutch priamels have their full equivalence in German, 10 have partial equivalence, and 44 have no equivalence at all.