paremiography

The tradition & historical record

Paremiography (from Greek παροιμία - paroimía, "proverb, maxim, saw" and γράφω - grafō, "write, inscribe") is the study of the collection and writing of proverbs. A recent introduction to the field has been written by Tamás Kispál. It is a sub-field of paremiology, the study of proverbs. There are many published collection of proverbs, ranging from ancient Akkadian clay tablets to internet sites. The proverb collection The Maxims of Ptahhotep has been describe as "the oldest book in the world". Published collections of proverbs are formatted in a variety of ways. Some are simply alphabetized lists, some are arranged by topic (such as laziness, respect for elders), others are arranged by key word (such as dog, rain). Some are from single languages (for example, Russian), others are multilingual but from a single country (for example, Nigeria), while others are collections from around the world. Others are collections of anti-proverbs rather than the more standard proverbs (Reznikov 2009). Some have collected proverbs and sayings of a certain structure, such as wellerisms. Some collections are a combination of these, such as proverbs about women from around the world. The journal Proverbium providers a list of newly published (or newly discovered) collections of proverbs from around the world. Collecting proverbs in languages with a literate heritage is usually done by looking for examples in the available literature. ¹

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Paremiography”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence. ¹

paremiography is the study of the collection and writing of proverbs, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition. ²

The source record links this tradition to 3 external registers, which can be verified through the citation. ²