Greener Journal of Social Sciences

Greener Journal of  Social Sciences Vol. 5 (3), pp. 072-081, July 2015

  ISSN: 2276-7800 © 2015 GJSS

Research Paper

Manuscript Number: 071015089

(DOI http://doi.org/10.15580/GJSS.2015.3.071015089)

 

Contrastive Analysis of English and Persian Proverbs Related to Animals

 

¹Dr. Mohammad Ali Fatemi, ²Reza Tahmasebi and *³Hadi Aghabeigi

 

¹English Department, Torbat-e Heydariyeh Branch, Islamic Azad University, Torbat-e Heydariyeh, Iran

Matorbat@ gmail. com

²MA student Torbat-e Heydariyeh Branch, Islamic Azad University, Torbat-e Heydariyeh, Iran

Rezabmi52 @yahoo. com

³MA student Torbat-e Heydariyeh Branch, Islamic Azad University, Torbat-e Heydariyeh, Iran

Hadi.Aghabeygi @gmail. com

 

Corresponding Author’s E-mail: Hadi.Aghabeygi @gmail. com

 

Abstract

Proverbs are the short metaphoric sentences that come from the cultural and custom of any country and contain moral point and advice. Proverbs related to animals have special figurative meaning in every culture. In this article we extracted 88 English proverbs which related to animals and made a contrastive analysis with their equivalences in Persian proverbs. We were able to find just about 70.5 percentages of their equivalence in Persian proverbs. Among them, 8 percentages had the same animal names and 11.3 percentages had different animal names which used for the same function. Furthermore other 51.2 percentages of equivalences had formed completely with different words without any animal names. Analyzing the content of proverbs also showed that the name of “dog”, “cat” and “horse” have the top frequency of usage in these English proverbs. It seems that being reachable, domestic and closeness of these animals to human lives could be the cause of this higher frequency. Culturally in both Persian and English proverbs, the name of “DOG” usually has negative, vile and lowbred meaning, “CAT” has less negative meaning and finally “HORSE” in both languages has neutral meaning.

 

Key words: proverbs, animal, culture, metaphor, contrastive analysis.

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References

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