Proverbs about LOVE

Proverbs of Cairene Colloquial Arabic: a case study

By

Ayman Eddakrouri

Abstract:

        This paper emphasizes the role of proverbs as a kind of idiomatic expressions ruled by both culture and language in which they establish the comprehension of any communication. Proverbs appear to be the natural decoders of customs, thoughts, social conventions, and norms. For this reason, researching proverbs provides a significant opportunity to know more information about the underlying parameters of a language. The present paper tries to investigate proverbs about love used in Cairene Colloquial Arabic. Therefore, various proverbs have been represented and analyzed through two social factors; age and gender.

Keywords: Proverbs – language – culture – age – gender

Introduction:

An idiomatic expression is a set of words working as a whole as a single unit whose meaning is different from its individual parts (Makkai, 1972). Idiomatic expressions have many types, one of which is proverbs which are propositions waded with hidden feelings, wishes, and intentions of the speaker. They can serve as tools to cover individual opinions in public interactive situations.

Proverbs help to understand the socio-cultural context. Meaning, they do not need to acquire linguistic competence only, but also, and most importantly, cultural understanding.

Proverbs provide a rich and varied cultural list of values, beliefs, and practices. They also supply examples of language in use in which symbolism, metaphors, puns, and a host of other literary devices are brought into operation, expressed in linguistic utterance that is often characterized by structural transparency, thematic brevity, subtlety, and balanced construction and factors which help memory to the retention and retrieve.

Therefore, special attention has been paid to proverbs and research has been performed to probe such features of a language.

 Language and culture:

There is inseparability between language and culture, in the sense that the former articulates the latter, and the latter embodies and penetrates the former. This is robustly expressed by Brown (1986) who addressed that it is impossible to separate the linguistic aspect of a language from its surrounding culture. He also forcefully addressed that “culture is really an integral part of the interaction between language and thought. Cultural patterns, customs, and ways of life are expressed in language; culture-specific world views are reflected in language.”

Sapir (1929, 207) argued that culture and language are essential for coexistence and social interaction in any society of people throughout the ages. In other words, to perform successful communication, culturally suitable language uses sound to be a must. Meaning, knowledge of language features is not enough for effective intercultural communication. Actually, this knowledge must be propped by an understanding of sociocultural context, customs, norms, etc., in which the communication is carried out.

Hannerz (1973, 237) asserted that language is at the same time a cultural phenomenon and the major medium of cultural expression. Meaning, language is so mingled with its culture, and vice a vice, that it seems difficult to separate them. Risager (2007) discussed that culture has an essential role in delivering messages asserting that it is at the core of any communication. Culture as a body of knowledge of common beliefs, behaviors, and values seem to be the agent to build and explain meaning in both verbal and nonverbal language.

Age and gender:

Discussing age as a social factor in using language was first introduced by Charles F. Hockett.  Labov (2001) has seen age as an individual linguistic change against a backdrop of community stability. Thus, age-grading is not limited to changes at any specific stage in life but can be researched in the way that babies, young, adults, and the elderly speak. Now, there is plenty of studies that give great interest to age and language use.

Speakers’ gender has also emerged as one of the most focal social factors in sociolinguistic research that treats gender in terms of two oppositional categories; male and female or men and women. The connection between using particular languages and the social role of males and females who speak these languages is generally investigated. The first impulse here was done by Lakoff (1973) when she paid her concern to specific themes with the language and gender. Her work prompted other researchers to engage her view and thus language and gender have become a promising study area to many researchers.

Proverbs:

Hymes (1989) developed a valuable model to assist the identification and labeling of components of linguistic interaction that has driven by his view that, in order to speak a language correctly, one needs not only to learn its vocabulary and grammar, but also the context in which words are used. To facilitate the application of the representation, Hymes constructed the acronym S-P-E-A-K-I-N-G, under which is grouped the sixteen components within eight divisions as follows: setting and scene (time and place of a speech act), the participant (speakers and audience), ends (outcomes of the speech), act sequence (forms and order of an event), key (clues that establish the tone), instrumentality (forms and style of speech), norms (social rules governing the event and the participants’ actions and reactions) and genres.

In their study of the categorization of Arabic proverbs, Roberts and Hayes (1987) identified authoritativeness, brevity, the complexity of meaning, memorableness, diffusion, and expressiveness as properties of proverbs that are germane to communication and expression.

Alamoudi (2013) proposed semantic and syntactic analysis for the Arabic idiomatic expressions and applied her model to those related to ‘hand’. This model has composed of four components: literal translation, semantic extension, idiomatic meaning, and syntactic structure.

Another analysis Dawoud (2003, 11-12) has suggested in his lexicon, stated that Arabic idiomatic expressions can be categorized into five levels: modern idiomatic expressions, translated idiomatic expressions, heritage idiomatic expressions, Qur’anic idiomatic expressions, and Sunnah idiomatic expressions.

Research question:

How do the age and gender (independent variables) of the speakers affect the choice (dependant variable) of proverbs about love in CCA?

Aims of the paper:

This paper aims to investigate the difference in using proverbs about love and both the age and gender of speakers of CCA.

Scope of the paper:

This paper will investigate the interaction between society and how it affects language use. So, it will only study the sociolinguistic aspects of proverbs of CCA in terms of age and gender. The sociolinguistic aspect that will be examined here is linguistic variation.

Significance and hypotheses: (Brown, & Rogers, p. 47)

The field of sociolinguistics is rich with research that handled English proverbs; however, Arabic studies are relatively few in this field. Therefore, this paper is intended to fill this gap by verifying Arabic proverbs.

As the research topic is large and stretched, the researcher has also put criteria to dive deeper from the base of this topic. Narrowing down is the main focus here, which is applied as follows:

1.     Type of idiomatic expressions >>> proverbs

2.     Variety >>> colloquial (ʿāmiyya)

3.     Speech community >>> Cairenes

4.     Theme >>> love

Hypotheses in this paper are that 1) the frequency of using proverbs about love in CCA among speakers who are above 30 is higher than those who are 15 to 30 years old speakers and 2) the frequency of using proverbs about love in CCA among female speakers is higher than male speakers. Also,

Data collection:

As there is no ready-made resource for gathering the research sample, the corpus will compose of a tentatively real-life set of proverbs collected from resources of spoken texts: broadcasting, TV shows, TV movies, and series; with a special focus on two modern Egyptian series: Kied ennesaa and 'a`ela magnouna gedan.

Research methods and techniques:

This paper mainly depends on the quantitative method as there is a need to count or analyze numerical data. (Brown, & Rogers, pp 21-49)

The main research tool or technique here is the direct observations of proverbs of CCA about ‘love’ as they are mentioned in the above resource.

Data analysis:

After consulting previous studies that dealt with the relationship between language and culture and both age and gender, the researcher suggests sociolinguistically analyzing tested collection according to:

1.     Gender: male and female

2.     Age: from15 to 30 and above 30.

Analysis and results:

          This part deals with the analysis of proverbs used in CCA about love according to age and gender.

Table 1: CCA proverbs about love

We can notice from table 1 that the most frequent proverb in CCA is مراية الحب عميا (9 incidents) which is used 8 incidents by speakers above 30 (6 incidents by females and 2 incidents by males) and only 1 incident by speakers from 15 to 30.

The proverb الرجل تدب مطرح ماتحب and ضرب الحبيب زي أكل الزبيب are used 8 incidents for each; 7 incidents by speakers above 30 (5 incidents by females and 2 incidents by males) and 1 incident by a male speaker from 15 to 30.

In addition, we can notice that most of the sample was used by speakers above 30 (89%); 54.7% by females, and 34.2% by males (hypotheses 1 and 2). But, speakers from 15 to 30 came into the second rank (10.9%) (hypothesis 1); 8.2% by males, and 2.7 by females (does not apply hypothesis 2).

It is also worth noting that this paper is confined by time and resource of data, which may negatively or positively affect the final results.

Conclusion:

We may conclude by asserting that proverbs play an essential role in languages and are a prime vehicle of communication in their culture. In the case of CCA, this paper has pointed out some differences between the language use of proverbs about love and both age and gender. According to age, proverbs about love in CCA tend to be used more by speakers above 30. According to gender, these proverbs tend to be used more by female speakers above 30 and male speakers from 15 to 30 years old. This likely helps to know the specific conceptualization of proverbs about love needed to attain a real-life communication in CCA.

Future research:

The researcher suggests that further research may include not only proverbs about love but also all proverbs regardless of their themes. Also, this future research may use in-depth methods to more shape the visions about CCA proverbs. Data resources may also cover both spoken texts: broadcasting, TV shows, TV series and movies, and written texts: social media, e.g. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

 References

Alamoudi, Khadija. (2013). The Conceptual Structure of 'Hand’ Idioms in Arabic. The Internet Journal of Language, Culture and Society, 37. 30-41

Brown, D. H. (1986). Learning a second culture. In: Culture bound: Bridging the culture gap in language, edited by Joyce Merrill Valdes. 33-47.

Dawoud, M. M. (2003). The lexicon of Arabic idioms in modern standard Arabic. Cairo: Dar Ghareeb. 287

Hannerz, U. (1973). The second language: an anthropological view. TESOL Quarterly 7. 235-47.

Hymes, D. (1989). Models of Interaction of Language and Social Life, Directions in Sociolinguistics.

Lakoff, R. (1973). Language and Woman's Place. Language in Society, 2(1). 45-80.

Makkai, A. (1972). Idiom Structure in English. The Hague: Mouton Sapir, E. (1929). The status of linguistics as a science. Language, 5. 207-14.

New York: Basil Blackwell. Labov, W. (2001). Principles of linguistic change: social factors. Oxford, UK: Blackwell.

Risager, K. (2007). Language and Culture Pedagogy. From a National to a Transnational Paradigm. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd.

Robert, J. M. & Hayes, J. C. (1987). Young adult male categorization of fifty Arabic proverbs. Anthropological Linguistics, 29. 35-48.

Sapir, E. (1929). The status of linguistics as a science. Language, 5. 207-14.