Concise Dictionary of European Proverbs

RR/99/84 Concise Dictionary of European Proverbs Edited by Emanuel Strauss Routledge London and New York 1998 491 pp. ISBN 0 415 16050 2

L100.00

Keywords Communication, Europe, Language

"A bad beginning makes a bad ending" is the first proverb in this dictionary Reviewer beware! This sentiment has ten other English versions: two are, "As a tree falls, so shall it lie; as a man lives, so shall he die" and "sow thin; shear thin". There follow ten German versions of this proverb, one Latin, five French, five Spanish, and one each in Catalan, Portuguese, Italian, Polish and Czechoslovak, then 350 pages later we come to proverb 1804: "You can't milk a bull" and "You can't shave an egg", to use two of the English alternatives. The intellectual effort needed to categorise the world's proverbs into a finite grouping is truly mind-boggling. We are told that the collector, Emanuel Strauss, has over 100,000 of them.

This work is a "concise" version of the Dictionary of European Proverbs published by Routledge in three volumes in 1994. The 1,804...