Editing Proverb (section)

===Cultural values===
[[File:Study proverb.PNG|thumb|Chinese proverb. It says, "Learn till old, live till old, and there is still three-tenths not learned," meaning that no matter how old you are, there is still more learning or studying left to do.]]
[[File:Better a monk.JPG|thumb|Thai proverb depicted visually at a temple, "Better a monk"]]
There is a longstanding debate among proverb scholars as to whether the cultural values of specific language communities are reflected (to varying degree) in their proverbs. Many claim that the proverbs of a particular culture reflect the values of that specific culture, at least to some degree. Many writers have asserted that the proverbs of their cultures reflect their culture and values; this can be seen in such titles as the following: ''An introduction to Kasena society and culture through their proverbs'',<ref>Albert Kanlisi Awedoba. 2000. ''An Introduction to Kasena Society and Culture Through Their Proverbs''. University Press Of America</ref> Prejudice, power, and poverty in Haiti: a study of a nation's culture as seen through its proverbs,<ref>Linda Tavernier-Almada. 1999. Prejudice, power, and poverty in Haiti: a study of a nation's culture as seen through its proverbs. ''Proverbium: Yearbook of International Proverb Scholarship'' 16:325–350.</ref> Proverbiality and worldview in Maltese and Arabic proverbs,<ref>Ġorġ Mifsud-Chircop. 2001. Proverbiality and Worldview in Maltese and Arabic Proverbs. ''Proverbium: Yearbook of International Proverb Scholarship'' 18:247–255.</ref> Fatalistic traits in Finnish proverbs,<ref>Maati Kuusi. 1994. Fatalistic Traits in Finnish Proverbs. ''The Wisdom of Many. Essays on the Proverb'', Eds. Wolfgang Mieder and Alan Dundes, 275–283. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. (Originally in ''Fatalistic Beliefs in Religion, Folklore and Literature'', Ed. Helmer Ringgren. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1967. 89–96.</ref> ''Vietnamese cultural patterns and values as expressed in proverbs'',<ref>Huynh Dinh Te. 1962. ''Vietnamese cultural patterns and values as expressed in proverbs''. Doctoral dissertation, Columbia University.</ref> ''The Wisdom and Philosophy of the Gikuyu proverbs: The Kihooto worldview'',<ref>Gerald J. Wanjohi. 1997. ''The Wisdom and Philosophy of the Gikuyu Proverbs: The Kihooto Worldview''. Nairobi, Paulines.</ref> ''Spanish Grammar and Culture through Proverbs,''<ref>Woods, Richard, ed. 1988. ''Spanish Grammar and Culture through Proverbs.'' Potomac, MD: Scripta Humanistica.</ref> and "How Russian Proverbs Present the Russian National Character".<ref>Gibian, George. How Russian Proverbs Present the Russian National Character. ''Russianness: Studies on a Nation's Identity''. Ed. Robert L. Belknap. Ann Arbor (1990): 38–43.</ref> Kohistani has written a thesis to show how understanding Afghan Dari proverbs will help Europeans understand Afghan culture.<ref>Kohistani, Zahra. 2011. Understanding culture through proverbs. University of Amsterdam MA thesis. [http://dare.uva.nl/cgi/arno/show.cgi?fid=346423 Online access]</ref>

However, a number of scholars argue that such claims are not valid. They have used a variety of arguments. Grauberg argues that since many proverbs are so widely circulated they are reflections of broad human experience, not any one culture's unique viewpoint.<ref>Walter Grauberg. 1989. Proverbs and idioms: mirrors of national experience? ''Lexicographers and their works'', ed. by Gregory James, 94–99. Exeter: University of Exeter.</ref> Related to this line of argument, from a collection of 199 American proverbs, Jente showed that only 10 were coined in the USA, so that most of these proverbs would not reflect uniquely American values.<ref name="Richard Jente 1932">Richard Jente. 1931–1932. The American Proverb. ''American Speech'' 7:342–348.</ref> Giving another line of reasoning that proverbs should not be trusted as a simplistic guide to cultural values, Mieder once observed "proverbs come and go, that is, antiquated proverbs with messages and images we no longer relate to are dropped from our proverb repertoire, while new proverbs are created to reflect the mores and values of our time",<ref>Wolfgang Mieder. 1993. ''Proverbs are never out of season: Popular wisdom in the modern age''. New York: Oxford University Press.</ref> so old proverbs still in circulation might reflect past values of a culture more than its current values. Also, within any language's proverb repertoire, there may be "counter proverbs", proverbs that contradict each other on the surface<ref name="Charles Clay Doyle 2012"/> (see section above). When examining such counter proverbs, it is difficult to discern an underlying cultural value. With so many barriers to a simple calculation of values directly from proverbs, some feel "one cannot draw conclusions about values of speakers simply from the texts of proverbs".<ref>p. 261. Sw. Anand Prahlad. 1996. ''African American Proverbs in Context''. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.</ref>

Many outsiders have studied proverbs to discern and understand cultural values and world view of cultural communities.<ref>Niemeyer, Larry L., "Proverbs : tools for world view studies : an exploratory comparison of the Bemba of Zambia and the Shona of Zimbabwe" (1982). Dissertations and Theses. Paper 886. http://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/open_access_etds/886</ref> These outsider scholars are confident that they have gained insights into the local cultures by studying proverbs, but this is not universally accepted.<ref name="Richard Jente 1932"/><ref>Grauberg, Walter. 1989. Proverbs and idioms: mirrors of national experience? In ''Lexicographers and their works'', ed. by Gregory James, 94–99. Exeter: University of Exeter.</ref><ref>Whiting, Bartlett J. 1994. ''When evensong and morrowsong accord: Three essays on the proverb'', edited by Joseph Harris and Wolfgang Mieder. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.</ref><ref>p. xv. Mieder, Wolfgang. 2004b. ''Proverbs: A Handbook''. (Greenwood Folklore Handbooks). Greenwood Press.</ref><ref>p. 146. Mieder, Wolfgang. 2008. ''Proverbs speak louder than words: Folk wisdom in art, culture, folklore, history, literature, and mass media''. New York: Peter Lang.</ref><ref>p. 124. Wolkomir, Richard. 2006. "Gold nuggets or fool's gold?" ''Magazine and newspaper articles on the (ir)relevance of proverbs and proverbial phrases'', Wolfgang Mieder and Janet Sobieski, eds., 117–125. (Supplement Series of Proverbium, 22.) Burlington, VT: University of Vermont.</ref>

Seeking empirical evidence to evaluate the question of whether proverbs reflect a culture's values, some have counted the proverbs that support various values. For example, Moon lists what he sees as the top ten core cultural values of the [[Builsa]] society of Ghana, as exemplified by proverbs. He found that 18% of the proverbs he analyzed supported the value of being a member of the community, rather than being independent.<ref>p. 134. W. Jay Moon. 2009. ''African Proverbs Reveal Christianity in Culture: A Narrative Portrayal of Builsa Proverbs''. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications.</ref> This was corroboration to other evidence that collective community membership is an important value among the Builsa. In studying Tajik proverbs, Bell notes that the proverbs in his corpus "Consistently illustrate Tajik values" and "The most often observed proverbs reflect the focal and specific values" discerned in the thesis.<ref>p. 139 & 157. Evan Bell. 2009. ''An analysis of Tajik proverbs''. Masters thesis, Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics.</ref>

A study of English proverbs created since 1900 showed in the 1960s a sudden and significant increase in proverbs that reflected more casual attitudes toward sex.<ref>p. 120. Peter Unseth. Review of ''Dictionary of Modern Proverbs''. ''American Speech'' 90.1:117–121.</ref> Since the 1960s was also the decade of the [[Sexual revolution]], this shows a strong statistical link between the changed values of the decades and a change in the proverbs coined and used. Another study mining the same volume counted Anglo-American proverbs about religion to show that proverbs indicate attitudes toward religion are going downhill.<ref>Petrova, Roumyana. 2016. How Religious Are The Modern Anglo-American Proverbs: A Linguocultural Study. ''Proceedings of the world congress of the IASS/AIS'', Editor in Chief: Kristian Bankov. {{ISSN|2414-6862}}. [http://www.iass-ais.org/proceedings2014/view_lesson.php?id=81 Web access]</ref>

There are many examples where cultural values have been explained and illustrated by proverbs. For example, from India, the concept that birth determines one's nature "is illustrated in the oft-repeated proverb: there can be no friendship between grass-eaters and meat-eaters, between a food and its eater".<ref>p. 22, [[Patrick Olivelle]]. 2013. Talking Animals: Explorations in an Indian Literary Genre. ''Religions of South Asia'' 7.14–26.</ref> Proverbs have been used to explain and illustrate the [[Fula people|Fulani]] cultural value of ''pulaaku''.<ref>Rudolf Leger and Abubakar B. Mohammad. 2000. The concept of pulaaku mirrored in Fulfulde proverbs of the Gombe dialect. ''Berichte des Sonderforschungsbereichs'' 268, Band 14, Frankfurt a.M. 2000: 299–306.</ref> But using proverbs to ''illustrate'' a cultural value is not the same as using a collection of proverbs to ''discern'' cultural values. In a comparative study between Spanish and Jordanian proverbs it is defined the social imagination for the mother as an archetype in the context of role transformation and in contrast with the roles of husband, son and brother, in two societies which might be occasionally associated with sexist and /or rural ideologies.<ref>Sbaihat, Ahlam (2012). La imagen de la madre en el refranero español y jordano. Estudio de Paremiología comparada. España: Sociedad Española de Estudios Literarios de Cultura Popular, Oceanide, 5.</ref>

Some scholars have adopted a cautious approach, acknowledging at least a genuine, though limited, link between cultural values and proverbs: "The cultural portrait painted by proverbs may be fragmented, contradictory, or otherwise at variance with reality... but must be regarded not as accurate renderings but rather as tantalizing shadows of the culture which spawned them."<ref>p. 173.Sheila K. Webster. 1982. Women, Sex, and Marriage in Moroccan Proverbs. ''International Journal of Middle East Studies'' 14:173–184.</ref> There is not yet agreement on the issue of whether, and how much, cultural values are reflected in a culture's proverbs.

It is clear that the Soviet Union believed that proverbs had a direct link to the values of a culture, as they used them to try to create changes in the values of cultures within their sphere of domination. Sometimes they took old Russian proverbs and altered them into socialist forms.<ref>p. 84ff. Andrey Reznikov. 2009. ''Old wine in new bottles: Modern Russian anti-proverbs.'' (Supplement Series of ''Proverbium'', 27.) Burlington, VT: University of Vermont</ref> These new proverbs promoted Socialism and its attendant values, such as atheism and collectivism, e.g. "Bread is given to us not by Christ, but by machines and collective farms" and "A good harvest is had only by a collective farm." They did not limit their efforts to Russian, but also produced "newly coined proverbs that conformed to socialist thought" in Tajik and other languages of the USSR.<ref>Evan Bell. 2009. ''An analysis of Tajik proverbs''. Masters thesis, Graduate Institute of Applied Linguistics.</ref>
[[File:Proverb scroll.PNG|thumb|left|Scroll of the Biblical [[Book of Proverbs]]]]