A CONTRASTIVE STUDY OF GERMAN AND MACEDONIAN PROVERBS AND SAYINGS WITH AN ANIMAL COMPONENT

Abstract

There is a lot of information and testimonies about proverbs and sayings (PSs), about their existence, duration and about their significant role in everyday life. Thanks to the global approach to scientific knowledge, we can be convinced of the unusual power of PSs, of their penetration into all spheres of society, of human activity and of their distribution. It is their popularity that has attracted our interest and pulled us into the labyrinths of language; to make the research topic more original and vivid, we inserted the animalisms through which human character traits and wisdoms are transmitted. This contrastive paper deals with the analysis of German PSs with an animal component and their Macedonian equivalents. We tried to determine the animal component that is most represented in German and Macedonian PSs, i.e., whether it is the same component or a completely different one. During our research, we tried to give an answer to questions as: Do PSs from the two languages have some similarities despite the different language groups they belong and do they have common elements? For an adequate and relevant answer, we first tried to define the terms proverb and saying and explain their similarities and differences.