COMPARATIVE Research OF ENGLISH AND BADE PROVERBS: Checking out FORM AND CONTENT
It is believed that there is no language without proverbs. Vulic and Zergollern in Valiulyte (2010), corroborate this notion that 'each region or country has its own proverbs". Therefore, every words has its own proverbs which are being used by its own sound system through many mass media as in books like poetry, prose and dilemma and other forms of daily communication. Nevertheless, some advanced dialects like English have a wealthy custom of proverbs, because its proverbs have been collected and examined academically. That is probably due to the early civilization of the English people, and their knowing of books and publication. Therefore, English proverbs have become richer plus more widespread, unlike the ones of Bade (an area dialect in Yobe State, Nigeria) whose proverbs have never received any review worthy of academic recognition.
The term proverb has been identified by different scholars in various perspectives. Norrick (1985) identifies proverbs as self-sufficient, quick, traditional appearance with advisory content and secured poetic form. Meider (1985) sees it as a brief, generally known word which contains wisdom, real truth, with memorable form and which is passed down from era to generation. According to Tatar (1998), proverbs are concise common expressions with literal and figurative meaning. It could be grasped from the above meanings that the term proverb is a terse declaring that represents matters of universal truth, with a literal, figurative, or poetic framework, maintained through discourse, and passed on from one era to some other in human world.
According to Meider (2004), in Dabaghi, Pishbin and Niknasab (2010), it is hard to recognize the origin and history of proverbs. Nevertheless, he contributes that proverbs '. . . do not show up from the sky'. Therefore, he observes that there surely is a similar development of emergence of proverbs in Europe, Asia, Africa and other linguistic and ethnic categories. He traces the foundation of Western european proverbs 'back again to the classical times of Greek and Roman antiquity; the Biblical time; the Medieval Latin, and the mass marketing'. In tracing the origin of proverbs in Persian dialects, religion and literature have been recognized as two resources (Moosavi, 2000, in Dabaghi, Pishbin and Niknasab, 2010). In a fairly more specific manner, Ridout and Witting (1969) web page link the source of modern British proverbs to popular sayings of the normal man; borrowing from the Bible and other dialects; wise stating of famous literary scholars; turning highly idiomatic expressions into proverbs; and, modern education.
Over the years, scholars have agreed that geographical location has some effects on the type of proverbs. Dark brown (1983) observes that proverbs emerging from the same area tend to have common features. The identical idea may be noticed in Schuh (2005), proclaiming that indigenous dialects in Yobe Point out share 'a large number of idioms, lexicon-related expressions', just like how West African languages show 'proverbs and riddles, music and folktales'. Nevertheless, this will not imply that those languages may well not have unique properties that can divide them from one another as different vocabulary. Because Bade is one of the concentrate languages in this research, some characteristics of proverbs that are peculiar to African languages provides the researcher with some abundant data to focus on.
One very inconvenient aspect of this research is that while available resources on British proverbs are not hard to come by, Bade, being the other focus on language is badly without literary resources specifically on proverbs on the one hand. Alternatively, it looks interesting that research will arranged a precedent in such an area with a significant academic intent. Just lately, studies on Verbal Arts put up on Yobe Terminology RESEARCH STUDY have provided a few choices of proverbs of indigenous dialects, with Bole (257 proverbs), Ngizim(230 proverbs), Karekare(32 proverbs), and Ngamo(14 proverbs). Regarding Bade, its collection handles music and folktales, with no single proverb fastened (Schuh, 2004). Other non-indigenous dialects like Kanuri, Fulfulde and Hausa which Schuh sees as extensively spoken in the state, will be the most widely studied, with the last one topping the list with several pieces of studies about proverbs including a dictionary entitled Dictionary of Hausa Proverbs. Hence, these few selections of proverbs on the indigenous languages of the study area will benefit the researcher greatly, by giving him with a program upon which to study the Bade proverbs easily.
The basic aim of this research is to investigate the form and content of English and Bade proverbs. To do this, the research aims to handle four main questions. First of all, it tries to determine whether British and Bade proverbs have different form. Secondly, it will treat the question of whether there are similarities between the content of British and Bade proverbs. Thirdly, it seeks to determine how English and Bade proverbs are conserved. Fourthly, it will ascertain whether there are distinctions in conditions of ethnic materials mixed up in construction of English and Bade proverbs. Such questions are immediately linked to the main goal of this research. By looking at these distinctions and similarities, it will be possible to justify this research correctly.
In order to answer these research questions accurately, theoretical platform is proposed. In the beginning, there is the need to clarify the variables of the research. This research has two centered variables-form and content, which rely upon the independent changing- English and Bade proverbs. It is possible that in a piece of research like this, two theories may present better analytical surface. Therefore, I have chosen to be eclectic in method, by using more than one theory in a single research. I am going to use two Semantic theories: Classical Metaphor will be used to analyze form; and, Topic-Comment Structure Theory to analyze content of all the proverbs in my corpus. These analyses, upon which the remaining questions and goals will be answered and achieved, will be utilized to explain the proper execution and content of both English and Bade proverbs.
The decision to propose Metaphor is very much indeed connected to its history as having positive effects on literary studies. Norrick (1985) confirms that the essence of metaphor in studies of proverbs can be tracked back to Aristotle. Saeed (2004) classifies two strategies of traditional metaphor as Classical and Romantic. He ascribes traditional metaphor to Aristotle, as it describes metaphor from figurative and rhetorical perspectives. Charming metaphor is linked to 'eighteenth and nineteenth century Intimate' cycles, which define metaphor as possibly common material in vocabulary use (Saeed, 2004). To set a concentrate for the study, the researcher has chosen to position it on classical perspective which immediately pertains to proverbs studies. Predicated on classical view, it appears likely that metaphor is a universal feature of proverbs. And since proverbs are characterized by 'rigid form', (Norick, 1985), metaphor will be of great gain in inspecting all the proverbs that have figurative form in the corpus of this research.
The second theory is named Topic-Comment Composition as explained above. Relating to Norrick (1985), this theory is related to Dundes(1975). He brings that the theorist proposed it because of the disagreement of paremiologists about a unified formula to analyze the content of proverbs. Using some British proverbs such as 'Like dad like boy, No rose with out a thorn, and Better late than never', Dundes implies substitutable variables such as 'like X like Y, no X without Y, and better x than Y' respectively. Norrick observes these variables can be used to substitute any manifestation in a proverb. Therefore, this researcher will use this theory to interpret the real content of most proverbs in the corpus.
This kind of research is not exceptional in literary studies. Different types of proverb research have been conducted by many literary experts in English and other dialects on the globe. Shariati and Teyabi (2012), in their research A Comparative Analysis of Proverbs Characteristics of Mesopotamian Terminology, and Local Dialect of Persian suggest that research in proverbs has been completed since 'about 2500 BC'. However, this may well not discredit this research as only repetition of previous works of experts. Certainly, it'll make it even more interesting since up to now, I have not found any serious research into Bade proverbs.
With this fast growing desire for literature and publication in the age of globalization, the importance of proverbs is realized not only in literary contexts but also in press, politics, religion and several other social orders. Meider, in Dabaghi, Pishbin and Niknasab, (2010), notes that 'proverbs clearly contain a lot of common sense, experience, intelligence, and truth, and therefore they stand for ready- made traditional strategies in dental talk and writing from high literature to the mass mass media'. Thus, it appears affordable that for literature to be meaningful, studies of proverbs ought to be taken as important as any other aspect of literary studies. Therefore, through this analysis, this research is defined to achieve certain objectives such as the next: to specify the formal structure of English and Bade proverbs; to determine the content of English and Bade proverbs; to unveil the ways of conserving the proverbs of English and Bade; to clarify the different social material involved in the construction of British and Bade proverbs.
