Some Interlinguistic Relationships in the First Hungarian Proverb Collection of 1598
Some Interlinguistic Relationships in the First Hungarian Proverb Collection of 1598

Summary/Abstract: Following a short historical introduction, referring to more than athousand Hungarian students studying at Wittenberg and other universities in the 16th century, the article presents proverbs included in the first 1598 Hungarian collection, which was compiled by the Strasburg graduate schoolmaster János Baranyai Decsi and was based on the 1574 edition of Adagiorum Chiliades by Erasmus, and others. It includes universal proverbs like “What isn’t good for you, isn’t good for others”, European loan proverbs originating in the Greek classics, like “To keep a snake in the bosom” (Aesop), from Roman classics, like “To carry wood to the forest” (Horace), “Cobbler do not go beyond your last” (Pliny the Elder), “Go slowly, you arrive earlier” (Suetonius), proverbs from the Bible “He digs a pit for others and falls in himself” (Proverbs 26: 27) – “You see a splinter in another’s eye, but fail to see a beam in your own” (Matthew 7: 3).From Medieval Latin there is, for example, “One need not inspect the tooth of a gift horse”, “Where a pig is offered, be there with your bag”, “Where there are three women, there is a market.” There are also some Hungarian variants of European proverbs. Regional and sub-regional proverbs include those having Nordic (Slavonic, Baltic) affiliations, like “Peel the lime tree until it peels”. “A cheap meat has a dilute broth” has Northern and Southern Slavonic, Baltic and Turkish equivalents (meat is replaced by fish in Estonian, Finnish, Zyryan and Ukrainian), “One stone is enough [to frighten] one thousand crows” can be found in Bulgarian, Turkish and Persian. “One sitting among the reeds can make a whistle of his choice” and “It does (not) bring much to the kitchen” have earlier exact German equivalents, while “A liar is caught sooner than a lame man” is found in different Romance languages. There are a number of proverbs found only in Hungarian, like “The pepper is small but ‘strong’”, “A Székely picks up anything of more value than a louse”, “He that wants to shoot a crow, does not bang his bow”, “There is no packed hay-cart unable to carry one more forkful of hay”, etc.

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