Analogie między kobietą ciężarną i cielną krową
Analogies between a pregnant woman and a cow in calf

Summary/Abstract: The article presents the analogies found in the Polish language and Polish folk culture between a cow in calf and a pregnant woman. The data come from general dialectal dictionaries of Polish, as well as cultural records excerpted from 19th- and 20th-c ethnographic sources. A number of analogies have thus been identified similar conceptualisations of pregnancy, parallel valuation of the pregnant females, analogical practices for dealing with infertility, cultural directives connected with a pregnant woman and a cow in calf, or the procedures for assisting in childbirth and calving, and in the cleaning after the delivery. There are also parallel ways of guessing or provoking the sex of the child or the calf. The transfer of the practices connected with human pregnancy and childbirth onto the cow reveals the importance of the latter for country dwellers in earlier times, as well as establishing a cultural equivalence between a pregnant woman and a cow in calf.

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