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SEMANTIC PECULIARITIES OF ENGLISH AND UZBEK PROVERBS
Zubaydullayeva Zarina Erkinovna
Tashkent Academic Lyceum No.2 of the Ministry
of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Uzbekistan
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15825985
Annotation:
This article explores the semantic peculiarities of English and Uzbek
proverbs, highlighting their cultural, linguistic, and cognitive foundations.
Proverbs, as a significant part of a nation's linguistic heritage, reflect the
worldview, value system, and social norms of its speakers. Through comparative
analysis, the study identifies both universal and culturally specific features in the
semantics of proverbs in the two languages. Attention is given to metaphorical
meanings, symbolic elements, and pragmatic functions. The findings contribute
to a deeper understanding of intercultural communication and the role of
proverbs in language teaching and translation.
Keywords:
Proverbs, semantics, cultural specificity, metaphor, symbolism, English, Uzbek,
comparative analysis, pragmatics, linguistic worldview
It is obvious that appearing and forming of proverbs, besides, admitting
them into live conversations by the nation takes sometimes considerably long
period of time. The English and Uzbek languages are believed to have long
history. English has background that comes from the Latin language, therefore a
huge number of English paremiologic stock have Latin bases; some of them are
identical to the historical forms, some of them faced to changes in comparison
with the old ones. A proverb is a product of the definite nation as a folk saying
during considerable long time. They are handed down through years and ages as
frames or models of human life typical situations. Ch.C.Doyle suggests
investigating them as minimal folk poems in literature, because they enliven
dialogues or give expressiveness and emotiveness to poetry or prose in various
ways [1, p. 4]. Scientists that link to this linguistic branch make a great deal of
investigations. V.N. Teliya writes that methodological basis of linguoculturology
serves “semiotic presentation indications of this interaction, considered as
cognitive contents of mental procedures, the result of which is cultural
liqualization of mental structures” [3, p. 17]. Proverbs have much in common
with set expressions because their lexical components are also constant, their
meaning is traditional and mostly figurative, and they are introduced into
speech ready-made. That is why some scholars following V. V. Vinogradov [4,
pp.112-126] think proverbs must be studied together with phraseological
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unities. Through many years, other languages have been affecting to the English
language, too. As a result, some proverbs are often borrowed from them in the
way of translating proverbs into English as well. W. Mieder introduces the four
major sources four common European proverbs, including English, namely the
Greek and the Roman Antiquity, the Bible, the Medieval Latin and the loan
translations
[2, pp.55-75]
. The Uzbek language possesses also long background.
It is true that this language was given the name of “Uzbek language” recently, but
this language has existed since approximately X-XI century.
When it comes to the notion of semantic structure, it is a fancy term for an
organization that represents meaning. For example, an English sentence (subject
- verb - object) is a semantic structure. Now, before you object, saying, “The
words have meaning, not the structure!” consider two examples of the previous
structure:
Snakes eats frogs.
Frogs eats snakes.
There is no hesitation that the words have meaning. However, two
sentences containing the same words in the same structure can have very
different meanings - depending on where in the structure the words appear.
Therefore, in the first case, it is the snakes, which eats the frogs, and in the
second case the frogs eats snakes. Changing the position of the words (or
"terms") within the structure changes the meaning of the structure. So, you ask,
how do we know which position means what? Grossly oversimplify, in the case
of our three-word sentences above, English grammar tells us that the word
before the verb is the subject, and that the word after the verb is the object. The
subject is the "doer," the verb is the "done," and the object is the "done-unto."
Systems that use other semantic structures (like languages other than English)
also need to supply a grammar, or way of interpreting meaning based on
structure, in order to be useful.
There are many synonym words and phrases in a language, proverbs can be
synonymous to one another. In some cases, their meanings resemble and they
can substitute one another in a context. Nevertheless, many of synonym
proverbs cannot be absolute synonyms even they correspond one another
semantically. Whereas, expressiveness in their meanings differs in some degree
from each other, consequently they are used in various cases and situations – so
they own different pragmatic and sociolinguistic features: some of them are
mostly applied in formal (official) cases while some of them often appear in
informal (oral) conversations. F
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When March thunders, tools and arms get rusty.
Yaxshi kelsa hut kadi- kadi sut yomon kelsa hut egri –bukri put
From the given proverb, it can be seen that as more of a general enunciation
than weather wisdom because any moisture may cause iron rust, not just a
March thunder. However, it contains a massage that all of the tools and arms are
outside in March, obviously being used or tended. Thus, farmers are working on
fields and soldiers might be preparing for o fight, since most of the wars are led
in spring. This weather lore is thus interesting because it unusually includes a
sphere other than agricultural. Due to the metaphorical content it can be also
confidentially proclaimed a weather proverb.
As it was mentioned above the Uzbek language is considered to have rich
stores of proverbs. One of the most known scientist U.K. Yusupov explains the
reasons of such kind of big quantity like these:[5. pp. 27-32] - firstly, the Uzbek
people pay much attention to the notion “friendship” which is considered as one
of the main relationships of humanity; examples:
Do‘st otgan tosh bosh yormas
(The stone does not hurt your head that was thrown by your friend). Quyosh
havoni isitar, do‘st – qalbni (The sun heats the air, a friend heats a soul).
-
secondly, the concept of “friendship” has wider meaning and requirements for
friendship is more in the Uzbek culture than other cultures, that is why these
peculiarities are expressed in the Uzbek proverbs; examples:
Yaxshi ko‘rgan
do‘stingga yaxshi ko’rgan molingni ber (Give your lovely thing to your lovely
friend). Do’sting uchun zahar yut (Eat poison for your friend).
- thirdly, there are
many proverbs in which the concept of “friendship” is compared with the notion
of “being enemies” in the Uzbek language; examples:
Dushmanni yengmoqchi
bo‘lsang, do‘stingni ehtiyot qil (If you want to win your enemy, take care of your
friend). Dushmanning donidan do‘stning somoni yaxshi (Friend’s straw is better
than enemy’s corn).
Translating proverbs word-by-word is not sufficient way to express the
meaning of proverbs in the other languages because of culturemes that exists in
its content in a target language. It may cause to misunderstand the basic
meaning of a proverb. Accordingly, the method of finding equivalents of
proverbs in English and Uzbek is used to investigate peculiarities of proverbs
about any specific topics in these languages.
Birds of a feather flock together. –
O’xshatmasdan uchratmas
(They do not meet who do not look like each other).
In this proverb, behavior of birds is taken as a resemblance to the human
friendship in the English proverb, while a short sentence structure with
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unknown subject is used in the Uzbek one. It is confessed that a sentence
structure in which a subject is elliptical is characteristic of the nearly all
proverbs belong to the Uzbek nation. In addition, according to the interesting
fact that both proverbs, which are given above have Arabic origin (XVI century).
There are many synonym words and phrases in a language, proverbs can be
synonymous to one another. Sometimes their meanings are similar and they can
substitute one another in a context. However, many of synonym proverbs cannot
be absolute synonyms even they resemble one another semantically. Because,
expressiveness in their meanings differs in some degree from each other,
consequently they are used in different cases and situations – so they own
different pragmatic and sociolinguistic features: some of them are mostly
applied in formal (official) cases while some of them often appear in informal
(oral) conversations. Though the proverbs that given above have several
synonyms they cannot substitute one another in a context, otherwise the
semantic or stylistic balance would be destructed roughly. Most of the proverbs
in the English and Uzbek languages are semantically complemantary. The
proverb in Uzbek has more simple structure and literal meaning in comparison
with the English one that owns figurative meaning.
Be a friend to thyself and others will befriend thee. – O‘ziga boqmagan,
o‘zgaga yoqmas (If a person does not pay attention to him/herself (his character
or behavior), others do not like him too).
There are old forms (“thyself”, “befriend”, “thee”) of English words in the
proverb which belongs to the Old English. It shows that this proverb has long
usage by the nation and nowadays it is still being used frequently. Both of these
proverbs mean that if a person respects himself and keeps himself from doing
bad things, he gets many friends.
In conclusion, it can be said that proverbs come to be a very numerous
parts of the English and Uzbek languages. They differ semantically, structurally,
stylistically and even pragmatically from one another. Proverbs cover many
drawbacks of the culture of a nation. Proverbs serve to describe, define and
express the culture of the language in which they exist. Besides, a society and
social processes effect directly to the usage, semantic expressiveness and other
features of proverbs. The translation process of proverbs from one language into
another requires more than componential or structural approach, it is necessary
to give exactly main idea of a target proverb in a translation.
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