Contrastive Analysis of English and Persian Proverbs Related to Animals

Abstract

Proverbs are the short metaphoric sentences that come from the cultural and custom of any country and contain moral point and advice. Proverbs related to animals have special figurative meaning in every culture. In this article we extracted 88 English proverbs which related to animals and made a contrastive analysis with their equivalences in Persian proverbs. We were able to find just about 70.5 percentages of their equivalence in Persian proverbs. Among them, 8 percentages had the same animal names and 11.3 percentages had different animal names which used for the same function. Furthermore other 51.2 percentages of equivalences had formed completely with different words without any animal names. Analyzing the content of proverbs also showed that the name of “dog”, “cat” and “horse” have the top frequency of usage in these English proverbs. It seems that being reachable, domestic and closeness of these animals to human lives could be the cause of this higher frequency. Culturally in both Persian and English proverbs, the name of “DOG” usually has negative, vile and lowbred meaning, “CAT” has less negative meaning and finally “HORSE” in both languages has neutral meaning.